By Tom Crosby, RESI Conference Manager, LSN

Institutional Strategic Investors: Point-of-Care Institution Panel

The lack of capital available for early stage life science companies has brought many different groups with strategic interests to the table. This panel aims to shed light on the institutional strategic companies that are now funding early stage commercial research in the space, many of whom have a primary goal of lowering the cost of care. Moderated by Monique Yoakim-Turk, Partner at the Technology Development Fund of Boston Children’s Hospital, the audience will hear from:

• Barbara Gamez Sims, Technology Licensing Manager, Mayo Clinic Ventures
• Manu Nair, Vice President, Technology Licensing Manager, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation
• Chris Coburn, VP, Innovation, Partners HealthCare
• Kanad Das, Program Manager, Stanford SPARK

Groups including hospitals and healthcare providers will discuss their differentiating investment models and structures, as well as what they can provide beyond just capital. What types of technological innovations are these groups most interested in? How do they go about sourcing new opportunities? At what stage of development do they tend to get involved, what do they look for in early communications, and what is their role with a company’s development following investment?

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I-Banks, 3PMs & Consultants: Fundraising Partners Panel

As early stage fundraising has been challenged of late, many emerging companies elect to use a fundraising partner — such as an investment bank, independent advisor or consultant — to take the lead on capital raising activity. The question is, can an investment bank make a random process more efficient?

Moderated by Colin Widen, CEO of Boston Innovation Capital, the audience will hear from:

• Paul Papi, Director, Investment Banking, Freedom Investors Corporation
• Dan Ross, CEO, IMS Health Capital
• John Cullity, Partner, Torreya Partners
• Adam Cutler, Managing Director, Trout Group

The core of the discussion will focus on weighing the pros and cons of outsourcing your fundraising efforts. Panelists will discuss the unique characteristics among new entrants to the life science investor pool, and more importantly, how to access these entrants. What changes with your approach depending on the type of investor you’re dealing with? What are the different levels of time to participate among these investors? How does the picture change when working with for-profit vs. philanthropic players? The role of data as a fundraising tool will also be highlighted throughout the session.

By Alejandro Zamorano, VP of Business Development, LSN

LSN is proud to announce the RESI Partnering Platform. The goal is to have a dynamic partnering platform to match biotech and medtech companies with the investors that are a fit and provide an opportunity to create a compelling dialogue that fosters a long-term relationship. LSN designed the RESI Partnering Platform from the ground up by leveraging an innovative partnering portal provider called Meeting Mojo. Click the video below to see how the RESI Partnering Platform can help your partnering efforts.

Considering the sheer quantity and diversity of investors attending RESI, paired with the power of the RESI Partnering Platform, the RESI conference is the right place for early stage life science companies to meet investors that are a fit. We hope to see you there.

By Michael Quigley, Director of Research, LSN

Just over a year ago I published an article discussing how the growth rate of seed and startup stage life science financing rounds was substantially smaller than all other financing rounds. More recent data pulled from the LSN’s Company Platform further validates that claim. Exhibit 1 compares the number of seed and startup stage financing rounds to the total number of financings in the US life science space over the past 9 years.

 

Exhibit 1 demonstrates that, as said by Alexis Borisy (a partner with life science VC firm Third Rock Ventures), “In the overall numbers, early stage life science investment isn’t growing compared to later stage investments.” The disparity in growth between these two variables presents a serious threat to large pharma companies, and provides savvy investors with an opportunity for strong returns. If this trend continues over time, the demand for later stage and more developed technologies will grow to be significantly greater than the supply. Large pharma companies are constantly looking to in-license and acquire technologies for their pipelines in order to protect future revenue streams as patents expire and better treatments become available, threatening their market share. However if there are not enough of these early stage companies getting funded today, then down the road pipelines will go dry.

By investing in early stage research today, investors could position themselves to have great exit potential to large pharma companies who, if this gap goes unfilled, will be suffering from painfully dry pipelines. Interestingly enough, large pharma companies seem to be well aware of this threat and have become a major funding source for early stage companies through the establishment of corporate venture capital arms. Many of these companies are also now investing in entirely separate venture capital and private equity funds with hopes that they will yield financial returns as well as funding the development of strategically relevant technologies. Other types of investors are also gaining interest in early stage life science companies as well, though their motivations vary across the spectrum from philanthropic to financial.

As a life science entrepreneur, it is important to understand what the long-term strategic opportunities for your assets will look like. While the recent IPO window has shown significant exit potential via public market interest in the life science space, there is significant uncertainty surrounding how long it will remain a viable option. However, the seemingly insufficient investment in early stage rounds for life science companies today could make the future exit possibilities for your asset very attractive to potential investors.

By Tom Crosby, RESI Conference Manager, LSN

A New Model for Foundations: Non-Profit to For-Profit Panel

In the past, non-profit organizations dedicated to research in specific disease areas were typically unable to take advantage of the upside of any significant discoveries that were funded through their organization. Recently, a new trend has emerged: non-profit organizations investing in early stage biotech/medtech companies in return for equity. This new way of investing provides the foundation the ability to reinvest their profits, providing additional capital to fund future research.

 Moderated by David Sandak, Vice President, Research at Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure, the audience will hear from:

• Howard Fillit, Executive Director and Chief Science Officer, Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Fund
• Benjamin Seckler, Founder and President, Charley’s Fund
• Salvatore La Rosa, President & CSO, Children’s Tumor Foundation
• Keting Chu, VP, Research TAP, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS)

Panelists will speak to their experience with the new model. What’s different about vetting a company with returns in mind? How has for-profit investing changed their non-profit model? What are the best practices for a fundraising executive approaching a foundation with an investment opportunity? Panelists will discuss these topics and more as they shed light on the inner workings of receiving capital placements from foundations.

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Investing in Emerging Life Sciences: CRO Direct Investment Panel

This panel features CROs that are leveraging their internal expertise to make investments into emerging biotech and medical device companies, either in the form of cash or service-for-equity agreements.

Moderated by Peter Lee-Armandt of Sathguru Management Consultants, the audience will hear from:

• Michael Recny, CEO, Calvert Holdings, Inc.
• David Gee, Vice President, Business Development, Cato BioVentures
• Krishna Kodukula, Executive Director, Strategic Development, Biosciences Divison, SRI International
• Joe Vacca, Senior Vice President, Early Success Sharing Partnerships, WuXi AppTec

This new form of investor is becoming more common place in the life science as CROs continue to mature and play a growing role in the industry. In this session, hear from firms that are on the leading edge of innovation talk about how they structure service for equity agreements. What kind of risk they are willing to take? What phase of development do they like to participate in? How do they vet potential companies, and how do they work with existing investors? What do they see as the future of their hybrid investment arm?

By Michael Quigley, Director of Research, LSN

On Monday, August 18, LSN’s partnering system for our Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) Conference will go live. The purpose of the system is to help scientist-entrepreneurs and funding executives connect at the conference with potential investors.

Using the LSN’s partnering system is fairly straightforward. Registered scientists and executives enter information about their company’s research—including technology type, indication, and phase of development—and the system identifies registered investors who may be a fit. Then scientists and executives use the system to book meetings—as many as 16 per attendee—with those investors.

What are the interests of these investors? This conference is designed to attract investors looking to allocate to early stage companies. Exhibit 1 shows that that largest number of attending biotech investors are interested in technologies in the preclinical and phase I stages. Exhibit 2 shows that the largest number of attending medtech investors are interested in technologies that are in development and the clinical stage. Keep in mind these are just the confirmed investors are attending thus far, so expect these number to increase come September 17^th.

We are able to attract a large pool of early stage investors because we target ten categories of investors. Many of these investors are relatively new to the space; a lack of capital and a glut of compelling science have attracted newcomers in recent years.

By drilling down into the data set, we are able to determine the indications of interest for registered investors. Exhibit 3 shows the number of investors interested in a given indication.

Neoplasms/Cancer/Oncology leads the pack, garnering the most interest from investors. In what may be surprising to many, diseases of the nervous system comes in at number two. This level of interest in technologies for the central nervous system is in part the result of the many specialized foundations and venture philanthropy organizations that will attend. The interest in numerous indications is another reason why this conference is of tremendous value to fundraising entrepreneurs.

Connecting with investors is only half of the value that the RESI conference offers, though. Scientists and executives also have the opportunity to attend our panels and hear representatives from all ten investor categories have in-depth discussions on a variety of topics. We hope to see you there.

By Alejandro Zamorano, VP of Business Development, LSN

LSN Globally tracks technology platforms and has been able to yield some interesting data by classifying the different platform types and assessing the number of technologies within each classification. As you can see in Exhibit 1 LSN breaks down technology platforms into 26 categories as described below:

One of the most interesting findings was that number of large molecule discovery platforms is fairly abundant in the market place. This makes sense considering the explosion of biotech companies that have emerged over the last several years each claiming their unique mechanism to creating newest and hottest molecules. In addition, the bioinformatics also seem to be a strong platform which also is in line with the advances in computational power and the increasing sophistication of software data feeds that one is able to leverage. It would appear that these technology platforms in the space that have grown to be more abundant than others as a result of a higher level of investment in their respective class at an early stage.

The bottom of the chart is perhaps the most interesting where can see technology platforms that are relatively rare in the marketplace. Controlled release platforms for example appear to be relatively novel with only 14 companies reporting an in house platform. In addition in silicon modeling (of disease physiology or mechanism of action) is also a fairly unexplored field with vast opportunity. These areas could prove highly profitable for savvy investors able to identify leading technologies in a relatively unsaturated marketplace.

Knowing where you stand relative to the marketplace is a significant data point to understand both as entrepreneur positioning yourself or as an investor making a decision.

 

 

By Tom Crosby, RESI Conference Manager, LSN

In today’s fundraising environment, investors are inundated, sometimes seeing hundreds of executive summaries a month. Life science entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are all but obligated to run a calculated outbound sales and marketing campaign. But how do you set yourself apart from the crowd? This panel features successful life science entrepreneurs at various stages of their fundraising campaigns, telling their tales from the road.

Moderated by Rick Berenson, CEO of Thermalin Diabetes, the audience will hear from:

Fred Colen, President & CEO, BeneChill

Richard Gauthier, Head of Business Development, Microbiotix

Gabor Bethlendy, CCO & Founder, Parabase Genomics

Michael Tippie, CEO, TomegaVax

Panelists will share insights and best practices based on their experiences with raising capital in the new investor landscape. The goal of the discussion is to help emerging companies understand what it takes to fund a biotech or medical device company today. What are their best tips for interfacing with different types of investors? How did they structure their campaigns? What types of resources did they use along the way, and how have they found the correct investor in the past? Listen in as these executives share their best anecdotes from tackling the challenges of fundraising first-hand.