Introducing the Signals Member Network

Three years, and the next chapter

Dear Kidneyverse,

Three years ago, I started writing this newsletter because I couldn’t find one that covered kidney health the way I thought it deserved to be covered. To be honest, it was mostly a scratch pad to share my thoughts as a first-time founder, trying to navigate the kidney space in all its complex glory. By some stroke of timing and luck, people started reading and sharing it. So I decided to go a bit deeper into the gray areas and began asking people questions: how a policy shift at CMS changes what’s viable for a product or care model, how new therapies reach patients, and why the economics driving kidney care seem vastly disconnected from other areas.

That newsletter became something bigger than I expected. You turned it into a place to learn what’s happening in kidney health, and over time, we built more capabilities around that space: media, research, advisory work, and a jobs board to name a few. Each one exists because people needed it, or because working alongside companies and clinicians made the gap obvious. That’s how we grew from a newsletter that covered a different corner of kidney health each week into a firm called Signals Group.

Today, we're turning everything we've learned, and everyone we've met along the way, into a network built to help people and ideas succeed.

The Signals Member Network

We just launched with 130 founding members across 90 organizations. Nephrologists and frontline clinicians make up about a quarter. Industry, pharma, biotechs, manufacturers, and care delivery organizations make up another quarter. We also have dozens of founders, investors, researchers, regulators, associations, and patient advocates, all in the same room.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned running Signals for three years: the hardest problems in kidney health do not get solved by any one of these groups alone. They get solved in the spaces between them, the conversation that doesn’t happen at a conference because the right two people never end up at the same table, the question a founder has that only a clinician on the frontlines can actually answer, the policy nuance an operator needs that a regulator understands but rarely gets to talk about.

That’s what we are building, and we’re building it for you. A place where a nephrologist can find the startup solving their patients’ biggest needs. Where a founder can find the patient voice their work requires. Where patient groups can meet the organizations who want to develop new treatments and tools to support their community, and find the clinician partners to help them do that.

We ask every founding member why they joined. Networking and peer connection tops the list, followed closely by finding industry partners and customers, connecting with patient advocacy groups, research collaboration, early detection and CKD management, value-based care, and policy and regulatory connections. In other words: everything that doesn’t fit neatly into a single conference agenda or a single publication, but matters just as much when it comes to getting solutions to patients.

As we keep shifting toward a cardio-kidney-metabolic lens on this field, having the right people within reach only becomes more important. Understanding how we get from a good idea to a paid-for, adopted, patient-facing reality takes all of us, working together, not any one group alone.

If you’ve been reading or watching Signals for a while, you already know why this matters. Now there’s a place to act on it if you’re looking to meet other readers, or advance your mission in the kidney or CKM space.

Membership is free for patients, advocates, and regulators. If you’d like access, or want to learn more about joining as an industry member, reach out to us or visit members.signalsfs.com.

Thank you for reading Signals from the start, or from wherever you joined along the way. This is just the next chapter, and I’m glad you’re here for it. And to those of you who are already founding members: thank you for saying yes early, before there was much to see. You made this possible, and we can’t wait to see where it leads.