New venture capital chairman could be helpful to health care

Terry McGuire

Polaris Ventures co-founder Terry McGuire was recently named the new chairman of the National Venture Capital Association. Polaris focuses in part on the life sciences and McGuire himself is a longtime investor in health care. All three of the companies he started were in the life sciences and that remains his focus at Polaris.

McGuire pointed out that the “venture industry is poised to play an important role in our country’s economic recovery.” We recently noted the NVCA’s role in the debate over renewal of the Small Business Innovation Research program. And McGuire has already said he wants to fight President Obama’s plan to increase taxes on venture capital firms.

But Jeff Bussgang, a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, pointed out that McGuire’s ascension to the chairmanship could be important for health-care investments — something McGuire pointed out in an interview with Bussbang:

With the incredible advancements in genomics, computational power and miniaturization, we are arguably entering into a golden age of innovation in life sciences (which encompasses healthIT, medical devices, diagnostics, and touches adjacent areas such as materials science and robotics. Having an NVCA chairman steeped in that world, at a time when the US Government is looking to perform a top-down re-engineering of the health care system, which is projected to make up 20% of GDP in a few years, is good timing indeed.