Five Questions for Alice Pomponio, Head of the American Cancer Society's Impact Investing Arm

Alice Pomponio, managing director of the american cancer society’s brightedge venture capital arm (photo: American cancer society)

For 110 years, the American Cancer Society has been a major and multifaceted player in cancer research and treatment. It has invested nearly $7 billion towards research — late last year, for example, it announced $64.5 million in new science and career development grants. Patient-oriented programs provide services that make a real difference to tens of millions of people and families dealing with illness, like free rides and lodging for treatments. Its ACS Cancer Action Network advocacy arm works in all state capitals and in Washington, D.C., to drive public policy.

Despite advances in some areas, cancer continues to be a stubborn foe, so the ACS decided it needed another tool in the fight. In 2019, it launched BrightEdge with $25 million to invest in promising innovation throughout the business and entrepreneurial world of therapeutic development. Any eventual profits would go back to the ACS to fund its work. Then, in 2022, the ACS invested another $40 million in BrightEdge. It wasn't just reinvestment, but a reboot that infused the ACS mission into the BrightEdge investment criteria — to reduce cancer mortality, accelerate patient-centric innovations and tackle the health inequities in cancer that have become increasingly apparent throughout the healthcare space.

Alice Pomponio is managing director of BrightEdge, a role she came to with both professional and personal experience — in the life sciences business generally, and in cancer specifically. She first pitched in as a volunteer with ACS after several close family members dealt with difficult cancer diagnoses. She's been an advisor to companies working on therapeutics in rare disease and oncology, and has worked in leadership roles in the pharmaceutical industry, including at Radius Health, AstraZeneca and Sanofi Genzyme. She has also worked in healthcare policy and other public sector roles, and is a faculty member at the Harvard-MIT program in Health Sciences and Technology.

Here are some of the highlights from a recent chat I had with Pomponio about BrightEdge, edited for clarity.

How is BrightEdge different than other venture capital investing outfits?

It's ACS, and who we are, and what we represent. We're pan-cancer — our mission is to end all cancers. And we have a strong health equity focus. Originally, BrightEdge, like most other venture philanthropy, was primarily focused on generating returns, and we were only investing in novel drug development. But now, we pay homage to the totality of ACS's mission, and so we invest across the entire cancer care continuum, because we know that prevention, screening, detection, these things matter. So things like patient disease management, navigation, financial barriers to care accessibility. We're thinking much more broadly about what the portfolio should look like.

If ACS donor dollars go to BrightEdge and its venture activities, doesn't that mean fewer dollars will go to ACS to support its various grantmaking and other programs?

You're absolutely right, but the hope is that over time, once BrightEdge reaches a $100 million threshold, we anticipate income from our investments to be an annual grant stream feeding back to ACS. We're still in a ramp-up phase now. Some of our investments are very early stage and may take some time before they're realized. But we have amazing, visionary donors who believe in the BrightEdge model — this is their preferred way for their donor dollars to work because they know that the current model may not be sustainable over time. So we do appeal to philanthropists who have some appetite for, or even experience in impact investing.

Typically, venture capital investors say they provide not just dollars to the companies they back, but also business and technical guidance. Is BrightEdge active in this way with the companies it invests in?  

ACS is the largest nongovernmental funder of cancer research. So all the novel cancer biology, as well as health systems and policy research — we can bring that to bear for these companies that are tackling really tough technical product development journeys.

I came from biopharma. Seventy percent of drugs may be launched by large biotech or pharmaceutical companies, but they're actually coming from small biotech companies that are venture-backed, and those are usually scientific founders. And they're surrounded by finance-first, finance-oriented venture capitalists. So they're not really thinking about those downstream issues of, “Can patients access these drugs?” and “Can patients afford them?” There are certain cancer types that are not as well-served today and vulnerable populations that we could help in the way that we design the product in the earliest stages, which is really the most cost-effective way to do it.

What we're saying to the market is to keep doing what you're doing, but please, let's start directing some monies toward things that make cancer care more sustainable and more equitable. And we're trying to do that within a really vibrant, competitive landscape where there is a bit of loss aversion.

What other resources or background can BrightEdge provide to its investment targets?

We have fairly unique insights into what's broken at a system level, at a population level, and at a market level. We at ACS can actually identify different solutions that no one is currently thinking about, or even incentivized to stand up. And by the way, we have the advocacy arm, which is the largest in the country, so we can also de-risk the marketplace and build markets. We have the unique ability to model what cancer care should look like for the future, and then essentially turn on the market engine to deliver that on our behalf.

What advice might you give to another philanthropic or charitable organization that is considering getting into venture philanthropy?

Be as clear as you can when you're designing the model on what it is you're trying to do. Because there are so many flavors out there. Is it to make money? That's one approach. And maybe it doesn't even make sense to have your own in-house team, maybe you just want to engage another VC to do that. If it's to be philanthropic and more catalytic — to support the types of companies that the market is not necessarily going to take a risk on — that's a very different model.

If it's to raise money because you think there are donors out there who want to see their philanthropic dollars work in a more for-profit way, you have to really test that because that's not going to be as straightforward as you might think. Because money lives in different buckets: Their grant money may or may not be the same as their impact investing allocation. And there are different standards and requirements for reporting and professionalism that are needed if you're going to begin engaging on the portfolio manager side. But if it's some blending of all of those, then I think everyone should go through the same exercise we did, which is to ask: What is your differentiated value-add that you bring to the space?