I began sharing my story here in 2015, writing from a patient’s perspective.
I had just left another specialist’s office, holding lab results that didn’t really point to anything clear. For years, I was sent from internal medicine to orthopedics, rheumatology, and endocrinology. Every specialist was considerate and ruled out what they could in their area, but no one looked at the bigger picture.
Doctors told me I was stressed, getting older, or maybe starting perimenopause. But my lab results suggested something different. No one wanted to give it a name.
I trained as a dentist and a healthcare analyst on Wall Street. Still, none of that made a difference. Most women with autoimmune diseases wait over four years and see five doctors before getting a diagnosis. I was one of them.
So, I started writing. And I started speaking at any conference that would have me.
During those years, one question stayed with me: What is an autoimmune disease? When I asked audiences—including scientists, financiers, and doctors—many answered AIDS. They rarely mentioned lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, MS, Hashimoto’s disease, or Sjögren’s syndrome. This happened again and again.
24-50 million Americans have autoimmune diseases, and 80% are women. Yet the people studying, funding, and treating these conditions often didn’t know what they were.
By the time I was sitting in Rheumission payer meetings in 2024 and 2025, every payer there could instantly recognize autoimmune disease. They needed to, since it was one of their biggest drug expenses after cancer.
From a category nobody could name to one nobody could ignore. I was there for both moments and saw the change myself.
At the first Stanford MedicineX conference that year, I co-led an autoimmune workshop with 25 patients and providers and ran a survey with over 400 participants. The results were no surprise to those living with the disease, but they caught almost everyone else off guard (you can find the 2015 findings republished here). Now, after eleven years and hundreds of patient conversations, the main question remains: what does good autoimmune care really look like? And who will support the companies working to create it?
What I learned
The journey is broken. Many patients spend years going from one specialist to another before anyone figures out what is really going on. Internal medicine refers them to rheumatology, rheumatology sends them to endocrinology, and endocrinology sends them back again. Each specialist focuses on just one organ, but no one looks at the patient as a whole person with a complex, interconnected problem.
The system is siloed. Conventional medicine treats each body part on its own. This approach made sense when our knowledge was still limited. But it doesn’t work well for immune system diseases, which affect many organs at once.
Patients become CEOs of their own health by necessity. When no doctor sees the full picture, the patient must do it. I wrote about this in 2017, and eight years later, it’s still true. The patients who do best are the ones who manage their own care and speak up for themselves at every step. It’s tiring, and it shouldn’t be their responsibility.
The care team model works. A coordinated team of clinicians who treat the patient as a whole person, not just a set of symptoms, makes a real difference. I helped build this approach at Rheumission as Chief Patient Officer from 2023 to 2025. In a real-world pilot with 72 patients, disease activity decreased by 70%. There are real challenges to expanding this model, but they can be solved.
Women bear most of this burden and are often not believed. 80% of patients with autoimmune diseases are women. Less than 1% of women’s health funding goes to autoimmune diseases. The recent surge of investment in women’s health is important, but it has only lightly addressed autoimmune and immune-mediated disease.
Why This Became a Fund
For a long time, I believed better advocacy was the answer. Then I thought it was better care models, and I even helped build one. After that, I focused on digital tools, then policy, and then diagnostics.
None of these solutions is enough on its own. Science remains fragmented, diagnostics lag, and care models remain isolated. All of these issues stem from the same root cause: the capital pipeline funding this field has not been designed to treat it as a single category.
In 2026, I founded The Autoimmune Fund, the first venture fund focused on investing at the intersection of immune precision, female biology, and accelerated aging for autoimmune patients. The fund’s thesis is called The Immune Decade. It brings together everything I have learned from eleven years of patient engagement, clinical work, and research about where the real investment opportunities and capital gaps are.
The fund is a continuation of all that’s amounted up to this point. I’ve been asking the same question since 2015: what does good autoimmune care actually look like? Now, there is a second part to that question: who will fund the companies that build it?
What Lives Here Now
This site, drbonnie360, is the patient-advocacy archive. It holds 11 years of writing on patient experience, care models, women’s health, and how conventional, functional, and digital medicine connect. This is a record of how our team’s thinking grew over time, post by post.
You can find our forward-looking work at autoimmune.fund. There, we will share the Immune Decade thesis, the supporting science, the investable patterns, and why we believe the next decade is when science and capital will finally align.
The Five Posts That Matter Most
If you want to see how things have developed from 2015 to now, these are the five posts I recommend starting with:
How to be the CEO of Your Own Health: A Patient Guide
A Patient Journey Solution, Part 3
Unlocking Autoimmune Potential in Women’s Health
Why the Care Team Model is So Important to Autoimmune Patients
Authors: DrBonnie360, Sen Meng
We approach these thought leadership posts from our multi-lens perspectives.
- DrBonnie360: Founder and Managing Partner, The Autoimmune Fund
- Sen Meng: Chief of Staff, The Autoimmune Fund
