Gini DESHPANDE

Gini Deshpande is Partner of Cathay Health. She has over 20 years of experience creating new products and launching companies across a number of sectors in life sciences. As founder and CEO of NuMedii, she pioneered the field of AI driven drug discovery, structured critical partnerships with Pharmaceutical partners and raised the Company’s initial rounds of financing. Previously, as a consultant, she helped early stage platform companies Iperian and CollabRx identify optimal markets, enabling them to raise over $25M in financing. At life sciences tools market leader Affymetrix, she was responsible for new product opportunities for their Academic Business Unit, their largest customer segment. As director of the early stage incubation business unit at Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB), she secured grant funding to enable prototype development for six medical device products. While at CHB, she helped launch several startups in the therapeutics and diagnostics space through collaborations with faculty. She has also managed broad, diverse IP portfolios and closed licensing deals worth several million. Gini has co-authored numerous papers and is the recipient of several awards. She has served on the Advisory Committee of the BIO Investor Forum for several years and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences on AI in Healthcare. She is an active advocate for increasing the participation of women in STEM and entrepreneurship and has also given talks at the United Nations on this topic. She is also an angel investor in companies at the intersection of technology and healthcare. She received her PhD in Biological Sciences from Purdue University and did post-doctoral work at Harvard Medical School.