At the final session of the 2025-26 College of Health Population Health Colloquium, a panel of Lehigh alumni entrepreneurs offered a candid look at what it takes to innovate and grow a business in today’s healthcare landscape. The session featured moderator Marc Tarpenning P’27, venture partner at Spero Ventures and co-founder of Tesla Inc., alongside Dr. Neal Walker ’92, chief executive officer and chair of the board of directors, Aclaris Therapeutics; Brian O’Connell, ’85, retired president & COO, Key Surgical; and Chris MacDonald ’05, co-founder of Abrus Bio | LifeSci Platform Development.
Tarpenning began by asking O’Connell to reflect on his career transition from high-tech lifesaving medical devices to lower-tech hospital supplies. O’Connell, who graduated from Lehigh with a BS in electrical engineering and built his career in the medical device and consumable medical product industry, shared that even the most basic products are critical to healthcare delivery.
“At Key Surgical, I went from implantable cardiac products that were directly lifesaving themselves to selling stuff that was the equivalent of rubber bands and paper clips to the hospitals,” he said. “Without those products, the instruments that get used in every surgery don’t get sterilized, and then no operations occur, and then the hospital shuts down.” He also introduced this idea of “psychological income,” the idea of working for a business that “does good for the world.”
His journey into entrepreneurship began at age 43, as a new parent, when he and his business partner took a significant personal financial risk to purchase Key Surgical. “It was a wonderful experience,” he said. “If you’re willing to tolerate the risk, I would encourage anybody to make a wise, calculated decision and be an entrepreneur.”
The conversation turned to Walker’s journey as both a dermatologist and an entrepreneur. He learned “on the fly” by founding a healthcare startup during residency, even though it was not in the dermatology space. Walker and his two partners saw a business opportunity and knew they had the experience and acumen to make it successful. He described the experience of scaling up the company and selling it as “more meaningful than anything I had gotten out of business school.”
MacDonald’s career followed yet another trajectory. After studying electrical engineering and engineering physics at Lehigh, he pursued a PhD. At the time, entrepreneurship was “not on my to do list,” he said. After working in manufacturing engineering at Alumina, he joined a startup which successfully brought a Covid test to market quickly during the pandemic. That experience led him to founding Abrus Bio. The company is working to build a protein sequencer, a tool that can read proteins in the same way that scientists can sequence DNA.
Unlike O’Connell, MacDonald chose to mitigate personal financial risk by raising outside capital.
“We don’t know if our approach is physically possible or not,” he said. “We are inventing new chemistries, new technologies as we go. For me, from our risk-based decision for starting this company was, I’m going to use other people’s money instead of my own to do this, right? The trade off, of course, is that I presumably own less of this company than they do.”
Tarpenning noted that this type of “science risk” — where success is not guaranteed even at a fundamental level — can make fundraising especially challenging. “The fact that nearly everybody said no for science risk is not a surprise. The fact that you somebody said yes is awesome.”
The conversation also highlighted the importance of a Lehigh education for both academic and personal growth. Walker, whose father was an engineering professor at Lehigh, began his studies in mechanical engineering before switching to biology in order to attend medical school. Reflecting on his entrepreneurial adventures, Walker said, “I’ve had a number of tech startups, some in the life sciences, some in med device. I sit on a number of boards, running a public company, which is fascinating. I could never have imagined painting that picture back from getting into engineering,” he said.
Panelists stressed to students that a career is not linear and that networking is critical, and they shared how they are using AI to increase productivity. The panel closed with a brief discussion on gender balance in entrepreneurship, highlighting the continued evolution of the startup landscape.
This year’s Population Health Colloquium featured six sessions focused on the “Business of Health,” in celebration of the new Integrated Business and Health degree program, a collaboration between the Colleges of Health and Business. The series will resume in 2026-27. To explore recordings and summaries from the full series, click here.
