Some of the most remarkable advances in medicine are happening inside companies most of us have never heard of.
For Christian investors, that raises an intriguing question: Could investing in healthcare innovation offer financial opportunity while also supporting businesses working to serve their neighbors and address some of the world’s most difficult problems?
Dr. Finny Kuruvilla believes it can.
Kuruvilla is Co-Founder, Co-Chief Investment Officer, and Senior Portfolio Manager at Eventide Investments. With an M.D. and a Ph.D. in chemistry, he brings an unusual combination of medical, scientific, and investment expertise to faith-based investing.
Where Faith, Medicine, and Investing Meet
Kuruvilla’s interest in investing began long before he entered the investment industry.
His parents immigrated to the United States from India in 1973 with very little. As his mother worked as a bank teller, she learned the fundamentals of investing and compound interest and began putting those principles into practice.
Kuruvilla watched his parents work, save, give, and steadily improve their financial situation. Their example shaped his own understanding of financial stewardship.
Years later, while completing an M.D.-Ph.D. program in Boston, Kuruvilla received a modest stipend and began saving and investing on his own. With encouragement from a roommate studying economics at Harvard, he spent years reading and learning about investing.
One influence was legendary Fidelity investor Peter Lynch and his well-known principle of investing in what you know. For Kuruvilla, that meant bringing together two areas of expertise: medicine and investing.
Eventually, he began to see that investing in medical innovation could potentially affect far more patients than he could reach through clinical practice alone.
Business as a Tool for Healing
Kuruvilla treated patients with serious blood-related conditions, including leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle cell disease. Through that work, he became increasingly interested in the role businesses could play in accelerating medical innovation.
That vision eventually led Kuruvilla and Robin John to co-found Eventide with Jason Myhre in 2008.
Their approach is grounded in a distinctly Christian understanding of investing. Jesus commands His followers to love God and love their neighbors. If investing means owning businesses, Kuruvilla argues, Christians should consider how those businesses affect the people they serve.
Businesses can provide products and services that meet genuine human needs. That means investors can consider not only what they want to avoid but also what kinds of businesses they want to support.
Rather than viewing faith-based investing solely through the lens of screening out objectionable companies, Kuruvilla encourages investors to ask a positive question: What kinds of businesses contribute to the common good and serve their neighbors well?
The Promise of Healthcare Innovation
Healthcare provides a striking example.
Kuruvilla points to recent developments in treating pancreatic cancer, historically one of the most difficult cancers to treat.
Researchers have made progress targeting RAS, a protein that signals cells to divide. When RAS is mutated, that signal can remain active, allowing cancer cells to continue multiplying. Scientists have long considered RAS extraordinarily difficult to target, but new therapies are beginning to change that.
For Kuruvilla, breakthroughs like these illustrate what can happen when scientific discovery, entrepreneurship, and investment capital work together.
Investors provide capital to businesses. Those businesses can then use that capital to develop medicines
