Charities create fund to invest in spinal cord injury companies

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Five spinal cord injury charities have joined forces to create an investment vehicle that will support companies developing innovative treatments for people disabled by the condition.

New York-based SCI Ventures has started with $27mn in commitments and expects to raise $40mn by the end of the year.

The launch illustrates the growth in venture philanthropy as a way for medical charities to fund the search for treatments and cures by putting money into corporate research, mainly in start-up companies.

The fund’s initial investments include two companies, Onward Medical and Augmental, that are developing electronic devices to help paralysed patients communicate and restore mobility.

Two others, Axonis Therapeutics and Sania Therapeutics, are pursuing biological approaches to stimulate the growth of new brain and nerve cells through drugs or gene therapy.

“Recent scientific and technological advancements have made recovery from paralysis a real possibility for the first time in history,” said Adrien Cohen, founding managing director of SCI Ventures.

“However, while treatments to restore function for people with spinal cord injury have shown promise in lab settings, transferring these treatments to clinical settings remains a stubborn barrier.”

The five founding charities — based in the US, UK and EU — have contributed their own capital to SCI Ventures, as well as donations from supporters with personal experience of spinal cord injury.

Cohen, a tech entrepreneur and investor based in London, was motivated by his brother’s spinal fracture three years ago. 

“I went on a journey to understand who was working on what and connected with 40 teams in North America and Europe,” he said.

“I felt extremely frustrated because it felt like we were not on the trajectory towards functional recovery or cures. I observed that a big obstacle to innovation was the lack of funding for early stage companies.”

Cohen contacted the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation which had already invested in Onward Medical, a Swiss-Dutch company developing spinal implants to restore movement.

They enlisted four more charities — Wings for Life, Spinal Research, Promobilia Foundation and Shepherd Center — to set up SCI Ventures. 

“We see great potential in the emerging companies in SCI Ventures’ portfolio,” said Anita Gerhardter, chief executive of Wings for Life.

“We are more confident than ever that people who are injured today will be the first generation that does not have to live with paralysis for the rest of their lives.”

With an estimated 15.4mn people globally living with spinal cord injury, according to the World Health Organisation, and the lifetime healthcare costs of an individual patient in industrialised countries above $1mn, SCI Ventures sees a huge potential market for effective treatments.  

The fund will reinvest all gains into more companies that aim to cure paralysis. It follows an increasingly popular model for charities to set up venture philanthropy vehicles focused on a particular disease, such as Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation.