By Bryanna Allison, Business Development Manager, LSN

BioHealth Innovation (BHI), central Maryland’s dynamic tech hub, will showcase its regional life science environment with 5 panels from the BioHealth Capital Region (BHCR). The LSN/BHI alliance works well because the Digital RESI format can increase both the reach of regional tech hubs and their visibility with the RESI global player attendees. Indeed, worldwide players seek technology partnerships with North American regional tech hubs. The 5 panels featured will allow the world to become more acquainted with this dynamic tech hub. Check out the descriptions of these panels below, and the organizations the speakers represent.

Great Investment Opportunities in the BioHealth Capital Region

While we adjust to a Covid-19 world, there continue to be great investment opportunities in the BioHealth Capital Region. Join BHCR CEOs as they make short introductions about themselves and companies. Join CEOs from American Gene Technologies International Inc., miRecule, Adaptive Phage, Healion Bio, KaloCyte, Emocha, Tailored Therapeutics, Inc., Deka Bioscience, and Ashvattha Therapeutics, Inc.

Raising Early Stage Capital in Difficult Times

Companies are still working to raise capital while we remain socially distant. Join us as we discuss how to best adjust and continue attracting investors to your business. Moderator, Rich Bendis, Founder, President and CEO of BioHealth Innovation, is joined by investment experts from Alexandria Venture Investments, The BioHealth Capital Fund, Boston Millennia Partners, and JP Morgan.

Collaborating for Growth in the BioHealth Capital Region

Being able to collaborate with your business partners is as important today as it ever has been. This panel demonstrates the strong collaboration taking place in the BioHealth Capital Region. Led by Jarrod Borkat, Senior Director, External Partnerships & Collaborations, Emergent BioSolutions, Inc., the panel includes experts from Children’s National Hospital, George Mason University, AstraZeneca, and Immunomic Therapeutics.

International BioHealth Companies Entering the U.S. Market

Also known as “Soft Landing”, the ability for international BioHealth Companies to successfully enter the U.S. market and grow is a constant challenge. Having a partner in the U.S. to help with this process is critical to your business. Moderator, Rich Bendis, Founder, President and CEO of BioHealth Innovation, discusses the topic with representatives from BHI, Gentian Diagnostics (Norway), Mimetas (Netherlands), and OnDosis (Sweden).

Advancing your Technology Through Non-Dilutive Grants

Keeping ownership of your company and technology, while raising growth capital, is an important topic for many entrepreneurs. Join our panel led by BioHealth Innovation Inc.’s Managing Director – Economic Development, Judy Costello, as she covers the ins and outs with participants who have successfully navigated these waters. Industry experts from Aperiomics, miRecule, Mimetas, SpineAlign, and TEDCO join the discussion to share their experiences.

Learn more about the Digital RESI – Three Day Conference Registration on June 8-10, 2020 ONLINE.

By Gregory Mannix, Chief Conference Officer, Vice President International Business Development, LSN

Partnering for Digital RESI June is up and running, and you have your company and personal profiles refined, updated and uploaded to the platform. You are diligently identifying the investors who are the best fit for your technology and stage of development and have begun to request a lot of meetings with the 400 investors and strategic partners who will be participating. You will soon start to get the first confirmations of meetings and you will be following up and sending out new requests over the next 3 weeks to get as many meetings booked as possible for June 8^th-10^th.

Now you need to start preparing for those important meetings.  Begin to prepare your meetings early to be as ready as possible when RESI begins. Your goal is to make enough of an impression in that 30-minute meeting on each of your potential investors that you get a commitment to have a next meeting. Here are some tips on how to make the most out of those crucial 30 minutes:

1. Research the Investor Firm

Try to understand the investment firm with whom you are meeting. Typically, there is a lot of information on the firm’s website about their mission and philosophy, as well as their portfolio of companies in which they have invested. This information is key to understanding how your company might fit in. Take notes of the reasons you see a potential to work together that you can bring up during the meeting.

2. Research the person you are meeting with

You will know in advance who you are meeting with from each of the investor firms. Be sure to learn all you can about the person you will be meeting with. One important thing to discover is the background and experience of your meeting counterpart. If you see that they happen to have a deep background in your particular area of technology, you might focus your pitch differently than if they have a background in finance and business.

3. Prepare your elevator pitch

For a 30-minute meeting, it is crucial to get the investor’s attention and interest in a concise, clear pitch that highlights all of the key elements of your company, without going into deep and lengthy technical descriptions that will eat up your time. Focus on what is important and differentiates your technology or team. Let the conversation flow naturally. Engaging the investor in a discussion rather than running through your slides will often help retain investor interest.

4. Have back-up slides on hand

That doesn’t mean you are not prepared to go into more detail if you are asked a specific question. Have your slides prepared that you can easily access in case you need to explain your asset’s mechanism of action in more detail or your data achieved to date that you may have summarized in your initial pitch. You can never have too many backup slides to address questions that might come up during your meeting.

5. Bring a second attendee to meetings

You will be very focused on making your pitch and answering any questions that come up, so you likely will not be taking notes during the meeting. If you are having back-to-back meetings, it will be extremely challenging to remember all of the comments and questions from investors during each of your meetings, but that information is really important for your follow up. Having a colleague on hand to take good notes at the meetings is a really good way to be sure you don’t miss anything.

6. Prepare a binder with your notes for each meeting

You will hopefully be needing your laptop for multiple meetings during RESI, some of them back-to-back, so I highly recommend having a paper back-up of your pre-meeting notes on each of your meetings that you can quickly reference between meetings. A binder with your pre-prepared notes and space to take notes during the meeting will be very useful.

7. Have questions prepared in advance

Most of your meeting with a new potential investor will be about presenting your company and yourself, and answering questions from your investor counterpart, but you shouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to ask questions that you may have from your pre-meeting research. Questions can be about what role the investor will play in your company if they decide to make an investment—such as, do they take a seat on the Board—or if they typically want to be the lead investor or part of a syndicate. Another thing that is always good to know is how any investor can add value to your company if they invest in you; what experience, expertise or connections do they have in your field that can help you in the future?

Best of luck to you all at Digital RESI June. It is such an exciting opportunity for you to make meaningful connections that will drive your success.

By Bryanna Allison, Business Development Manager, LSN

The action item today is keeping up your business momentum in these challenging days. LSN has seen a distinct uptick in global regional-based tech hubs taking advantage of Digital RESI to expand into the new digital paradigm of global partnering conferences. The main strategy is to get the early stage companies back in the mix and secondly, to showcase the technology assets that are teeming in these dynamic regional hubs. The BioHealth Capital Region is a perfect example of deciding to take advantage of RESI and to expand their global reach.

The BioHealth Capital Region is uniquely positioned to help address Covid-19 with its biocluster serving as home to NIH and its 27 research institutes and 6,000 scientists, the FDA with its accelerated approval process, NIAID, BARDA and Dr. Anthony Fauci, all on the front line every day. In addition, many of the region’s industry leaders are developing innovative therapeutics, vaccines and diagnostic tools to fight the virus, including Emergent BioSolutions, Novavax, GSK, AstraZeneca, Qiagen and more than 30 more BioHealth companies of all sizes.

BioHealth Innovation, a Gold sponsor for this RESI Conference, has been busy assisting companies and entrepreneurs with their applications for the numerous Covid-19 grant opportunities, and working with international companies desiring to enter the U.S. market through the BioHealth Capital Region. We also are in the process of raising a $50 million BioHealth Capital Venture Fund to address the early stage funding gap in our ecosystem.

BioHealth Innovation, in cooperation with RESI, will be sponsoring 5 informative panels during Digital RESI June, with additional details will follow. We welcome all to join these sessions to hear from knowledgeable BioHealth experts, investors and entrepreneurs regarding best practices and information they can use to grow their businesses.

By Erich White, Business Development Manager, West Coast, LSN

Women in Bio is a sponsor of our upcoming Digital RESI June event, and I spoke with Lisa Iadicicco, Executive Director, Women In Bio and Sibylle Hauser, MAPS Vice Chair, Founders Forum of Women In Bio to learn more about their organization, their mission and why they chose to partner with LSN and RESI.

Erich White: How did the Women Founders Forum and Entrepreneur Center start?

Sibylle Hauser: The Women Founders Forum started out in San Diego, but now we have women entrepreneurs all over the United States attached to it. We will start more of these peer groups in other chapters now, as well. Lisa, together with the executive team, had the idea to grow the center, and I came from the bottom up with growing the Founders Forum into a national Entrepreneur Center. The primary goal for the Entrepreneur Center will evolve, but right now the Center offers resources, education, corporate leadership programs, and entrepreneur programs. The goal is to have three pillars. First, give women all the resources they need. Second, provide them with a roster of advisors. Third, provide them with pathways to access capital and financing. We want to prepare our women founders to really have a compelling pitch and give them an opportunity to showcase their technologies and present to as many investors as possible.

Erich White: Are you planning to use the Partnering Platform at Digital RESI to find partners for the Entrepreneur Center?

Sibylle Hauser: We are cautious not to take time away from the women entrepreneurs. Some of the investors have very limited time. Last month, during the Digital RESI 2-Day Partnering Event, I requested to meet with investors but decided to put the discussion aside to after the event. In fact, one of the outcomes form last month’s digital event was that we connected with three VCs wanting to hear more about WIB’s Entrepreneur Center, for which we have scheduled a follow-up conversation this week.

Lisa Iadicicco: We have a pretty targeted group of attendees at RESI that we want to meet with and we want to meet with anyone committed to enhancing the awareness of Women In Bio.

Erich White: Why did you decide to partner with LSN and RESI to sponsor your pitch session?

Sibylle Hauser: WIB has done a pitch session at events before and on a chapter level, as Lisa already mentioned. The Boston Chapter and Washington, D.C. chapters have pitching events there, but we wanted to do something on a national level. We also wanted this to be in an environment where there are many investors and big exposure. RESI is a great conference and platform to do that. I am really excited about doing the session with RESI. Through our outreach for this partnership, we even unearthed women entrepreneurs we never met before, so we were able increase our Women Founders Forum.

Lisa Iadicicco: Sibylle actually introduced us to RESI. We have done this as a chapter only effort in the past. Chicago is another chapter that consistently has a pitch or startup competition. But we want to create an event that we can speak to a national audience and RESI and LSN offered a platform for us to do just that.

Erich White: What part of RESI did you like the most so far?

Sibylle Hauser: We had the chance to witness the Featured Company Pitch Session during RESI San Francisco this past January. I really liked the value of the feedback. A lot of these women entrepreneurs don’t get feedback on their approach or pitch from an investor’s point of view. So, the pitch session is helping them hone in more and target their pitch to investors.

Lisa Iadicicco: That was the thing, to hear that feedback. I’ve been on panels and several pitch competitions here in the Pittsburgh area and the feedback is really critical. You don’t usually get this like you do at RESI. We want everyone to walk away from this experience having learned something, even if they are not one of the five finalists to pitch.

Sibylle Hauser: One other point about RESI that made a difference for the companies that participated in the April 2-Day Partnering event. Five of twenty-eight WIB member companies had never pitched to an institutional investor before. They are very good at getting grants from the NIH. But this was their first time getting in front of an institutional investor. It was a totally new audience for them. Obviously, it was a learning curve for them, but it was a really good opportunity for them to start relationships with some of these investors. Some of these companies may be early but, nevertheless, it is never too early to start relationships with a potential top target investor.

Erich White: Anything else you would like to say about RESI?

Sibylle Hauser: What I really liked was that LSN helped me push these women entrepreneurs to the limit. They were, in parallel, in NIH grant submissions last month. But LSN gave them a unique opportunity and a really great methodology for booking meetings with investors. LSN gave each company a list of targeted investors that were a fit for the companies and their assets as well as an introductory message template for requesting a meetings, suggestions for follow-up messages, a tear sheet template, and recommendations for their messaging and branding. And, if the company adhered to it, they would really have great success. The highest challenge was actually the pre-recorded pitch for the Featured Company Forum. But, in my view, this is the future. I work with some San Francisco investors and we now only do evaluations with pre-recorded video pitches.

Women In Bio

Women In Bio is an organization of professionals committed to promoting careers, leadership, and entrepreneurship of women in the life sciences.

We aim to help women achieve the highest levels of leadership, influence and decision-making that they desire. Our primary focus is to provide women-to-women mentorship and leadership support through all stages of career development

• from bench to boardroom
• from academia to industry
• from first job to last
• from idea to entrepreneur

Our members reflect the increasing spread of the life sciences. We belong to biotech and pharma companies, universities and institutes, law and accounting firms, marketing and PR firms, CROs and CMOs. Many of our members are entrepreneurs, and a focus on entrepreneurship has remained core to the mission of WIB since its foundation in 2002.

By Gregory Mannix, Chief Conference Officer, Vice President International Business Development, LSN

Partnering for Digital RESI June is about to open, and after 29 successful RESI partnering events, we can see what strategies lead companies to successfully book many productive meetings using the RESI Partnering Platform. Follow these tips and you will see the results:

 

1. Start Early: Be sure to register before partnering opens to get on the platform from the beginning.
2. Company Profile: create a compelling profile for both your company and yourself
3. Choose Your Meetings: us the Partnering Platform to filter for the investors and strategics who are a fit for your technology and stage of development.
4. Meeting Request Message: put a lot of thought into developing a concise but compelling message to request meetings.
5. Request Many Meetings: request meetings with all of the investors/strategics who you think might be a fit for you. The 72-hour non-stop partnering format at Digital RESI June allows all attendees to book more meetings than ever before at a RESI conference!
6. Follow Up: don’t forget to send follow-up messages to the people you are hoping to meet with until you hear back. Craft several messages with additional information about your company you can use to follow up.

Check out these partnering success stories:

• Terran Biosciences Creates A New Record With 45 Investment Partnering Meetings at Digital RESI – Congratulations
• Reglagene Nails RESI Partnering with 25 Investor Meetings

If you haven’t registered yet, you can REGISTER HERE

Confirmed investors for Digital RESI June:

 

By Dennis Ford, Founder & CEO, Life Science Nation; Creator of RESI Conference Series

Global early stage investment will be manifesting in unique partnerships and alliances as new business models proliferate.  Though nascent, a new paradigm is evolving around sourcing, vetting, developing, operating, testing, prepping for licensing and exiting of technology assets.  There are 100s of Biotech and Pharma incubators sprouting up, not to mention the proliferation of university, regional, state and national incubator programs worldwide, because technologies are reaching a breakthrough threshold to change the state of patient care and how we treat and cure disease. Big Pharma plus hundreds in the U.S. alone are all in the hunt to find solutions that will impact the healthcare market.

The incubator strategies are all over the map, depending on corporate mandates. I have stated, in the past, that finding seed money (under 2mm) for 1000s of companies is a lot different than finding series A and B capital (10-50mm). The simple math dictates that a funding bottleneck is on the horizon. This is not a scientific survey, but an estimate based on our knowledge of the market. Using the LSN Company Platform, the NIH SBIR/STTR database and the list of RESI attendees over the last 8 years, our ballpark estimate is that there are around 10-15K early stage companies in the life science arena, with the following distribution.

LSN called and Googled around, and estimated that there was around $60B in investor capital in 2019 for early stage healthcare companies. Assuming there will be 10,000 fundraising startups, with 75% raising a Series A at a ballpark $10M+ and 25% raising a Series B at a ballpark $30M+, our back of the envelope, very conservative, calculation is that at least $150B in capital is needed, with only $60B available.

The point here is that there will be a very large bottleneck in cash due to a lot of need and not a lot of available dollars.

The game changer here is that ALL these incubators have to prepare their early stage companies for the up and coming bottleneck.  The incubators have to better manage their assets, and train their early stage firms on how to raise money and secure strategic partnerships, while their portfolio companies need to actively achieve milestones and get compelling data. All RESIs have a 1:1 ratio of companies to investors, giving companies a great platform to make themselves noticed. Even still, many investors say they invest in only about .5% of the companies they see each year. These incubators with 1000s of early stage companies need to worry about how to get their companies to rise above the noise in the marketplace, as too many early stage companies compete for too few dollars!