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Health equity should not be considered a parallel initiative, but a central pillar of the biotech industry’s strategy, said experts on Day 3 of the 2025 Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) International Convention in a panel, “In Pursuit of Health Equity: How Industry Has Evolved Its Focus on This Critical Healthcare Challenge.”
And the stakes – as defined by five leaders working in different areas of biotechnology – are both human and economic.
“This is an industry that truly sits in a space with the opportunity to significantly impact the quality of life for people across the globe,” said Tanisha M. Sullivan, J.D., head of external engagement and health equity strategy at Sanofi. “It is within our hands every day, through the decisions we make and the persistence we bring, to tackle some of the most complex health challenges and benefit humanity as a whole.”
“The opportunity to benefit from innovation, from belief, from hope is embedded deeply in our ecosystem,” she added.
The session underscored how inclusive R&D, reimagined clinical infrastructure, and strategic investment can lead to new business models.
From engineering to equity
For Dr. Nabiha Saklayen, co-founder and CEO of Cellino, the promise of health equity depends on how technologies are built from the ground up. She spoke about the need to invent manufacturing platforms that drive toward the lowest cost and highest accessibility for personalized stem cell therapies.
Her team made an intentional decision from the beginning to avoid relying on standard cell sources that predominantly reflect limited population groups, emphasizing the need to build more representative foundations in biotech.
“We’ve been building this understanding and awareness and connecting the dots because we want to serve patients across all socioeconomic backgrounds around the country and build a technology that can deliver that,” a reflection of the team’s early decision to avoid relying on standard cell sources that represent only a narrow portion of the population.
Precision medicine depends on representation
Without genetic diversity in trial populations, there is no true personalization.
“First of all, all chronic diseases today are being treated at the molecular level, which makes genuine cell therapy crucial. That is the foundation of precision medicine and personalized health care. It all begins with clinical trials. Our genes must be represented in those trials,” said Rodney Cotton, Venture Partner of 2Flo Ventures.
He cited U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) data showing that from 2015 to 2019, less than 5 percent of some cancer trials included Black males, and under 2 percent included Black females. In trials for preeclampsia, less than 1 percent of participants were from that demographic.
Cotton emphasized the importance of decentralizing trials, moving them beyond academic medical centers into community settings, and engaging community-based principal investigators and coordinators to build trust and participation.
Redesigning access from the ground up
Dr. Tia Lyles-Williams, founder and CEO of LucasPye BIO and HelaPlex, turned attention to a root barrier: early-stage capital for underrepresented biotech founders.
Through the LucasPye BIO accelerator, she is building a new kind of pipeline—one that centers inclusion from the start.
“It’s a diverse group of startups,” she explained. “We have five therapeutics, three medical devices, one digital health, and one biotech supply chain. Eight of them are BIPOC led, eight are first generation, seven are women-led, and seven are immigrant-led.”
These founders are not lacking in vision or drive. Often, what they are missing is a single critical resource, such as a trusted advisor, access to pre-clinical testing resources, or key professional connections that others in the ecosystem may already have access to. The challenge is not one of capacity, but of access.
She underscored that equity-building cannot be an afterthought. It must be intentionally designed into the system from the outset, including how communities are engaged. That means being transparent about the economic, medical, and cultural value for communities, which is essential for building genuine and lasting partnerships.
