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How one mom's fight to find a cure for her son has helped her to make cutting-edge healthcare investments for private equity giant Carlyle

Ashley Evans and her husband, Mike Graglia, pose with their two young children.
Ashley Evans and her husband, Mike Graglia, pose with their two children. Barbara Kinney

  • Carlyle combined the firm's US growth and buyout-investment strategies in June. 
  • Managing director Ashley Evans has helped Carlyle make strides around innovation and healthcare. 
  • Evans' work with SynGap, a disease her son has, has pushed the company's integration strategy. 
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Ashley Evans, a managing director on Carlyle's technology team, has a personal connection to innovation in healthcare.  

About three years ago, Evans' son, Tony, who is now 7, was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease known as SynGap, which causes neurological disorders. Tony had been showing signs of developmental issues, such as poor muscle tone and seizures, prompting Evans and her husband to get a medical diagnosis for their son. 

She looked into genetic therapy, a technique in which a copy of a healthy gene or an altered gene is used to treat a genetic mutation, and started talking to scientists about it. 

"What we found from those conversations is that this is actually a ripe time for innovation in genetic therapy," Evans said. "In fact, my son's mutation, while no cure is known today, is targetable by some of the technology that's out there."

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The discovery led Evans and her husband, Mike Graglia, to start a nonprofit research fund dedicated to financing scientific research that is making headway with SynGap. When the fund started in 2018, 250 people were found to have the disease. The number has risen as the medical community becomes more aware of SynGap and patient data has become more accessible. The latest numbers as of last month, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, show there are 795 known patients. 

Carlyle helped fundraise more than $100,000 in October toward the fund. So far, the SynGap Research Fund has given out nine grants. The most significant being the $205,500 for a SynGap study run at Scripps Research Institute in Florida and $500,000 to support research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland, which both have professors specializing in the research. 

Carlyle wants more collaboration, which allows for more opportunities for growth

Evans also said this work has helped her gain experience and knowledge useful in helping Carlyle's US buyout and growth team spot technological-innovation opportunities in healthcare, which plays into a broader strategic shift at the firm, where once-siloed strategies are becoming collaborative.

Kewsong Lee, who became Carlyle's sole CEO in 2020, said in February that the asset-management firm had a four-year plan to drive growth faster for shareholders. In April, Carlyle released details of an offshoot that highlighted the merging of its buyout and growth teams into one unit, bringing together strategies that focus on large investments with those focused on growth-oriented small companies, which enables Carlyle to cover more ground in healthcare and other sectors.

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"It allows us to adapt and pivot faster to opportunities," said Steve Wise, head of global healthcare. "If buyout opportunities are too expensive, we can pivot to growth. If it looks like there's fewer opportunities in mature economies, we can pivot to the emerging markets."

The combined team houses units representing six investing themes: technology, media and telecommunications along with healthcare, industrial and transportation, consumer and retail, global financial services, and global aerospace, defense and government services. All totaling $64 billion in assets under management, as of September.

Broadening areas of investment is important to Carlyle's strategy

Teams across Carlyle are working together to find opportunities in specific areas in biotech and health. Joe Bress, managing director on Carlyle's healthcare team, approached Evans in summer 2020 about investing in TriNetX, a software company that provides clinical researchers access to aggregated patient data that is deidentified, or stripped of personal identifying information. According to the TriNetX website, concentrating patient data and providing a network platform for researchers to connect cuts down on time.

"It has a lot of the features of what we really find compelling in data businesses," Evans said.

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Carlyle's tech team made investments in other data businesses like the financial content and analytics provider Dealogic in 2014. The deal was valued at about $700 million. The firm invested in ZoomInfo, a software-as-a-service business that sells business data to marketing firms, in 2018 for an undisclosed amount.

Carlyle bought a majority stake in TriNetX in September 2020. The company started in 2013 and in less than a decade has built a data system that is connected to hundreds of health and life-sciences organizations across North America, Europe and Asia. 

Wise said the firm was introduced to TriNetX through Pharmaceutical Product Development, a major player in the clinical trials that Carlyle acquired in 2011. 

The firm's most recent investment is in the clinical-trial data and services provider Saama Technologies, a company Carlyle is betting will help disrupt the life-sciences industry for the better. 

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"Both of those businesses are going after what we perceive to be the big opportunity in clinical trials, '' Bress said.

Certain steps in the clinical-trial phase are repetitive and will soon be replaced or streamlined through the use of data, analytics, and technology, he added.  

"We're very focused on investing in growth and a big piece of investing in growth is understanding disruption. And in order to understand that you need to understand technology," Wise said.

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