LSI Alumni Innovator Spotlight: Apreo Health’s Karun Naga

Apreo Health is taking on one of respiratory medicine’s most persistent challenges with an approach built around a deceptively simple idea: instead of destroying diseased lung tissue, work with the lung to help it breathe. Under the leadership of Co-Founder and CEO Karun Naga, the company has advanced its investigational BREATHE Airway Scaffold from an early concept to a 200-patient pivotal trial, backed by a $130 million Series B and a team determined to establish a new treatment option for people living with severe emphysema.

For Naga, however, Apreo is about more than building another medical device company. It is the culmination of decades of lessons about pioneering innovation, intellectual property, people, failure, persistence, and the responsibility that comes with trying to do something medicine has not been able to do before.

From Patent Attorney to Entrepreneur

Karun Naga has spent much of his career around people trying to create things that do not yet exist.

An engineer by training, Naga initially found himself surrounded by the automotive industry in the Midwest and searching for work that felt more personally meaningful. He pivoted to law, moved to California, and became a patent attorney, a role that placed him alongside entrepreneurs at the earliest stages of building technology companies.

It did not take long for him to realize he wanted to be on the other side of the table.

“I soon realized, I don’t want to be your lawyer. I want to be you,” Naga recalled.

That realization eventually brought him to the Bay Area and into the medtech ecosystem. 

Over the ensuing years, his career would span intellectual property, corporate development, company building, and leadership, including roles at Ardian and Medtronic and nearly two decades of involvement with The Foundry.

Each experience added another layer to the way Naga now approaches Apreo Health.

“I do feel like everything I’ve done in my career leading up to now has helped me lead this organization and the development of this therapy very effectively,” he said. “You have to be willing to stub your toe a few times along the way and learn from those mistakes. Those painful lessons really inform your judgment later on.”

That perspective is particularly relevant at Apreo because the company is operating in a field where the history of innovation teaches many more hard lessons than successes.

This blog is originally published here: https://www.lifesciencemarketresearch.com/insights/lsi-alumni-innovator-spotlight-apreo-healths-karun-naga