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From Digital Health to Deep Tech: What the Fierce Innovation Awards Reveal About the New Center of Gravity in Life Sciences (2023 → 2025)

Every year in November, Fierce Healthcare announces their Fierce Healthcare Innovation Awards.  Two years isn’t long in biotech. But looking at the Fierce Innovation Awards 2023 vs. 2025, you’d think the industry rewrote its priorities from the ground up. The shift is dramatic, and it tells a bigger story about where value is moving, what investors are rewarding, and how therapeutic development is being rebuilt. Priorities are moving decisively away from digital health infrastructure and toward deep technology platforms that accelerate therapeutic development. It would appear the center of gravity in life sciences has migrated upstream, into discovery, translation, manufacturing, and delivery.

2023: The “Fix Healthcare” Year: Digital, Operational, and Patient-Facing Innovation

The 2023 winners emerged from categories overwhelmingly centered on healthcare delivery and digital operations: Clinical Information Management, Data Analytics/BI, Digital & Mobile Health Solutions, Financial/Operational Solutions, and Population Health & Patient Engagement.

This was the period when the industry, still unwinding the effects of COVID-19, continued modernizing the administrative machinery of care delivery. Companies like ISEEYOUCARE, icometrix, RazorMetrics, and Project Ronin reflected the push for smarter clinical data management and neurological disease monitoring. In Data Analytics and BI, innovators such as PointClickCare, GeneDx, Penn Medicine, OM1, and RethinkFirst emphasized real-world analytics, network management, and decision support, tools designed to make the healthcare system function more efficiently.

Digital health also dominated. Solutions from Ventric Health, BioMech, Nectar Life Sciences, and TBD Health showcased patient engagement, virtual care, and human-centered digital therapeutics. Even the financial and operational winners; GoodRx, CertifyOS, Edifecs, and Real Endpoints fit the same theme: remove friction, simplify workflows, and help patients navigate costs. Finally, in population health, companies such as Hinge Health, Cadence, CentralReach, and Accumen leaned heavily into longitudinal disease support and engagement.

These 2023 Fierce Healthcare Innovation winners weren’t pushing the boundaries of therapeutic science, they were upgrading the healthcare system itself.

Why 2023 looked this way?

The timing matters. These awards captured the first full post-pandemic year when healthcare utilization normalized and systems sought stability. The healthcare system was pressure tested through COVID and the system itself was identified as the problem. Innovation was grounded in solving systemic inefficiencies, not reorganizing the underlying science of therapeutic development.

2025: The “Rebuild the R&D Engine” Year: Deep Tech, AI-Native, and Platform-Driven

By contrast, the 2025 awards represent a dramatic pivot away from operational innovation and toward therapeutic-enabling technologies. The categories themselves tell the story: AI Innovation, Technology Innovation, Drug Delivery Technology, Biotech Innovation, Medical Device Innovation, Operations Solutions with a manufacturing focus, and only one carryover category: Digital Health. The winners reveal the bigger shift.

AI-native discovery and computational biology

Companies like SandboxAQ and Immunai are no longer building tools to organize health data, they are redesigning how drugs are discovered and developed. SandboxAQ’s physics-informed molecular simulation platform and Immunai’s single-cell multi-omics–powered clinical operating systems represent the maturation of AI from workflow automation to biologically grounded R&D engines.

R&D data and regulated analytics platforms

Domino Data Lab highlights another dimension of this shift. Instead of powering clinical decision support, platforms like Domino now accelerate reproducible, compliant analytics across the pharma lifecycle. These tools sit at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, GxP methodology, and machine learning – the new backbone of modern R&D.

Cell & Gene Therapy (C&GT) manufacturing and precision delivery

Manufacturing and delivery have emerged as the new bottlenecks in biotech, and 2025’s winners make this clear. Danaher’s integrated CRISPR manufacturing ecosystem and Orca Bio’s high-precision allogeneic T-cell therapies represent the sector’s movement toward scalable, individualized treatment delivery. These are not incremental advances, they redefine manufacturability, speed, and patient access in cell and gene therapy.

Intracellular and targeted delivery technologies

Platforms like Entrada Therapeutics’ EEV™ system show how intracellular delivery, historically one of the hardest unsolved problems in drug development, is now advancing quickly. Entrada’s progress in Duchenne muscular dystrophy illustrates how breakthroughs in delivery mechanics can reshape entire therapeutic categories.

Next-generation diagnostics and ultra-early detection

The inclusion of ATED Therapeutics, whose rapid blood test detects Parkinson’s before symptom onset, reflects an industry returning to diagnostics, but this time with platforms that are simple, scalable, and cost-effective. Diagnostics are no longer pandemic-driven; they are becoming integral to early detection and therapeutic decision-making.

A slimmer digital health presence

Only Timely by DrFirst represents the digital health category, a striking contrast to 2023. Its inclusion points to a consolidation of digital health around platforms that produce measurable clinical or commercial outcomes, rather than broad engagement apps.

Why the Market Shifted So Dramatically?

The transition from 2023 to 2025 wasn’t random. Several forces converged:

  1. Digital health’s hype cycle collapsed. Large-scale utilization normalized, investments tightened, and the market no longer rewarded marginal improvements to patient workflows.
  2. Biotech’s capital contraction forced prioritization. From 2022 to 2024, companies cut programs and refocused budgets on platforms that reduce scientific risk and enhance manufacturability. The winners of 2025 reflect those survival-driven priorities.
  3. AI reached biological maturity. AI stepped out of the clinic and into the wet lab, integrating physics-based models, multi-omics datasets, and deeply technical simulation engines.
  4. Manufacturing and delivery became existential. For cell and gene therapy especially, innovation bottlenecks shifted away from biology and into production, delivery, and logistics. The awards simply followed those fault lines.
  5. Diagnostics re-emerged with a new purpose. Post-pandemic diagnostics had to reinvent themselves. The next wave focuses on actionable early detection, not mass population testing.

The Emergence of Therapeutic-Enabling Technologies

Taken together, the shift from 2023 to 2025 signals a new market consensus. The most transformative innovation is now happening upstream, in the platforms that enable therapies to be discovered, tested, manufactured, and delivered faster and more precisely.

This aligns with AVANT BIO’s core thesis:

Tomorrow’s’ cures rely on today’s therapeutic-enabling technologies. The awards now reflect what we see daily across our portfolio and global deal flow.  AI-native discovery, translational tools, advanced delivery mechanisms, scalable CGT manufacturing, and next-generation diagnostics are no longer niche. These breakthroughs are becoming the foundation of the next era of medicine.