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Patient advocacy organizations that leverage venture philanthropy—an approach to philanthropic giving that applies venture capital principles to achieve philanthropic goals—can provide vital funding sources for high-risk, early-stage research and drug development.
Advocacy-driven investment models can act as a symbiotic balance to traditional venture capital. As such, in the lead up to the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) Investor Growth (BIG) Summit, Bio.News sat down to talk with Nicole Schwerbrock, Associate Director at IBD Venture Investments, about her background in patient-centric investment and how venture philanthropy has helped to advance therapies in the Inflammatory Bowel Disease space.
Nicole Schwerbrock will be a panelist on the 1:30 pm panel, The High-Impact Investment Landscape in Immunology & Inflammation, at the BIG Summit on March 2.
BIO: Can you talk about your background and work at IBD Ventures? How has that informed your understanding of the role of patient advocacy in investment?
Nicole Schwerbrock: My path into Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) research and investment is both personal and professional. I entered the Crohn’s and Colitis space because of family experiences. During my master’s training at Amsterdam Medical Center in the Netherlands, I knew I wanted to work in a field where I could make a meaningful difference for people living with IBD.
That commitment ultimately brought me to the United States, where I completed my PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and trained as a life scientist. My academic work focused on preclinical research, while my commercialization activities centered primarily on early-stage discovery and intellectual property development rather than late-stage clinical trials. Over time, my interests expanded beyond the science itself to a broader question: how does effective science translate into something that truly reaches patients?
Over the course of my career, I have worked across academia, biotech, pharma, and investment strategy, with a consistent focus on early innovation and translational development.
At IBD Ventures, that translational and patient-centered approach remains central to my work. Patients are integrated throughout our activities—including proposal reviews and advisory discussions—helping ensure that funding decisions reflect real-world disease burden and lived experience.
For me, this experience has reinforced that mission-driven investing and structured capital deployment are not in conflict. When patient insight is embedded thoughtfully, it sharpens strategic decision-making and strengthens the path from innovation to meaningful impact.
BIO: Can you talk about your experience in the immunology and inflammation space: how it’s changed, the innovations we have seen, and what more needs to be done?
Schwerbrock: The immunology and inflammation field has advanced substantially over the past decades. The introduction of biologics targeting TNF-α marked a turning point in IBD care, followed by therapies directed at integrins and IL-12/23 signaling, and oral small molecules such as JAK inhibitors and S1P modulators. Many of these treatments were initially developed in other immune-mediated diseases and later adapted to IBD once shared inflammatory pathways were identified. That era brought meaningful clinical progress and improved outcomes for many patients.
Today, we are entering a more precise phase of therapeutic development. A deeper understanding of immune cell subsets, mucosal immunology, and disease heterogeneity has enabled more targeted biologics, small molecules, and exploration of rational combination strategies. Clinical programs are becoming more refined, incorporating biomarkers and improved patient stratification.
At the same time, the therapeutic ceiling remains. Many patients do not respond, lose response over time, or experience recurrence after surgery. Durable remission and long-term disease modification are still not consistently achieved.
The next phase requires innovation intentionally designed for IBD biology itself. This includes advancing selective immune modulation, improving durability of response, addressing complications such as postoperative recurrence and fibrosis, and increasingly exploring strategies aimed at prevention and earlier intervention.
There remains considerable opportunities to improve sustained outcomes for people living with IBD.
BIO: What is your perspective on how venture capital (VC) and patient advocacy partnerships can help investors and innovators weather more difficult years financially?
Schwerbrock: Venture capital firms and patient advocacy organizations play different but complementary roles in advancing innovation. Venture funds are structured as financial partnerships, typically organized around limited and general partners with defined timelines and fiduciary return expectations. That structure shapes how risk is assessed and capital is deployed.
Advocacy-driven investment models, by contrast, are nonprofit and donor-supported, with capital deployed to advance patient impact within a defined disease area. At IBD Ventures, our focus is exclusively on IBD, with the goal of strengthening innovation across the disease. That sustained, disease-specific commitment allows us to support promising science at different stages of development and through a lens focused specifically on long-term patient impact.
In more challenging financial environments—including periods when capital markets tighten or research funding becomes more constrained—mission-aligned capital can play a stabilizing role. In addition to funding, we provide deep disease expertise and connectivity across clinicians, researchers, industry, and patient communities, helping refine development strategies and reduce translational risk.
When expectations are clear and roles are well defined, mission alignment and responsible capital deployment can work in concert. In tighter markets, coordinated collaboration across capital models helps maintain development momentum and prevent promising science from stalling.
BIO: How do you see the future of patient advocacy-informed VC investment in the coming years? How is that dynamic evolving?
Schwerbrock: From my experience in immunology and inflammation, I expect patient advocacy-informed VC investment to strengthen in the coming years. As science becomes more precise and disease mechanisms more complex, the value of deep, disease-specific expertise continues to increase.
Foundations like ours bring a broad and longitudinal understanding of the field—from early discovery through translational development—along with strong networks of researchers, clinicians, and patients. That perspective can meaningfully inform investment decisions, particularly in early-stage innovation where scientific risk is higher and strategic direction is critical.
I also see growing investor interest in immunology and inflammation. As more capital enters space, aligning venture strategy with disease insight becomes increasingly important. Advocacy organizations are contributing not only capital, but also knowledge, connectivity, and patient perspective to help refine development plans.
Looking ahead, I believe the dynamic will continue to evolve toward deeper collaboration—especially in areas such as long-term disease modification, recurrence prevention, and earlier intervention in immune-mediated diseases, where scientific uncertainty is greater and sustained partnership can help reduce translational risk.
