About

Digitalis Commons is a nonprofit organization founded in 2018 to catalyze health technologies with the potential for outsized impact—especially those that fall outside traditional market models. We are working toward a world where cutting-edge health technologies are broadly accessible to people everywhere.

‍

Digitalis Commons is part of the Digitalis Group which also includes Digitalis Research, an applied research organization building new ideas at the intersection of health and technology, and Digitalis Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in solutions to unmet needs in health. Digitalis Commons partners with Digitalis Research to identify structural problems ripe for change, identify potential solutions, and test them in real-world practice.

ABOUT OUR NAME

The Digitalis plant is the natural source of cardioactive steroid glycosides widely used in the treatment of heart disease since the 1700s. Dr. Thomas W. Smith, the father of our founding partner, began his career as a physician-scientist at Harvard by developing a novel radioimmunoassay to enable the safe administration of digitalis. Dr. Smith’s subsequent research program touched on many themes—the health benefits of nature-derived compounds, the importance of measurement science in therapeutic development, rational design in drug discovery, among many others that continue to resonate with our group today. Beyond his research, Dr. Smith was a renowned clinician and beloved mentor to a generation of academic cardiologists. Our name reflects our ongoing commitment to this legacy of both scientific innovation and human connection.