Santé Ventures Closes 2020 with New Partner Promotions, Advisory Board and Senior Hires

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Jan 05, 2021, 08:00 ET

AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 5, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Santé Ventures (Santé), an early-stage healthcare and life sciences investment firm, today announced a series of end-of-year senior appointments and promotions, including naming two new Partners, to strengthen the firm's senior leadership team across venture investing, capital formation, and data & analytics.

James Eadie, MD, a current Partner at Santé, has been promoted to Managing Director. He first joined the firm in 2010 following two tours of active duty service in Iraq as a Major and Military Physician in the U.S. Air Force. Dennis McWilliams, who founded SparkMed Advisors, Apollo Endosurgery, and Chrysalis BioTechnology before joining Santé as Venture Partner 18 months ago, has been named a Partner. Omar Khalil, a Santé alumnus, returns to the firm as a Partner to lead its new Boston office, having spent the last nine years in executive roles at Kaléo and Baxter International Inc.

Santé has also formed a Senior Advisory Board to provide the firm with original, expert insights into economic, technology and geopolitical trends at the intersection of health and technology. This Board will be chaired by Dennis Lockhart, formerly the fourteenth President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He is joined on the Board by fellow Senior Strategic Advisor Michael Hoffman, who previously Co-Founded Palamon Capital Partners and served as a Partner of Warburg Pincus.

The Board's remaining positions will be filled by professionals from a variety of relevant areas including artificial intelligence, biotechnology & bioinformatics, behavioral economics, public policy & government regulation, and global capital markets. The members' collective acumen will help ensure Santé continues to prioritize its strategic vision, while maintaining a broad search for investment and acquisition opportunities over the next 10 years that will deliver attractive returns for investors.

Santé has also announced two new senior hires. Victoria Nguyen, who previously served as Chief Innovation Officer at Whitespace Solutions and as an Intelligence Officer for nearly a decade with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, has joined the firm as Head of Data & Analytics. Brooke Jones, previously Director at Brooklands Capital Strategies and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has also been appointed Head of Capital Formation.

"Venture is a team sport and as Santé continues to nurture complex, innovative technologies that improve lives and generate returns we must surround ourselves with the brightest minds and a healthy mix of outside and internally-developed talent," said Kevin Lalande, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Santé. "We extend our sincere congratulations to Santé's newest leaders, many of whom are talented, enthusiastic entrepreneurs. Together, we will continue to build companies of consequence and a diverse portfolio across biotech, healthtech and medtech for many years to come."

About Santé's New and Promoted Executives

Mr. Eadie joined Santé in 2010 and is an Emergency Medicine Physician. He was previously Vice-Chair of Emergency Medicine at Wilford Hall Medical Center, an academic level-one trauma center. Mr. Eadie is an Oversight Committee member for the University of Michigan's Michigan Translational Research & Commercialization program, an early-stage granting body for life science companies. He is also a Mentor in the Coulter Program at Michigan and a Board Member of the Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care. Board-certified in emergency medicine, Mr. Eadie earned his MD at Harvard Medical School and completed his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Ms. Jones joined Santé in April from Brooklands Capital Strategies, a leading boutique global capital raising and strategic advisory partner for alternative asset managers and companies. She established the firm's presence on the East Coast, advanced the firm's institutional investor relationships in North America, and helped launch several new investment products. Ms. Jones previously served as Co-Head of Capital Strategy at Bank of America, where she advised hedge funds and asset management firms on capital raising and product development. She was also a Director on the Capital Introductions team at Citi and held a similar role at Credit Suisse.

Mr. Khalil rejoined Santé in 2020, where he concentrates on the biotechnology space, and manages the firm's Boston office. Prior to that, he held senior leadership roles with Baxter International, Baxalta (now part of Takeda) and Kaléo, a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company developing a novel drug delivery platform primarily focused in Allergy & Immunology. Mr. Khalil has managed and led businesses from early clinical development through commercial launch, scaling them, to more than $3 billion in annual sales. Earlier in his career, Mr. Khalil spent four years at Santé as a Principal and also worked at McKinsey & Company in the healthcare practice, where he served leading medical device and pharmaceutical companies.

Mr. Lockhart joined Santé as a Senior Strategic Advisor in 2020, having embarked on a career across the private sector, academia, and government. He recently stepped down from the position of President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, where he was responsible for all the Bank's activities including monetary policy, bank supervision and regulation, and payment services. In addition, he served on the Federal Reserve's chief monetary policy body, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Mr. Lockhart was also a Faculty Member of Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service where he chaired the Master's program's concentrations in global commerce and finance and international business-government relations. He also was an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, Chairman of the Small Enterprise Assistance Funds, President of Heller International Group, and Chair of the U.S. Export-Import Bank's Advisory Committee.

Mr. McWilliams is a serial life science entrepreneur and innovator dedicated to globally commercializing medical technologies. Prior to joining Santé, Dennis founded SparkMed Advisors, a boutique advisory to the medical device space, Apollo Endosurgery, a medical device company developing novel flexible surgical devices for less invasive surgery, and co-founded Chrysalis BioTechnology‚ a development-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on novel drug therapies for tissue regeneration. He started his career as an Analyst for the IC2 Institute, a global think tank focused on applied entrepreneurship and commercialization research. Dennis also serves as Co-Course Director for the B.E.S.T. Innovation Course, has taught at the IHU Institute in Strasbourg France, is a Member of the Center for BioDesign's Advisory Counsel at Johns Hopkins University and is a frequent Lecturer in the Stanford BioDesign Fellowship program.

Ms. Nguyen first began working with Santé in 2016 and currently coordinates data and human intelligence to improve the firm's competitive advantage through better insight. A recognized authority in spatiotemporal analytic tradecraft and Big Data analysis, Ms. Nguyen served as the Senior Intelligence Officer for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Division prior to joining Santé, where she pioneered new data methodologies and drove novel application of technologies against no-fail global operations. A change agent and trusted advisor to senior leadership, she led and implemented Agency-wide tradecraft and technology transformation. Ms. Nguyen completed 13 deployments in direct support of the United States Special Operations Command and interagency partners. Ms. Nguyen is a recipient of the Presidential Unit Citation and Joint Civilian Service Commendation for notable service and contributions to U.S. National Security.

About Santé Ventures
Founded in 2006, Santé Ventures is a specialized healthcare and life sciences investment firm with over a half-billion dollars in capital under management. The firm invests in early-stage companies developing innovative new medical technologies, biotechnologies, and digitally enabled healthcare services. Recent Santé successes include Claret Medical (Boston Scientific), TVA Medical (Becton Dickinson), Millipede Medical (Boston Scientific), Molecular Templates (MTEM), AbVitro (Celgene), and Explorys (IBM Corp). Santé invests nationally and has offices in Austin, TX, and Boston, MA. For more information, please visit www.sante.com.

Media Contacts
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SOURCE Santé Ventures