Garheng Kong, MD, PhD, MBA, Managing Partner of HealthQuest Capital will be in conversation with Joel Marcus, Executive Chairman and Founder of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc.
Garheng founded HealthQuest Capital in 2012 to improve people’s lives through improving healthcare on a significant scale. His vision was to build a best-in-class team of the highest talent and integrity to work with outstanding entrepreneurs to transform healthcare through high growth companies while generating outsized risk adjusted returns for investors.
A physician, scientist, and engineer by training, Garheng has over two decades of experience investing in innovative healthcare companies with a long list of successes (29 IPO/M&A exits). He has represented HealthQuest on the boards of Ajax I, Ajax II, Ajax III, Alcresta, Avedro, Avizia, BardyDx, Castle Biosciences, CleanSlate, Etairos, ENT Specialty Partners, Everlywell, HealthChannels, Lunit, Magnolia Medical, Nomad Health, Perspectum, Pulmonx, Spirox, TigerConnect, Trice Medical, Venus Concept, and CareMetx/VirMedica.
Some of his notable past successes include IPO’s with Alimera (ALIM), AmWell (AMWL), Applied Genetic Technology Corp. (AGTC), Avedro (AVDR), Castle Biosciences (CSTL), Cempra (CEMP), Histogenics (HSGX), Lunit (A32813), Proteon (PRTO), Pulmonx (LUNG), StrongBridge (SBBP), TransEnterix (TRXC) and Venus Concept (VERO). His companies going on to successful M&A transactions include: Ajax I (Medtronic), Aldagen (Cytomedix), Athenix (Bayer), Avedro (Glaukos), Avizia (AmWell), BardyDx (Hillrom), Calibra Medical (J&J), CareMetx (General Atlantic), Cellective (AstraZeneca), NovaMin (GlaxoSmithKline), Salveo Specialty Pharmacy (United Health), SARCode (Shire), Serenex (Pfizer), Spirox (Stryker), Strongbridge Biopharma (Xeris) and Virmedica (CareMetx).
Garheng’s interests and industry footprint are broad as he also serves on boards of LabCorp (LH), Alimera Sciences (ALIM), Xeris Biopharma (XERS), Be The Match, Duke University Medical Center, and has served as Chairman on nine boards. He is an Aspen Institute Health Innovators Fellow, Kauffman Fellows Mentor, and member of YPO.
Garheng received undergraduate degrees in both Chemical Engineering and Biological Sciences from Stanford, while on an athletic scholarship. He then earned a MD, PhD and MBA from Duke University, graduating at the top of his class in each instance. His early career included stints at GlaxoSmithKline, McKinsey and a medical device start-up, TherOx, before joining Intersouth Partners and then Sofinnova Investments. He is married to his physician wife (a board certified cardiac electrophysiologist), has 3 children, and was a nationally ranked volleyball player (and avid “foodie”).
Joel S. Marcus, JD, CPA, is Executive Chairman and Founder of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), the REIT that pioneered life science real estate from a specialty niche to a mainstream asset class and is the preeminent, longest-tenured owner, operator, and developer uniquely focused on collaborative life science, agtech, and advanced technology campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations. Since co-founding Alexandria in 1994 as a garage startup with a $19M Series A and a mission to advance human health, he has led its remarkable growth into an S&P 500 company that as of December 31, 2022 has a total market capitalization of $35.0B and a total equity capitalization of $24.9B, which ranks in the top 10% among all publicly traded U.S. REITs. Alexandria, which celebrated its 25th anniversary on the NYSE in May 2022, has a total shareholder return exceeding 1,670% as of December 31, 2022.
Mr. Marcus leads Alexandria Venture Investments, the company’s strategic venture capital platform, which he founded in 1996. Some of his most notable early-stage investments include Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Google, Juno Therapeutics, and Moderna. With over $1.6B, Alexandria Venture Investments actively invests in disruptive life science companies as well as promising agrifoodtech, climate innovation, and technology companies that are advancing new, transformative therapeutic modalities and platforms to meaningfully improve human health.
Mr. Marcus also leads Alexandria’s social responsibility initiatives, which aim to address some of society’s most urgent challenges, including disease and other threats to human health, hunger and food insecurity, deficiencies in military support services, opioid addiction, disparities in educational opportunities, mental illness, and homelessness. To reverse the trajectory of the opioid epidemic, Mr. Marcus and Alexandria partnered with Verily, an Alphabet company, to pioneer OneFifteen, an innovative, non-profit data-driven healthcare ecosystem providing a full continuum of care to help people live healthy, addiction-free lives.
Mr. Marcus currently serves on the boards of several public biotechnology companies and non-profits, including the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, Emily Krzyzewski Center, National Medal of Honor Museum, Navy SEAL Foundation, and TOPGUN Association.
He earned his undergraduate and Juris Doctor degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles.
