Issue 182  /  October 13, 2026  /  Feature

Great Ideas Die Between the Lab and the Market. One Fund Is Betting on the Gap

Arben Ventures co-founder Ariel Ganz on funding health research before the evidence exists, what 83 first checks have produced, and why she judges women against themselves instead of the average.

Great Ideas Die Between the Lab and the Market. One Fund Is Betting on the Gap

Researchers at Stanford tested the same 109 people every three months for up to eight years. Instead of checking each result against a standard normal range, they compared every person with their own earlier results.

The study, published in Nature Medicine in May 2019 by Sophia Miryam Schüssler-Fiorenza Rose, Kévin Contrepois and 28 co-authors, led from Michael Snyder's genetics lab, turned up more than 67 health problems worth acting on.

The group was small and chosen partly because many were at risk of type 2 diabetes, and half were followed for less than three years. The study shows what tracking one person over time can find. It does not show that finding it made anyone healthier.

Ariel Ganz is one of the 28 co-authors, and that study shaped how she invests. Most medical tests compare a woman's results with an average of other people.

Tracking her own results over time can catch a change that the average would miss. Ganz invests in companies built on that idea, and she invests early, before they have the evidence to prove it works.

Arben Ventures, the fund she co-founded, wrote first checks into 83 health companies from a $5M first fund, and its first impact report says three of them now have FDA clearance.

She believes investors are undervaluing both the stage and the idea.

The funding squeeze starts before a company even exists. In fiscal 2025, the National Institutes of Health funded 13% of the 62,592 research project grant applications it received, down from 21.3% two years earlier, according to the agency's own figures. Some rejected applications are funded later on resubmission, and the figure covers all of biomedical research, not women's health alone. Ganz started Arben for the ideas caught in that gap.

"We just felt like there is an academic valley of death where these incredible ideas, even in the top labs in the world, not everything can get funded," she said. "The Einsteins and the Edisons of our time should be empowered with capital and should get the funding that they need."

Her co-founder, Ben Rolnik, added. “Some meaningful fraction of the rest were right,” he said of the proposals the NIH turned down. “We’re not trying to beat the NIH at picking science. We’re trying to be the capital that exists for the ones they couldn’t afford.”

Private money is thin at that stage too. From July through September, The Luteal counted 21 equity rounds in women's health, worth $213.1M together. Five backed companies with no human data yet, and those five raised $7.5M between them, 4% of $213.1M.

Early rounds are always smaller, so the split alone does not prove the market is wrong, and only $2.0M of the $7.5M is confirmed so far in the companies' or investors' own announcements.

Ganz came to Snyder's lab as a postdoc after a Cornell PhD in molecular nutrition. In 2023 she co-founded Arben with Ben Rolnik, writing some of the first checks into early health and AI companies. Women's health is 18% of the 82 companies in the fund's report.

The impact report, published this year, is a public account of what those 82 companies have done since the fund invested, covering 2023 through 2025.

A venture fellow, Michaela Ciulla, assembled it, and Ganz said that meant following up with every company. The report tracks where the fund's money went, which companies reached regulatory milestones, how many patients each company reaches and which products are first of their kind.

Its count of three FDA clearances includes only full marketing authorizations, held by CureMetrix, Concha Labs and Swing Therapeutics. The report also tracks every other stage of the regulatory process across the portfolio, from pre-submissions to filings still under FDA review. It also puts later investment from other backers at about $200M, a figure that includes money raised in the same rounds as Arben’s checks and comes from a survey not every company answered.

Investing before there is clinical data means betting on the person. "At the very early stage, we're definitely betting on the founder and especially the founder's commitment, clarity, drive," Ganz said. According to the report, 65% of the 82 companies have at least one founder with a PhD or MD. For companies that treat patients, she likes to see a doctor closely involved.

"With science you have unique people who are just best in the world, the only people who know about this particular topic and have taken the time and the care to spend 5, 10, 20 years plus working on this tiny niche area," she said.

Rolnik makes the same case in market terms. “We write first checks to academic founders because the person who spent ten years on one mechanism is the single most de-risked asset in the deal,” he said. “They know what fails. They know what the market is going to misunderstand. The only thing they haven’t done yet is sell it, and that’s a skill, not a miracle.”

Founders in the portfolio describe that approach from the other side, in comments provided by the fund. Farshad Murtada of Scry Bio said Ganz and Rolnik “read our paper before our first call and came with deep, thoughtful questions.” Amie Leighton, co-founder and CEO of Allia Health, said Ganz is “always there for a confidence boost, problem-solving, or recruiting.”

A lab sets its normal range from a large group of people and leaves out the highest and lowest 2.5%. If your number falls in the middle 95%, it's normal. Ganz's problem is with who is in that group. It is, she said, "a population average based on a population that is not like yourself."

Lab scientists have known about the gap since 1974, when Eugene Harris showed in Clinical Chemistry that a population-wide range can miss real change in one person whose own levels stay in a narrow band. Many common blood tests work this way. A 1999 review by Per Hyltoft Petersen and colleagues in Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine cautioned that the idea is often misread, and that it matters far less for a single test than for a test repeated over time.

She sees the cost of that in patients who never fit the expected pattern. “So many people have unseen suffering, and the standard of care in medicine often leads to patients being dismissed or falling through the cracks when their symptoms fall outside of what we expect or can identify,” she said.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and for Ganz the subject is personal. She was diagnosed with breast and thyroid cancer while raising Arben's first fund. She said the experience gave the fund "a deep concentration and focus on cancer, and especially breast cancer early detection," and Arben has since backed eight companies in early cancer detection, by her count.

Breast screening is also where one test meets its biggest exception. About half of US women 40 and older have dense breast tissue. On a mammogram, dense tissue shows up white, and so do tumors, so a cancer can be hard to see. That is what happened to Ganz.

"Mine was missed by mammogram and ultrasound, and I have dense breasts," she said.

The best evidence on what a second look finds comes from the DENSE trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in November 2019 by Marije Bakker and colleagues. It followed 40,373 Dutch women aged 50 to 75 with very dense breasts and a clear mammogram. Half as many cancers showed up between regular screenings in the group offered an MRI, 2.5 per 1,000 compared with 5.0 per 1,000 with mammograms only. The trial was too small to show whether MRI saves lives, and it flagged 79.8 women per 1,000 for cancers that turned out not to be there. Without proof on lives saved, the US Preventive Services Task Force said in 2024 there wasn't enough evidence to recommend extra scans for women with dense breasts.

An FDA rule now requires every mammography center to tell a woman if her breasts are dense and that other scans may help. Whether insurance pays for them depends on her state and her plan.

Arben's portfolio includes a company built on that gap. BeSound, founded by Bailey Renger, a physicist who had a cancer scare at 21 while interning at NASA, pairs ultrasound with FDA-approved photoacoustic imaging, which uses light and sound to show tissue, for women with dense breasts and women under 40. It raised a $6.8M seed round in September 2025. Like every supplemental scan, it faces the same open question the task force raised, whether finding more cancers earlier translates into fewer deaths.

Ganz's case for why the shift from averages to individuals is investable now is that the tools finally exist. Wearables, home tests and detailed blood and genetic testing produce far more information about one person than a doctor's chart was built to hold, and AI can now find patterns across it.

"All this data that was before thrown away because we couldn't store it, it was too messy, it was too big, we didn't know what to do with it, that becomes highly valuable data that companies can leverage to do things that have never been possible before for your health," she said.

CureMetrix, one of the three companies with FDA clearance, shows what that looks like with an image women already get. Its AI software finds calcium buildup in the breast's blood vessels on routine screening mammograms, a finding linked to a higher risk of heart disease, which causes about one in five deaths among US women, according to the CDC. The American College of Radiology recognized it as a relevant finding in its 2025 breast imaging atlas, and the FDA cleared an updated version of the software in August 2026. A calcium finding is a warning sign, not a diagnosis, and it only helps a woman if her doctor acts on it.

When asked what the market is undervaluing, Ganz started with women's health as a whole.

"I do think women's health is being underpriced in general, just because it's such a big segment of the market, and I think we don't have a clear view yet on how much it's being missed," she said. "As a category, we don't even quite realize yet the potential upside."

She put personalized medicine and early detection in the same column. "People are looking at the way medicine is practiced today and then assume that that's how it's going to stay instead of anticipating the massive shift that's going to take place," she said. She compared where it leads to the indicator lights on a car, "instead of just having that for your blood pressure, having tons of data about yourself over time."

Ganz is now raising Arben's second fund. She said pre-seed remains the fit, and the areas she named were women's health, personalized medicine, early cancer detection and brain health.

The founders she most wants to meet are building something large and have a real reason to care about the problem, whether or not they have lived it. At that stage, she looks at what a founder has already put in, and it does not have to be money. "It's different if you're day one and you haven't put any investment into yourself," she said. "You can tell the people who have already invested a lot of their own time and energy."

The NIH funded 13% of the research proposals it received in fiscal 2025, and in the third quarter 4% of private money in women's health reached companies with no human data yet.

Medicine still reads a woman against an average.

Capital still reads the earliest companies against what usually happens at that stage.

Ganz is betting that in both cases, the average hides what matters.

The Femtech Capital Index for Q3 2026 publishes this month. It covers every women's health round we counted this quarter, who invested in each, and what each company could prove when it raised.

The Luteal covers the business, science and policy of women's health. Nothing here is medical advice. Arben's figures and plans are company-stated.

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Sources

— Keisha, Editor of The Luteal