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

The Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) conference series consists of investors (the buyers) and the life science startups  (the sellers), and the service providers who have the services that the startup companies need to move their products towards commercialization. Service provider sales and business development staff have a tremendous opportunity to use RESI to keep their business pipelines full, as a good portion of the capital raised after an investment transaction often goes to 3^rd party service providers.  LSN and RESI act as a hub for the early-stage life science ecosystem, bringing all of the players together to interact and form relationships. Indeed, It is a twofold proposition for the service providers who attend RESI: first, they have an opportunity to meet the startup firms that would benefit from their services. Second, they have the chance to meet the investors that attend RESI,  who are not only funding these new prospective clients but also have a portfolio of funded firms that may be in need of 3^rd party services.  A lot of the big global CROs that regularly attend RESI love the fact that creating relationships with the funding source can help drive ongoing strategic relationships.

The BD staff of the service providers can also take advantage of the RESI format – having a partnering conference every few months across North America allows them to regularly schedule a full day of meetings with prospective new clients and potentially closing a lot of new deals.  RESI has been the ONLY conference to regularly coalesce (5 times a year) the global early-stage investor community (10 categories of investors) and their billions of investment dollars.  No other conference entity is dedicated exclusively to the early-stage life sciences ecosystem. It is our relationship with this community that makes RESI unique. The hook for RESI is that the early-stage capital is meeting with the early-stage companies across the silos of drugs, devices, diagnostics and digital health thus creating extremely compelling business targets for service providers.

The smart early-stage service providers know that attending RESI and putting these fundraising CEOs and scientist/entrepreneurs on their radar screen can funnel business into their pipeline.  Moreover, being able to meet and cultivate relationships with “the money” and obtain insights into the portfolio companies of the investors  and the services they may need offers another avenue for obtaining new clients. After 19 conferences over three years we have seen that the service providers are a solid part of the RESI ecosystem. The combination of regional, smaller service providers and big global players makes RESI incredibly dynamic.  RESI generates business and forges important industry connections for service providers, making them an important part of their sales and BD strategy since day 1.

By Lucy Parkinson, VP of Investor Research, LSN

In recent years, big pharma companies have begun looking outwards for innovative new therapeutics to add to their pipelines. This RESI Boston panel will feature five speakers and a moderator from various big pharma companies discussing topics such as:

•     How big pharma sources assets
•     The evaluation and investment process
•     Key factors of interest
•     How early-stage big pharma is willing to look

At RESI Boston on September 6th, we welcome five speakers from major pharma firms who will explain how they evaluate early stage companies for potential licensing and partnership relationships.  The panelists are:

• Alex Rabiee, Director, Business Development, Amgen
• Lizabeth Leveille, Head, Boston Innovation Hub, Merck
• Imran Nasrullah, Director, BD&L, Strategic Partnering, Boehringer Ingelheim
• Niels Emmerich, Senior Director, Global Head Search & Evaluation Oncology, AbbVie
• Tim Luker, VP External Innovation, Eli Lilly

These panelists will shed light on the process that big pharma goes through when sourcing early-stage assets and advise startups on how they can best make a case for themselves. Panelists will also explore various trends within the therapeutics marketplace, what assets are of interest to their company, and what they think will be big in the future.

By Lucy Parkinson, VP of Investor Research, LSN

At LSN, we’re gearing up to open the RESI Partnering portal in just a few days.  We’ve been overwhelmed by the investor interest in this year’s RESI Boston Fall event, with investment decision makers heading to RESI from pharma firms, VCs, family offices, corporate VCs, impact investment funds, foundations, PE firms, angel groups and institutional investment firms all over the world.

RESI attendees can book up to 16 face to face meetings with investors on September 6th.  The unique, high-touch partnering information provided by the LSN Investor Platform helps RESI’s attendees determine a potential fit prior to reaching out for a meeting.

If you’d like to get in on the RESI Partnering action, register now.

Click to See More Confirmed Investors & Strategic Partners

By Claire Jeong, Senior Research Analyst, LSN

It’s challenging to pitch a diagnostics opportunity to investors, and many entrepreneurs in the field feel that it’s hard to uncover investors who have a strong focus on the field.  At RESI Boston on September 6^th, two panel sessions will focus on the difficulties and the possibilities for new technologies that will guide patient care in the future.

Tom Miller, Managing Director of GreyBird Ventures, will be the moderator of the RESI panel on Personalized Medicine.  As his firm has a focus on diagnostic technologies, LSN is delighted to have Tom as the leader of this 50-minute discussion at RESI where the future of personalized care will be in the spotlight.  We asked Tom about his goals for the event.

What will RESI attendees learn from you?

As, unlike most healthcare VCs, we are focused on technologies for diagnosis, we can give solid advice on that particular segment.  Diagnostic technologies have many of the same requirements as pharmaceuticals in terms of clinical trials needs and the importance of solid clinical data but very different boundary conditions for capital efficiency and exit expectations.

What makes you excited to attend RESI?

It is a very efficient use of time.  We get to see a large number of companies that exactly fit our investment strategy and focus in the speed-dating format.  And the match-making software allows us to weed out those companies that would not be a fit making sure that both sides do not waste time.  I also get to meet like-minded investors as we are always seeking best practices from which we can learn.

Investing in Personalized Medicine
Thursday, September 6^th, 2018
3:00 – 3:50 PM

This panel will discuss current trends in personalized medicine.  Topics may include:

• How investors assess personalized medicine technologies and applications in diagnostics, drug discovery and treatment plans
• Which indications investors believe are showing the most promise – genetic disorders, orphan diseases, oncology, etc.
• Investing in individualized treatments (such as CAR-T) and the scalability challenges of autologous vs allogeneic/xenogeneic off-the-shelf treatments
• The regulatory challenges some of these technologies face, whether to ensure individual privacy from genomics databanks or to prevent potential harmful side effects from therapeutics such as CRISPR technologies

Personalized medicine has proven to produce more effective treatments in multiple indications by tailoring medical treatment to the individual and their disease. Additionally, early detection of disease has improved outcomes for many patients. Panelists will discuss where the field is heading and what unique challenges companies in this area will face.

Tom Miller

After receiving a degree in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Tom studied Medical Physics at the Harvard/MIT Health Sciences and Technology joint program graduating with a Masters degree in 1982.  During his academic career he worked at Los Alamos, the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research (now the Paul Scherer Institute), Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Massachusetts General Hospital as a research associate in radiation biophysics.

Tom then joined Siemens Medical Systems where, after 9 years, he became the first non-German CEO of a German factory and business unit.  He left Siemens after 15 years to become CEO of the global medical operations of Carl Zeiss.  Completing a successful turnaround, he joined Analogic Corporation as CEO.  After three years and a doubling of the stock price, Tom left to become CEO of LightLab Imaging, a start-up that he helped to establish.  Completing a profitable sale of LightLab, Tom re-joined Siemens eventually serving as a member of the operating board of Siemens Healthcare and the CEO of Customer Solutions Division, responsible for 26,000 employees in over 130 countries.  Tom co-founded GreyBird in mid-2013 with an investment focus on technologies enabling precision medicine diagnosis.

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

Life Science Nation will host the RESI Global Partnering Conference on September 6^th at the Boston Marriott Copley Place. Part of this new aspect of RESI is the First Coast Innovator’s Gathering, which will include incubators, accelerators, tech transfer offices, university translation initiatives, hospitals, research labs and their constituents from DC, MD, VA, PA, NJ, NY, RI, CT and MA. These geographic tech hubs will gather for the first time in one location to get on the radar screens of potential global partners.

This new initiative is the result of our global investor network asking LSN if we could source even earlier stage technology companies than typically attend LSN’s RESI conferences. The scientist-entrepreneurs and fundraising CEOs who come to RESI are typically looking for series A and B, 2-10mm in capital. What our investors are asking for is the addition of the earliest stage startups seeking grants, seed, and angel capital. This is why LSN created the First Coast Innovators Gathering, to be introduced as a new part of the RESI Boston event. This will add a new and exciting dimension to our RESI conference, making it relevant to companies from seed to series B and beyond.

The Stetson Family office, a Title Sponsor of RESI and a supporter of the Innovator’s Gathering, is pioneering new global funding initiatives and platforms to help the early stage players move faster through the development cycle. Stetson will also be hosting a lunch to talk about these programs to the attending First Coast Tech Hub executives and their teams.

The good news is that we have had over 200 investors (with another 200 expected, interested in the earliest stage and beyond) already signed up and now we are recruiting the early-stage players, from seed to series B, to come meet global partners and form some new strategic relationships. RESI also has speaker slots open and tables available for showcasing your firm to the national and international players that will be attending. Contact us now if you would like to participate in RESI.

Click here to download the event brochure and learn more about RESI