Cure
Overview
Clare Peeters, CBO and CFO of The New York Academy of Sciences, shares why a small set of financial metrics should stay top of mind for healthcare founders.
Whether you’re building a biotech company, launching a health-tech platform, or running a grant-funded research project, financial discipline is what keeps the lights on long enough for the science to work. According to Clare Peeters, CBO and CFO of The New York Academy of Sciences, once you strip away the complexity, most financial decision-making comes back to three core metrics that should always be top of mind: cash, burn rate, and runway.
View the entire lesson of our Concept to Cure course: Intro to Financial Planning and Analysis with Clare Peeters. All lessons available exclusively to Cure members.
Cash and Burn Rate Set the Pace of Your Business
Cash is the simplest, and the most unforgiving. It’s the balance in your bank account. It determines whether you can make payroll, pay rent, renew insurance, or keep critical vendors on board. More importantly, it’s what allows you to act on decisions once you’ve made them. Without cash, even the right strategy stalls.
Burn rate puts that balance into motion. In practical terms, burn rate is the average amount of money your organization spends over a given period, usually per month. Early on, it’s often calculated on a gross basis, meaning you’re looking purely at expenses with little or no revenue offsetting them.
Those expenses are familiar to any founder, payroll, rent, insurance, software, office supplies. Individually, they may feel manageable. Taken together, they define how fast your cash pile shrinks.
Runway Determines What’s Possible, and When
Runway connects the dots. It’s your cash balance divided by your burn rate, and it answers the question every founder eventually has to face, how long can we keep going before something changes?
That “something” might be raising new capital. It might be landing a grant. Or it might be making uncomfortable cuts. What runway gives you is time, and time is often the most valuable asset a healthcare company has.
Healthcare complicates this equation in ways other sectors don’t. Regulatory timelines are unpredictable. Clinical milestones slip. Grant funding can arrive on a schedule that doesn’t match your operational needs. At the same time, both costs and potential revenues tend to be larger than in many other industries.
All of that makes day-to-day financial visibility essential, not optional.
These numbers aren’t abstract finance concepts. They’re operational tools. Tracking them closely helps founders understand what they can afford to pursue, when they need to slow down, and when they need to accelerate conversations with investors or partners.
That’s also why having basic systems in place early matters. Simple tools like QuickBooks can go a long way toward organizing financial data in a standard, scalable way. They don’t just help you manage today’s expenses. They prepare you for the moment when your organization is suddenly much bigger than it was designed to be.
Concept to Cure Video Series
We are proud to introduce Concept to Cure, our 12-part video series built for healthcare founders and operators turning breakthrough ideas into real-world impact.
Across these expert-led lessons, biotech CEOs, venture investors, and policy leaders share the frameworks and hard-won lessons that move innovations from early concept to clinic and beyond.
From validating your market and building investor-ready business models to navigating FDA approvals, scaling commercialization, and leading high-performing teams, each episode distills the practical insights entrepreneurs need most.
Concept to Cure lessons are available exclusively to Cure members.
