7 Things to Know about Impact Investing and Saving Lives
1) Impact investing is the practice of making purposeful investments that help achieve social benefits – while generating financial returns. In the charitable space, impact investing has been embraced by several prominent foundations to ensure that assets committed to advancing social good through grant-making are invested in projects that align with those values.
2) Unlike charitable giving, impact investing provides individuals an opportunity to achieve both social and financial returns. Impact Investing is a small but fast-growing niche investment category. The International Finance Group reported that even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, impact investing reached $2.3 trillion in 2020 and will continue to grow exponentially in the coming decade.
3) Impact investments have successful track records. A 2018 survey conducted by the Global Impact Investing Network found that the vast majority of impact investments met expectations for both impact and financial returns.
4) Investing in a disease-specific impact investment vehicle gives investors direct insight into the drug development process, opportunity to provide portfolio companies with clinical or non-clinical expertise and spur commercialization, accelerating getting therapies to patients and returns to investors.
Precision Medicine is Ideal for Impact Investing
5) There is a real opportunity to apply what has worked well in other sectors to health care, including medical research and drug development. By better predicting how cells will react to medicines, doctors can eliminate the trial-and-error phase of an individual’s treatment journey, leading to faster cures.
6) Precision medicine could save millions of lives each year by making it possible to tailor treatments based on patients’ unique genetics, lifestyle and environmental factors.
Equity and Diversity are Top of Mind
7) Sheila Mikhail, CEO and co-founder of gene therapy firm AskBio, on a recent panel discussing social impact investing’s future, called out the inequality of capital allocation. “Less than 5% of venture-backed companies are run by women, less than 3% are run by a person of color. That discrepancy curtails potentially worthwhile investments, specifically in the space of rare genetic diseases that often present in marginalized communities. If it wasn’t for social (impact) investors, a lot of these new technologies would never get the opportunity to show they have viability. There must be a more even distribution allocation of capital”
This work can’t be done without investment. We need to close the gap between innovative health care organizations that need investors and healthcare-minded individuals looking to have their money work for them by developing cures to extend and save lives. MCC enables impact investors to close the gap and put an end to pancreatitis and other complex, underserved diseases.