BIO from the BAYOU: Build Your Biotech Network with Key Opinion Leaders and Investors
4 Feb 2026 · 14 min
0:00
In this episode of Bio from the Bayou, host Dr. Yulian Ham interviews Andrew Meadow, founder of Health Innovation Capital (HIC), a venture fund launched in January 2022 to address unmet medical needs in pediatric and maternal health. Meadow recounts the fund’s origin—sparked by his COVID‑19 recovery and a period of intensive reading—leading to the realization that pediatric care requires dedicated investment beyond treating children as small adults. HIC’s investment thesis centers on targeting innovations that directly improve outcomes for patients under 21, including neonatology, maternal‑fetal medicine, and postpartum care. The conversation explores the heightened risk of pediatric R&D, the fund’s strategy of building global centers‑of‑excellence partnerships to streamline patient recruitment and clinical testing, and a proprietary “dual due‑diligence” process that evaluates both technical merit and real‑world impact on care quality, cost, and access. Meadow explains the importance of stewarding “other people’s money” (OPM) for limited partners, emphasizing the fund’s track record of delivering upper‑quartile returns while pursuing socially beneficial outcomes. He advises entrepreneurs to reach out proactively via LinkedIn, noting that HIC receives many pitches and values persistent engagement. The episode concludes with reminders to access show notes for HIC contact information and a call to subscribe for future biotech insights.
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Serving the entire Gulf South, but recorded in the heart of New Orleans. Welcome back to BIO from the Bayou. I'm your host, Dr. Yulian Ham, the Executive in Residence at Tulane School of Medicine, and this week we are actually So we have an amazing opportunity to sit down with the people that are attending our conference. And today with me, I have Andrew Meadow, who is with Health Innovation Capital. And so excited to sit down with you in person, not over Zoom. Let's tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and then really your origin story of Health Innovation Capital, because it's a really fascinating one.
Well, thank you very much, Doctor. Health Innovation Capital was founded in January of 2022 to address the unmet medical needs in pediatric healthcare. The premise for HIC, as we affectionately refer to it, to the firm surfaced during the time that I was recovering from COVID My wife and I were one of the first, very first few in Massachusetts to acquire the COVID virus.
Wow.
During the month of March, and then subsequently April, as we found ourselves recovering, I'd like to say convalescing, but it was truly a battle in recovering. I found myself with something I haven't had since I was in my teens, which is about 8 to 10 weeks of doing nothing but reading. And as I began to evaluate certain trends that I was seeing in the market and questioning what I was doing professionally in the world of venture capital, I saw this underserved opportunity in pediatric healthcare venture capital that needed to be addressed.
Yeah.
And we felt that there was a new way forward to do that. And that approach was to take the best of the learnings that we had gleaned during our respective careers in venture capital, in healthcare innovation, both as investors, as well as entrepreneurs and C-suite executives, and combine that with our experience as providers in healthcare.
Mm-hmm.
And to ask ourselves, what is missing in the market? If I am doing a consult with a patient, and we are presented with certain indications, and we need to come up with creative solutions on the fly in order to address those complications the patient is experiencing. That is the world of a pediatrician today, and particularly pediatric specialists. We are asking them to be both medical practitioners and entrepreneurs. I think we can do better than that.
Yeah.
And we've decided to dedicate, and I personally have decided to dedicate my career to finding unique solutions that address those unmet medical needs for pediatrics, whether it be a therapeutic, whether it be a medical technology or healthcare service. Unlike other folks who may focus on a specific indication or a specific platform or modality, we focus on a specific patient and that specific need.
Yeah.
If an innovation does not target the unmet medical needs of an individual under the age of 21, we are probably not the right partner for them.
Yeah.
And it was not too long after that that we realized that as we began to delve more into pediatrics, that if we are going to address the root cause as well as systemic side effects of pediatric healthcare, we needed to also focus on maternal fetal medicine, neonatology, and then eventually postpartum.
Yeah.
And so that aspect of our practice in women's health, particularly as it relates to neonatology, maternal fetal medicine, and postpartum, has become a core component of our business. I do not want to play my cards here, but there's one of our next investments is actually in that field. And we are very excited about this company. We think that even though we're one of the few in the marketplace, I will say that that is not a statement I want to make. I wish that there were more funds focusing on this area. I can think of no more than a handful of funds worldwide focusing on pediatrics. And in this particular day and age, there should be a lot more than $200 to $300 million focusing on unmet medical needs in pediatrics.
I love that you bring the pre and post around that because it's not just about the baby between, you know, 0 and 21 years. It's also the mother and the care that she gives to the child in utero and the care that she gives to the child after too. So I think that that's such an important piece. If you're going to solve a problem, you also have to look at the ecosystem swirling around that problem too. And that's a really smart way to do that. What gets you excited about the market right now, especially as we think about the pediatric or maternal health side? What gets you excited these days?
So Many folks consider that the pediatric R&D community is fraught with an extraordinary amount of risk. I mean, healthcare venture capital—
Oh, absolutely.
And healthcare innovation is incredibly risky just to begin with. But then when you start thinking about doing clinical trial work on pediatrics, it's then the risk factor that is tenfold, if not more than that. So for us, we have become very smart, in my opinion, on how to engage R&D at the human level.
Mm-hmm.
So one of the key things that we did at the fund is we started out with building collaborations with centers of excellence in the United States, in Europe, in Australia, Middle East, and in Canada, and building these partnerships in an idea of how can we collaborate with the different institutions to find a more efficient way to recruit patients, to find a more efficient way to test the R&D in a clinical setting, and how really begin moving forward with commercializing the innovation once it goes through the regulatory pathway. And our fear, for lack of a better word, and I use that term in quotation marks, has become far less stressful as we've become smarter in this and as we begin speaking to the practitioners in the field and the providers. Because parents want to see their children get better.
Sure.
They want to see their children go out and play with their friends. They want to see their children be thriving young people who are thoughtful and creative and caring. And it's hard to do that when they are undergoing significant, highly invasive treatments at different centers of excellence. And so they are keen on seeing solutions. They are keen in finding opportunities that their children can be a part of to help move the needle forward in terms of quality of care and quality of outcomes.
Yeah.
I think when we talk about progression-free survival and overall survival, I think an 18 to 24 month diagnosis for a pediatric glioblastoma patient, for overall survival, especially when that individual is 6 or 7 years old, I think we can do a little better as a society.
Yeah. Yeah. You have such a great value proposition of Helping kids, I mean, that's so great. But at the same time, there's that other side of that coin. Helping kids is hard. They are not just small adults. I think you mentioned this. I mean, it's a really challenging patient/customer to have to navigate from a development standpoint, from a trial standpoint. How do you make your own LPs comfortable around that risk?
That's an outstanding question. And it's an issue that we have thought long and hard of when we began establishing the foundation for Health Innovation Capital. We are absolutely a for-profit fund.
Sure.
There is, trust me when I say this to you, our limited partners want a better than upper quartile return.
Yeah.
On their investment. And for us, bringing a successful track record and having done that before with other funds is very compelling to our investors. They wanna know that our learning curve is not 90 degrees, but we have been to this rodeo before.
Yeah.
And we've been able to provide investors with a very significant and very meaningful rate of return on their capital. They also appreciate the fact that we understand a key acronym that many people in our industry forget, which is OPM, which is other people's money.
Absolutely.
We are not playing with house money. We are playing with other people's money. And so it's very important for us to make sure that our LPs know that our commitment to being good stewards with their money is preeminent in our thinking.
Yeah.
But we also believe that we can do well and do good simultaneously.
Absolutely.
And it is that marriage that I think creates a unique investment thesis and philosophy for us. What we like to call a double due diligence or dual due diligence platform we use. We have our own proprietary methodology—
Sure.
For evaluating companies. But in parallel with the technical due diligence and the background of the management team due diligence that we do, we simultaneously are are evaluating how the product improves the quality of care for patients, how it reduces the cost of care for patients, cost of R&D, how it improves access. And I'm not just talking physical access, but you can have physical access to a product, but when you go to the cash register to pay for said product, the access requires somebody to take a second mortgage on their home or third mortgage on their home.
Yeah.
I don't think that that's That is a definition of access. That is a definition of—
Privilege.
The haves and have-nots.
Absolutely.
And so for us, we do this dual due diligence process so that when we make a forward investment in an opportunity, we can go back to our LPs and tell them that technically this is as sound as we can get it.
Yeah.
We're in the business, as I say all the time, of making a perfect decision with imperfect data. And I can certainly tell you that When it comes to pediatric healthcare, that statement is never more true. But at the same time, though, if we can do good when we launch that product, where the entrepreneurs and the management teams we work with launch that product, that we can say with a degree of confidence that we have thought through how this is going to engage with the payers, with the providers, and most importantly, with the patients.
Well, it sounds like you're not just great for the LPs, you're also great for the co-investors too, especially for the funds that, you know, they do healthcare, but peds isn't their thing. You help bring that gravity, the information, the knowledge, and the comfort of like, oh no, no, we have people on this team that can make sure this company that we are also investing money in is going to do well. Going a little bit further up the food chain, talking about the entrepreneurs, we have many in our audience. How would someone working in the fields that you've indicated, the pediatrics and the maternal care, how would they get your attention? What would make you, once you learn what they're doing, they did stop and grab them and say, we need to talk.
It's more than just having a cool innovation. We are very fortunate, and I say this with all due humility, blessed to have a great pipeline of opportunities for consideration. Great entrepreneurs, great technologies, compelling science. But to me, I'm always, and maybe this is my humble background, I'm always thinking about the grass greener on the other side. What am I missing? So we are always, always, always interested in looking at new opportunities. and new technologies. So for us, one of the things that is very keen for us is how can we make sure that we are engaging with everybody? And I will say this with all due humility with the folks listening, that I get a lot of emails and many of them unfortunately slip through the cracks. So unlike maybe other members of the venture community, I would strongly recommend that you reach out to all of us at HIC. We're all on LinkedIn.
We're all— Yeah.
Available. And make sure that you're poking the pie as many times as you possibly can. We want to learn. We want to know. We want to be engaged. It's just when you're drinking from a fire hose, sometimes it's hard for the water that we want to get into our mouths to get there. So we respectfully ask that you keep your foot on the pedal, and we look forward to the conversation.
What a perfect way to end this, because as always, we will always have in our informational show notes information about Andrew, his group, Health Innovation Capital. We'll have all of the links in our show notes so that you can be able to find him and go bug him about your next cure to help kids and mothers move their lives forward with the latest and greatest innovations. So—
We look forward to speaking with your audience, and certainly always a pleasure speaking with you, Doctor.
I was so excited to see you today. So thank you so much, Andrew, for joining me on the podcast today.
Thank you. Thanks for joining us for Bio from the Bayou, and we hope you'll join us again.
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