As technology has advanced – and overlapped – in the life sciences and information technology spaces, it has created a nexus in which areas such as math, physics, computing, chemistry and biology intersect. And that intersection is the focus of Digitalis Ventures, which launched a new $100 million fund aimed at investing in health solutions.

"It's really a coming together of these different technology realms," Digitalis founder and managing partner Geoff Smith told Medical Device Daily. "We're really interested in thinking about health, rather than thinking about disease, and [inverting] the common thinking in the health care space."

It's a strategic approach that has been years in the making. Smith, who co-founded and serves as general partner at Ascent Biomedical Ventures, a venture capital firm boasting a portfolio of biopharma and medical device firms, said the Digitalis team has a "fair amount of experience around startups in both traditional life sciences and a little experience in the information technology world." They also watched as tech in both of those areas advanced, to the point that, in health care, it became "about engineering a solution rather than blindingly trying to find one through high-throughput screening methodology or something like that.

"It allowed us to think about important questions differently than in the past," he added.

For example, Digitalis made one of its earliest investments in microbiome company Second Genome Inc.'s $42.6 million series B round last year to further build and develop that company's drug discovery platform, which melds microbiology and host biology with the aim of understanding the role of the microbiome in both disease and health.

"It really gets down to the ground level, [looking] at populations of different bugs" to map and understand that space, Smith said. "We believe you have to get down to the ground floor."

Another investment was in Girihlet Inc., a company whose stated goal is providing a "window into the immune system" and health of a patient by profiling the T-cell receptor repertoire.

"You have a very diverse T-cell repertoire when you're younger and less diverse when you age," Smith explained. "So, think about what a healthy population looks like and how we can forward engineer a solution that helps maintain that."

Digitalis also has invested in Caredox Inc., which offers a unified digital health platform covering nearly 2 million public system students.

The types of companies may defy traditional categorization – biotech, med tech or health IT. Digitalis' website lists half a dozen interests, including data architecture, physical computing, bioelectronics and precision medicine. In the end, the focus is more on understanding a health problem and figuring out a solution, Smith said. The solution "may require a hardware component or software, or [work] through a biologic system. We're more keen to see how the technology focuses" on a particular problem.

Digitalis anticipates its first fund will end up in the range of 10 to 12 investments, in a mix of seed and early venture rounds – likely about 30 percent on the seed side and 70 percent on the venture side, Smith said.

Seed-stage investments probably will be "a few hundreds of thousands to a few millions," he said, enough to get that key proof of concept. Venture-stage investments will involve about $3 million to $5 million per initial investment, with reserves to help finish out any product development activities.

And the Digitalis team expects to maintain active roles on the boards of its portfolio firms. "This is not meant to be a passive investment vehicle," Smith said. In that way, it is like a traditional venture capital firm, in that "this is a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-involved-with-the-company type of thing."

Co-founding companies also is on the to-do list for Smith, who taught for a number of years at Rockefeller University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and has experience leading discoveries beyond academia. "So that's an area of great interest to us, too, to help the translational process."

For the new venture firm, Smith chose the name Digitalis as a nod to his late father, Harvard Medical School professor Thomas Smith, whose work on digitalis resulted in both the invention of a radioimmunoassay designed to measure digitalis levels in the blood and the development of Digibind, an antibody capable of counteracting digitalis toxicity.

"As a nice byproduct, 'digital' happens to be in the word, so there's sort of an Easter egg in the name," he said.