On this week’s version of InnovationRx, we take a look at the spreading Ebola epidemic, the Midas checklist well being traders, Lilly’s trio of vaccine offers, and extra. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.
Well being staff leaving the isolation space at Congo’s Normal Referral Hospital through the Ebola outbreak response.
Getty Photographs
In lower than two weeks for the reason that Africa Heart for Illness Management confirmed an Ebola outbreak within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, greater than 220 individuals have been killed by the illness. The full variety of individuals contaminated has now topped 1,000, and the illness has unfold to neighboring Uganda. On Monday, the top of the World Well being Group, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the illness was spreading quicker than response efforts, leaving public well being staff “taking part in catch-up.” The outbreak could surpass the 2018-2020 one, which was the most important on report and triggered greater than 2,290 deaths, in response to the Worldwide Rescue Committee.
Though there are vaccines for Ebola, they’re restricted to a particular model generally known as the Ebola-Zaire pressure. There isn’t any authorized vaccine or remedy for the present outbreak of the Bundibugyo pressure, which has a 32% fatality charge–about the identical as smallpox. A staff of Oxford scientists have been engaged on a vaccine for it, however medical trials are nonetheless months away.
Within the meantime, governments all over the world are working to comprise the outbreak. Within the U.S., CDC is recruiting workers to help Ebola screening at entry ports. Three American airports, Houston’s Bush Worldwide Airport, Washington, D.C.’s Dulles Worldwide Airport and Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Worldwide Airport are geared up to deal with screenings of passengers from Congo, Uganda and South Sudan, which has not but reported any instances however is on excessive alert. The Forbes breaking information staff is monitoring updates to the epidemic here.
The Midas Listing 2026
Annie Lamont
Guerin Blask for Forbes
Yearly, Forbes ranks the highest 100 enterprise capitalists, primarily based on their portfolio firm exits to IPO or acquisition in addition to vital good points of their non-public valuations. This yr, good points from AI firms helped catapult 25 newcomers to the checklist. The AI increase has made it a lot more durable for healthcare traders to make the lower.
Annie Lamont, cofounder and managing accomplice of Oak Funding Companions, was the one VC whose main Midas deal was healthcare-related. That large win was insuretech firm Devoted Well being, which is now valued at greater than $14 billion, in response to VC database Pitchbook. (Learn our 2024 profile of how Lamont grew to become a well being tech heavy hitter here.)
Zhen Zhang, founding father of Chinese language agency Gaorong Capital, had just a few large biotech wins in his portfolio: ProfoundBio was acquired by Genmab in April 2024 for $1.8 billion and precision drugs firm Alto Neuroscience’s went public in February 2024 and now has a market cap of greater than $700 million.
Different traders with large well being care bets–who made the lower for non-health investments–embrace:
Hemant Taneja, CEO of Normal Catalyst, whose funding in Anthropic, which has built AI tools for healthcare companies, helped hold him on the checklist.
Vinod Khosla, founding father of Khosla Ventures, who has been the lead accomplice on a number of healthcare offers, together with insurance coverage platform Loop Well being and healthcare market Zocdoc, ranked #1 this yr for being the primary VC to again OpenAI, which launched healthcare-focused AI products earlier this yr..
Neil Shen, the founding accomplice of funding agency HSG is thought for his early backing of TikTok father or mother firm Bytedance, whose healthcare division has moved into AI drug discovery, digital well being platforms and funding of a Beijing-based “AI native” most cancers hospital.
Read the full Midas list here.
What $7 Billion Commure Has Deliberate
Final week, Commure, which sells AI-powered enterprise software program to well being methods, reached a $7 billion valuation. Forbes spoke with CEO Tanay Tandon in regards to the firm’s plans for enlargement to assist handle the $1 trillion spent yearly on healthcare administration.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Commure presents an AI scribe for docs, instruments for follow administration and software program that may automate income cycle administration, the time-consuming affected person billing and reimbursement course of. It’s deployed throughout greater than 500 healthcare organizations, together with main well being methods like Tenet and HCA. It’s rising quickly: Tandon says that the corporate has greater than $200 million in reside annual recurring income (a metric that represents the energetic subscription income being billed to clients), double what it reached final yr. “If we’re aggressive, I feel we are able to double once more,” he says. “A number of it’s simply deploying what we’ve already signed.”
Ambient scribing, which data conversations that sufferers have with their docs and routinely fills out their well being varieties, is presently a $600 million market, dominated by Microsoft’s Nuance and venture-backed Abridge (valued at $5.3 billion), which management practically two-thirds of the area, in response to an October 2025 report by VC agency Menlo Ventures. However as competitors has elevated, and even digital recordkeeping behemoth Epic is providing its personal merchandise, costs have come down. In a harder market, anticipate consolidation. “We’ve got seen extra curiosity on inbound M&A from scribing firms [recently] than previously three years mixed,” Tandon says.
In the meantime, the sport has more and more moved from scribing per se to revenue-cycle administration, the place well being methods can see the monetary payoff. “My objective is to make the system extra worthwhile,” Tandon says.
Deal of the Week
Eli Lilly snapped up three vaccine developers for nearly $4 billion in a giant push into infectious illnesses by the $1 trillion (market cap) pharma big finest identified for its weight-loss medication. The three firms are Curevo, LimmaTech Biologics and Vaccine Firm. Curevo is growing a shingles vaccine that might probably problem GSK’s Shingrix, the dominant vaccine. LimmaTech is engaged on vaccine candidates for bacterial infections, together with Staphylococcus aureus, whereas Vaccine Firm’s pipeline features a potential vaccine towards Epstein-Barr virus. Lilly’s chief scientific and product officer Daniel Skovronsky mentioned in a press release that the takeovers signify “a deliberate strategy to forestall illness at its supply fairly than deal with its penalties.” Lilly reported 2025 revenue of $62 billion, a forty five% improve over 2024 as gross sales of Mounjaro and Zepbound soared.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Oura, which reached a valuation of $11 billion final yr as gross sales of its good rings soared, filed confidentially for an IPO.
Within the first 5 months of Utah’s AI prescribing experiment, startup Doctronic’s AI beneficial a prescription renewal 72% of the time and flagged the remaining 28% of instances for a physician.
Retatrutide, one in all Lilly’s experimental weight problems medication, yields weight loss approaching that of bariatric surgery, albeit with uncomfortable side effects and excessive charges of discontinuation, in a late-stage examine.
How a gaggle of biotechs ran a profitable covert campaign to oust tFDA Commissioner Marty Makary.
President Trump, who will flip 80 subsequent month, is getting his annual physical at Walter Reed. What the general public will see from it stays an open query.
Researchers on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative created an open-source atlas of a couple of billion predicted protein constructions that might present new insights into illness prognosis and remedy.
