In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at the spreading Ebola epidemic, the Midas list health investors, Lilly’s trio of vaccine deals, and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.
In less than two weeks since the Africa Center for Disease Control confirmed an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, more than 220 people have been killed by the disease. The total number of people infected has now topped 1,000, and the disease has spread to neighboring Uganda. On Monday, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the disease was spreading faster than response efforts, leaving public health workers “playing catch-up.” The outbreak could surpass the 2018-2020 one, which was the biggest on record and caused more than 2,290 deaths, according to the International Rescue Committee.
Although there are vaccines for Ebola, they are limited to a specific version known as the Ebola-Zaire strain. There is no approved vaccine or treatment for the current outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain, which has a 32% fatality rate–about the same as smallpox. A team of Oxford scientists have been working on a vaccine for it, but clinical trials are still months away.
In the meantime, governments around the world are working to contain the outbreak. In the U.S., CDC is recruiting staff to support Ebola screening at entry ports. Three American airports, Houston’s Bush International Airport, Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport and Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport are equipped to handle screenings of passengers from Congo, Uganda and South Sudan, which has not yet reported any cases but is on high alert. The Forbes breaking news team is tracking updates to the epidemic here.
The Midas List 2026
Every year, Forbes ranks the top 100 venture capitalists, based on their portfolio company exits to IPO or acquisition as well as significant gains in their private valuations. This year, gains from AI companies helped catapult 25 newcomers to the list. The AI boom has made it much harder for healthcare investors to make the cut.
Annie Lamont, cofounder and managing partner of Oak Investment Partners, was the only VC whose primary Midas deal was healthcare-related. That big win was insuretech company Devoted Health, which is now valued at more than $14 billion, according to VC database Pitchbook. (Read our 2024 profile of how Lamont became a health tech heavy hitter here.)
Zhen Zhang, founder of Chinese firm Gaorong Capital, had a few big biotech wins in his portfolio: ProfoundBio was acquired by Genmab in April 2024 for $1.8 billion and precision medicine company Alto Neuroscience’s went public in February 2024 and now has a market cap of more than $700 million.
Other investors with big health care bets–who made the cut for non-health investments–include:
Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst, whose investment in Anthropic, which has built AI tools for healthcare companies, helped keep him on the list.
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, who has been the lead partner on multiple healthcare deals, including insurance platform Loop Health and healthcare marketplace Zocdoc, ranked #1 this year for being the first VC to back OpenAI, which launched healthcare-focused AI products earlier this year..
Neil Shen, the founding partner of investment firm HSG is known for his early backing of TikTok parent company Bytedance, whose healthcare division has moved into AI drug discovery, digital health platforms and funding of a Beijing-based “AI native” cancer hospital.
Read the full Midas list here.
What $7 Billion Commure Has Planned
Last week, Commure, which sells AI-powered enterprise software to health systems, reached a $7 billion valuation. Forbes spoke with CEO Tanay Tandon about the company’s plans for expansion to help address the $1 trillion spent annually on healthcare administration.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Commure offers an AI scribe for doctors, tools for practice management and software that can automate revenue cycle management, the time-consuming patient billing and reimbursement process. It’s deployed across more than 500 healthcare organizations, including major health systems like Tenet and HCA. It’s growing rapidly: Tandon says that the company has more than $200 million in live annual recurring revenue (a metric that represents the active subscription revenue being billed to customers), double what it reached last year. “If we’re aggressive, I think we can double again,” he says. “A lot of it is just deploying what we’ve already signed.”
Ambient scribing, which records conversations that patients have with their doctors and automatically fills out their health forms, is currently a $600 million market, dominated by Microsoft’s Nuance and venture-backed Abridge (valued at $5.3 billion), which control nearly two-thirds of the space, according to an October 2025 report by VC firm Menlo Ventures. But as competition has increased, and even electronic recordkeeping behemoth Epic is offering its own products, prices have come down. In a tougher market, expect consolidation. “We have seen more interest on inbound M&A from scribing companies [recently] than in the past three years combined,” Tandon says.
Meanwhile, the game has increasingly moved from scribing per se to revenue-cycle management, where health systems can see the financial payoff. “My goal is to make the system more profitable,” Tandon says.
Deal of the Week
Eli Lilly snapped up three vaccine developers for nearly $4 billion in a big push into infectious diseases by the $1 trillion (market cap) pharma giant best known for its weight-loss drugs. The three companies are Curevo, LimmaTech Biologics and Vaccine Company. Curevo is developing a shingles vaccine that could potentially challenge GSK’s Shingrix, the dominant vaccine. LimmaTech is working on vaccine candidates for bacterial infections, including Staphylococcus aureus, while Vaccine Company’s pipeline includes a potential vaccine against Epstein-Barr virus. Lilly’s chief scientific and product officer Daniel Skovronsky said in a statement that the takeovers represent “a deliberate strategy to prevent disease at its source rather than treat its consequences.” Lilly reported 2025 revenue of $62 billion, a 45% increase over 2024 as sales of Mounjaro and Zepbound soared.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Oura, which reached a valuation of $11 billion last year as sales of its smart rings soared, filed confidentially for an IPO.
In the first five months of Utah’s AI prescribing experiment, startup Doctronic’s AI recommended a prescription renewal 72% of the time and flagged the remaining 28% of cases for a doctor.
Retatrutide, one of Lilly’s experimental obesity drugs, yields weight loss approaching that of bariatric surgery, albeit with side effects and high rates of discontinuation, in a late-stage study.
How a group of biotechs ran a successful covert campaign to oust tFDA Commissioner Marty Makary.
President Trump, who will turn 80 next month, is getting his annual physical at Walter Reed. What the public will see from it remains an open question.
Researchers at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative created an open-source atlas of more than one billion predicted protein structures that could provide new insights into disease diagnosis and treatment.
