Z4 Global Innovations

Where the map gets thin.

Strategic advisory, global partnerships, and operational leadership for life sciences and health technology companies working in places the obvious playbook doesn't reach.

Most health technology fails at the handoff. The product works in the lab, the pitch works in the room, and then it meets a hospital, a regulator, or a procurement office that was never in either.

Z4 works at that gap — as an operator who has been on both sides of it. Building products, running companies, and assembling the teams and partnerships required to make technology function in environments where the model and the reality don't line up.

Twenty-five years in biomedical engineering and health technology, spent mostly on the side of the table where something either works or it doesn't.

Years

Biomedical engineering and health technology — from academic lab to regulated device to venture-backed company

Founder–CEO

Built and led a venture-backed genomics company from concept through commercialization — setting strategy, building teams and partnerships, raising capital, and changing course through COVID-era disruption while continuing to deliver

End‑to‑end

Coverage

Products · R&D organizations · partnerships · capital — from idea to market

The work

Z4 engages where the standard advisory handoff stops short — across the full arc from identifying the real problem to running the operation when that is what the situation requires. Some engagements are advisory. Some are fractional or interim operating roles. Some are long-term partnerships. The form follows the work, not the other way around.

Strategic advisory

Product-market fit, development planning, and primary discovery with clinicians and institutions in markets your team has not visited. Africa and the Middle East are the center of gravity.

International partnerships

Clinical sites, academic collaborators, and regional entry structures for companies that need a foothold before they need a strategy. The relationships take longer than the contract. We plan for that.

Operational leadership

Fractional or interim CEO, R&D organization build, commercialization. For founders who need someone who has run the company, not just advised it.

Where

The constraint is rarely where you think it is.

Where you need to go to get the data at the scale you need.
Where you need to build the company to meet the specs of the capital source or the collaboration.
Where the future product is most constrained.

Field notes

One place. One constraint. One thing that travels. Written by Zac when there is something worth saying, not on a schedule.

Pakistan October 2026

Retrieval is not capture

The national health records proposal centers on a shared identity number — one identifier that lets any institution retrieve a patient's history across the system. The interoperability argument is sound. But it assumes the record exists to retrieve. In emergency-care settings, clinical data capture depends heavily on nurses and technicians working under high patient volume, where documentation competes directly with care. The identifier solves matching. It does not solve the moment when a clinician chooses between writing something down and treating the person in front of them. Retrieval can be engineered centrally. Capture happens one patient, one workflow, one busy person at a time.

Read on LinkedIn →

About

Z4 Global Innovations is the advisory and operating platform of Zac Forbes, PhD — a bioengineer turned operator with 25 years in biomedical engineering and health technology, including BD Medical, Philips Healthcare, Celldom, and Force Middle East Bioventures.

Zac began in academia, building a drug delivery laboratory at Drexel College of Medicine from scratch, filing IP, and licensing technology before being recruited to industry. At BD Medical he was a core team leader on infusion therapy and healthcare worker safety products — including peripheral IV safety catheters developed through direct clinical research in hospitals across multiple markets. At Philips Healthcare Research he co-built the Shanghai, China organization, oversaw ISO 13485 certification, and formed and led teams developing AI imaging platforms for breast cancer screening, image-guided intervention, and emergency diagnostics.

He was founding President, CEO, and board chair of Celldom, a single-cell multi-omics company, from 2016 to 2020 — building the product concept, establishing IP strategy, winning NIH SBIR funding, entering the Illumina Accelerator, managing distributed teams across North Carolina and San Francisco, and raising capital through COVID. He served as Chief Strategy Officer through the leadership transition in 2021.

The common thread across those roles was accountability for what happened after the strategy was approved — building teams, managing investors and boards, setting product direction, and carrying the consequences when a technically sound plan met an operating reality that did not cooperate. Z4 comes from that side of the table.

He subsequently operated as a founding partner at Force Middle East Bioventures in Dubai, supporting companies across MENA, Europe, and North America through financings and early-stage scaling.

PhD & MS, Biomedical Engineering — Drexel University
BSE, Biomedical Engineering — Duke University
BD Medical · Philips Healthcare · Celldom · Force Middle East Bioventures

Contact

zac@z4global.com

If you are working on something in the thin part of the map, write. A short note is fine.