Volume 18 Number 1 Winter/Spring 2001

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new ventures NOT FOR MDS ONLY

'Don't forget your Stanford connection,' urges alumnus Jeffrey Bird, a new partner at a health care focused venture capital firm.

By Charles Clawson

IN AN OFFICE overlooking the hazy foothills of Jasper Ridge, Jeffrey Bird, MD, PhD, reflects on turning 40 and an accompanying desire to give something back to the Stanford biomedical community. As the newest member of the Alumni Association's board of governors, he'll have his chance. Board members recruited Bird to help them increase involvement of PhD graduates from the Medical Center.

"They tend to be a more disenfranchised group, so there's a benefit to creating a little more sense of community," Bird says. "After heading off in different career directions, it's nice to come back and celebrate community."

The son of a Harvard professor of international development, Bird experienced a variety of cultures as a child, including two years in Iran in the 1970s. He came to Stanford as a freshman in 1978, began bench research then at the Medical Center and has made his home in the Bay Area ever since. He and his wife, Christina, also a Stanford graduate, have three children.

In 1988 Bird joined Gilead Sciences, a biotech firm where he experienced the rush of a startup. "Things happen remarkably quickly," he recalls. "Diverse people and technologies come together with a noble goal ­ to make a difference in medicine ­ and at the same time there's this sense of creation, of building something. That's what led me into scientifically oriented business."

Since June 2000, Bird has been at Three Arch Partners, a health care-focused venture capital firm co-founded by Stanford professor of surgery Thomas Fogarty, MD, whose career stands as a model of the inventiveness Bird mentions. Indeed, Fogarty was recognized last year with the prestigious Lemelson-MIT prize for invention and innovation.

The firm's startup ventures offer a glimpse at medicine's future. One company, called Ingenuity, which began as a group of Stanford MD/PhDs, is in the process of creating a database of the world's medically relevant scientific information. Another company, called Phylos, involves a group of Harvard professors who are creating a protein chip to aid in mapping the functions of the human proteome. Yet another company, called ePocrates, supplies medical databases for handheld devices. Their initial free download provides a drug-drug interaction database -- the kind of information that's difficult to memorize and is frequently updated. As well, the firm recently developed a device to treat ischemic stroke by lowering a patient's blood temperature, thus creating a mild state of hypothermia that preserves brain function. The device is now being tested in clinical studies in the United States (including Stanford) and Australia for treatment of stroke and myocardial infarction.

During a typical working day, Bird helps young entrepreneurs prepare presentations, attends their board meetings and aids in recruiting -- a sort of hand-holding process for those not schooled in startups. He encourages alumni with new ideas to take advantage of the rich tradition of entrepreneurial support in the Bay Area.

"For a time, the Internet was soaking up startup capital as well as entrepreneur's talents and interest, but I think the medical field is durable," he says. "Stanford alumni interested in starting companies should begin by seeking out advice of their former faculty and their classmates, and should feel free to contact people in companies with a similar technological focus. Around here you have a faculty that's experienced in working with industry, and accounting and law firms and investors who know the ropes."

Bird also thinks it is important for company builders to turn their talents to help institutions like Stanford University School of Medicine so "our kids can look forward to an evergreen source of talented people committed to great ideas." SMD