Biotechnology still has relatively few women making investment decisions, and Stella Vnook believes that affects which companies, technologies and areas of medicine receive serious consideration. Investors naturally gravitate toward opportunities they understand, she argues, so bringing a wider range of perspectives and experience into funding decisions can broaden not only who receives capital, but which unmet medical needs are recognized as investable opportunities.
Stella Vnook has experienced the industry from multiple perspectives: scientist, healthcare provider, pharmaceutical executive, biotech CEO, board director, entrepreneur and investor. After nearly two decades in global pharmaceutical leadership, she moved into biotech CEO and board roles before founding Aviva Ventures, where she invests in and builds early-stage life sciences companies. She also played a key role at Kaida Biopharma, which is developing therapies for platinum-resistant ovarian cancer.
Her interest in women’s oncology is deeply personal, while her experience building companies has also shown her the additional barriers women founders can face, including smaller professional networks and more limited access to experienced advisors and investors.
Here, Stella Vnook discusses those barriers, the changing biotech investment environment, the case for more women at the investment table, and what it takes to build and fund an early-stage biotechnology company.
Could you introduce your background and explain how you came to work as both a biotech entrepreneur and an investor?
I began my career as a scientist and healthcare provider and spent nearly 20 years in large pharmaceutical companies. I later moved into biotech CEO and board roles, which was both humbling and incredibly rewarding. That transition gave me a very different perspective on what it actually takes to move an innovation from compelling science into a viable company.
Over the past several years, I have gone on to build and lead multiple companies.
Today, I am the Founding & Managing Partner of Aviva Ventures, a venture studio focused on building biotechnology companies from the ground up.
Aviva is different from the traditional venture studio or advisory model. We combine investment with a disciplined evaluation and company-building approach developed from my experience across pharma, biotech and emerging companies.
We are not advisors standing on the sidelines. We identify high-potential assets, determine what must be true for them to become investable companies, deploy capital and operating expertise against those milestones, and help build the leadership and infrastructure required for the next stage of growth.
What I enjoy most is helping founders and technologies at the beginning of that journey. If my experience, network and investment can help a promising therapy reach its first patient sooner, that is a privilege.
I never imagined I would run a venture studio, but it has become one of the most rewarding parts of my career.
How has the funding and investment environment for biotech changed over the past few years, particularly since COVID?
If you look at the numbers, capital is flowing again. At the same time, I attend many meetings where founders tell me, “Well, it’s not flowing to my company.”
What has changed is that capital is being deployed with much greater discipline. I see that as a genuine recalibration – and potentially a healthy one.
Investors are increasingly looking for reproducible preclinical results and stronger evidence of translation. During COVID and immediately afterward, companies could often raise meaningful funding on relatively limited rodent studies or even in vitro data. Today, investors frequently want much stronger validation and, where appropriate, clinical evidence – even if that evidence is generated outside the United States – because they want greater confidence that a program can ultimately work in patients.
That shift has left many startups that were built under the previous environment wondering what it means for their survival and their ability to secure capital.
It has also changed what constitutes a compelling investment narrative.
Rather than simply highlighting the size of the addressable market, companies need to demonstrate a much clearer understanding of the unmet patient population, whether the proposed mechanism of action is supported for that population, what evidence de-risks the program, and how the therapy will ultimately differentiate itself clinically.
I think we have become much more thoughtful and pragmatic about where investment is going. Investors are looking for mechanisms and products capable of delivering meaningful improvements over the current standard of care rather than simply following whichever modality happens to be in vogue.
Women’s health has been a focus throughout your career. Why are you particularly passionate about women’s oncology?
For me, it is very personal.
One of the primary areas I was involved with at Kaida was the development of a drug targeting platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, which represents a profound unmet need.
Approximately 21,000 American women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, and roughly 12,000 to 13,000 die from the disease. Because ovarian cancer is often silent, it is frequently diagnosed at an advanced stage. Once patients become resistant to platinum-based therapy, treatment options become significantly more limited.
What are we missing? Why are we still relying on therapeutic approaches that originated decades ago for a disease that continues to affect so many women? Where is the biology telling us to go next?
I believe we need to continue supporting programs with strong biological evidence if we are going to make a meaningful difference for this patient population.
Clinical research in women can also require more sophisticated study design because endocrine status, reproductive stage, menstrual cycle variation, pregnancy, lactation, perimenopause, menopause and exogenous hormone use can affect pharmacology and outcomes.
Historically, rather than consistently designing studies to account for that complexity, women were often excluded or underrepresented in clinical research. That has contributed to important evidence gaps not only in oncology but also in cardiovascular disease and other areas of medicine.
Women represent half the population. We need appropriate inclusion in clinical research and studies specifically designed to generate the evidence clinicians need to make informed decisions for women.
I am also very encouraged by where women’s oncology is heading. We have seen important advances in ovarian and endometrial cancers, and there is tremendous interest in earlier detection.
If we can diagnose these cancers at stage I or stage II, the clinical picture changes dramatically.
I am particularly interested in diagnostics and technologies capable of predicting and detecting these cancers earlier, alongside therapies built around increasingly sophisticated biological understanding.
I think we are moving in the right direction, and that creates tremendous enthusiasm in the scientific and investment communities.
Are there particular challenges facing emerging or women-led biotech companies?
Yes, and it is not simply my opinion – it is supported by data.
Studies, including work by Boston Consulting Group and MassChallenge, have shown that women-led startups receive substantially less funding than companies led by men. At the same time, those studies have also suggested that women-led companies can be highly capital efficient.
Those numbers should cause the investment community to pay attention.
One challenge is that there are still relatively few women making investment decisions in biotechnology and venture capital. That is not an argument that women should simply fund other women. The issue is broader than that.
Different professional experiences change which unmet needs we recognize, which founders enter our networks, which questions we ask during diligence, and which scientific opportunities receive serious consideration.
The more diverse the experience represented around the investment table, the broader the pattern recognition available to investors.
Women’s health has also historically been treated as a niche investment category despite addressing diseases and conditions affecting half the population. That perception is changing, but there is still significant work to do.
I would also like to see women-led companies represented far beyond women’s health – across oncology, neuroscience, immunology, metabolic disease, medical technology, mid-sized pharma and large pharmaceutical companies.
Ultimately, we need to move beyond the assumption that women founders or executives belong primarily in certain categories of healthcare.
Could the industry do more to help women founders and innovators?
Absolutely.
Continuing to have conversations like this matters, but we also need to define what meaningful support actually looks like.
Many of the fundamental challenges facing women founders are the same challenges facing all entrepreneurs.
They need help evaluating and de-risking their programs, identifying the right regulatory strategy, understanding what evidence will matter to investors, assembling experienced leadership teams, selecting the appropriate research and development partners, building networks and communicating the value of their science.
There are organizations capable of helping founders overcome many of those hurdles.
The additional challenge for women is that they may have smaller professional networks to draw upon. There are still comparatively few women who have served as biotechnology CEOs, senior pharmaceutical executives or venture investors, which can make it harder for first-time founders to access experienced advisors, industry knowledge, leadership talent and potential investors.
I became increasingly aware of that disparity after spending nearly 20 years in large pharma and then moving into the CEO role of a biotechnology company.
I decided that if I wanted to see change, I needed to help create it. That thinking influenced how I built Aviva.
We evaluate companies against objective scientific and commercial milestones while also giving founders access to the operating experience and network I have developed over more than two decades.
It requires thinking simultaneously as an investor and an operator.
And sometimes that means making difficult decisions about the asset, the indication, the strategy, the leadership team or even whether a program should continue.
Ultimately, the strongest way to change perceptions is through performance.
We need to demonstrate that women-led companies can build valuable businesses, that therapies addressing women’s health can create meaningful patient and shareholder value, and that diverse investment teams can identify opportunities others may overlook.
And yes, we need more women making investment decisions.
What advice would you give aspiring biotech entrepreneurs – particularly women – who are preparing to raise capital?
It always starts with the asset and the mechanism of action.
You have to understand exactly what your capital is going to achieve and which value-creating inflection point it is going to get you to.
That is something I spend a great deal of time working on with founders in my venture studio, including when we talk about non-dilutive and grant funding.
People sometimes think about grants simply as funding that allows them to learn more, and that can be perfectly appropriate in an academic environment.
But if you are building a company that is moving toward an investigational new drug application or another major development milestone, your grant strategy should also align with the next inflection point that moves the program closer to the patient.
Regardless of where the capital comes from, it should be deployed with the same discipline.
Every dollar should answer an important question, reduce a meaningful risk or move the program toward its next value-creating milestone.
The second piece is the management team.
Investors want to know that leadership is capable of making difficult decisions – including decisions that may involve stopping a program, changing the indication, redirecting an asset, reallocating capital or changing the leadership team when something is not working.
Those decisions de-risk the portfolio, protect capital and demonstrate leadership.
Perseverance matters enormously in biotechnology, but leadership is not measured by how long you hold onto a plan.
It is measured by how quickly you recognize the evidence, make the difficult decision and redirect capital toward the path most likely to reach patients.
That discipline is ultimately what makes a company investable.
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