Big Tech and Big Pharma: How Medtech Can Bridge the Gap

As technologies evolve and healthcare innovation accelerates, the traditional boundaries separating medtech, big tech, and big pharma are increasingly blurry — but the cultural and strategic gaps between them remain. At LSI USA ’25, panelists Juan-Pablo Mas (Action Potential Venture Capital), Nishant Doctor (Surf Therapeutics), and Jordi Parramon (Nexus NeuroTech Ventures) joined moderator Katie Elias to examine how medtech can better align with big tech and big pharma to drive innovation forward.

The conversation centered on key differences in development strategy, investor expectations, and business timelines — critical challenges that arise when building partnerships or raising capital across sectors. As medtech companies seek broader platforms and more ambitious outcomes, understanding and navigating these differences becomes essential for effective cross-sector collaboration and long-term success.

Understanding the Evidence Gap

A major area of divergence between medtech and pharma lies in how each generates and values evidence. Parramon, who transitioned from classical medtech into Google’s life sciences division, highlighted the contrast: “In pharma, the average expenditure of a successful Phase III is over a billion dollars. So the whole evidence generation strategy is designed to manage that risk.”

Medical devices, by contrast, are often developed with smaller trials and faster feedback loops. As Elias pointed out, medtech teams are expected to iterate during the clinical process — something that’s “a big mind shift for people coming from a pharma background.” Doctor added, “Most medtech companies don’t know why something works — they just know that it does. But if you understand the mechanism early, like SetPoint Medical did, you can unlock platform expansion and pursue multiple indications.”

Mas echoed the importance of speed and pragmatism in medtech: “Devices historically rely on empirical evidence. Getting to humans as quickly as possible is the rule of thumb.” But while this approach works for medtech timelines and budgets, it often clashes with pharma’s demand for deep mechanistic understanding — particularly when forming co-development partnerships.

This blog is originally published here: https://www.lsiusasummit.com/news/big-tech-and-big-pharma-how-medtech-can-bridge-the-gap