Digitalis Commons is a non-profit organization that builds frontier-advancing, scalable solutions that have an outsized impact on important problems in health and health care.
We partner with technical innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropic groups, and funding agencies to tackle technical and commercial barriers to creating and implementing these solutions. We execute on our vision by building public-private partnerships, developing public good utilities, and investing catalytic capital.
Digitalis Commons is part of the Digitalis Group. Digitalis believes that technology can be used to meaningfully advance health. To realize this vision across a broad spectrum of opportunities, Digitalis provides complementary solutions that span the life cycle of private and public interest technologies. Our solutions currently include Digitalis Commons and Digitalis Ventures.
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.
