NEXT PHASE

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

Life Science Nation’s Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) conference series is unique in several ways:

• The Innovation Challenge that takes place at every RESI conference is a huge hit with early stage global investors seeking firms that align with their investment mandates.  LSN developed an expert system that facilitates the quick scoring and ranking of all of the companies and their technology assets that apply to get into the Innovation Challenge. A typical RESI conference gets over 100+ applications and LSN vets and ranks the top 30 applicants.

• RESI is held every few months at major innovation hubs and gives both fundraising CEOs, early-stage investor/partners and service providers a capability to use RESI as part of their ongoing yearly business and partnering activities. Scientist/entrepreneurs can weave themselves into the RESI conference series and dramatically increase face time with prime partnering targets. The ability to carry on a dialogue every few months greatly aids in transmitting the latest information and cultivating the relationships.

• RESI is one of the very few healthcare conferences that is cross-domain, in that it features Biotech, Medtech, Diagnostics and Digital Health. Many investors have multiple investment mandates covering multiple silos in the life science arena.

• RESI is primarily a powerful  partnering conference using a unique profile-based partnering system that will have up to 1400 meetings between buyers and sellers in one day. LSN has integrated a matching algorithm in our partnering software that connects the right investors/partners with the right early stage companies that are a fit for stage of development and product set. I think if you polled some of your colleagues they would say that RESI is a well-known partnering vehicle and attest to the dynamic nature of a RESI event.

The importance of continued dialog in maintaining partner relationships is specifically why LSN chose to incorporate a RESI conference every couple of months throughout the year.  RESI partnering has produced compelling results – over 350 firms have raised close to 500 million by using RESI as part of an ongoing fundraising vehicle.

LSN presently has 5 RESI conferences a year – JP Morgan (during), Toronto (part of Health Innovation Week), Summer BIO (day before), Boston (September) and NYC (November). The long-term goal is to expand RESI to China, Europe and South America and thus have a one-of-a-kind ongoing global event.

By Chris Cummings, Senior Marketing Manager, LSN

The RESI Conference offers a unique platform for scientist-entrepreneurs to meet investors. For selected companies competing in the RESI Innovation Challenge, the platform expands exponentially. Participating in the Challenge opens a new universe of potential meeting opportunities, well beyond the 16 time slots available in Partnering.

The objective of most fundraising companies attending RESI is to maximize the number of investor meetings they obtain; playing the numbers game gives an entrepreneur the best shot at closing an investment deal. LSN designed the Innovation Challenge with this concept in mind. Utilizing a poster presentation format that encourages one-on-one interactions, as opposed to simply sending companies on stage to pitch to a disengaged audience, entrepreneurs can dramatically increase the number of meaningful investor relationships they build.

Entrepreneurs who are outgoing and engaging have demonstrated the ability to meet upwards of 25 to 30 additional investors on top of the 16 pre-booked meetings available in partnering. Many companies elect to bring two representatives in order to take advantage of both ad-hoc and scheduled meetings. This strategy has proven to be quite effective, as the list of successful companies who participate in the Innovation Challenge continues to grow.

Below are some of the previous Innovation Challenge winners. If you are a fundraising entrepreneur, you can apply for the RESI Boston Summer Innovation Challenge here. The application deadline for the Innovation Challenge is May 4^th. Also, don’t forget to register for the conference as well – prices increase on Friday, April 27^th!

RESI on MaRS 2018 Innovation Challenge Winners

RESI San Francisco 2018 Innovation Challenge Winners

RESI New York City 2017 Innovation Challenge Winners

RESI Boston 2017 Innovation Challenge Winners

RESI San Diego 2017 Innovation Challenge Winners

RESI on MaRS 2017 Innovation Challenge Winners

RESI San Francisco 2017 Innovation Challenge Winners

RESI Boston 2016 Innovation Challenge Winners

RESI on MaRS 2016 Innovation Challenge Winners

Yasaman Soudagar

An interview with Yasaman Soudagar, Founder & CEO, Neurescence – By Greg Mannix, VP of International Business Development, LSN

Greg Mannix

Interview with Yasaman Soudagar: This year’s winner of the Innovation Challenge at RESI on MaRS was Neurescence, a Toronto-based company that has combined the power of novel optical imaging technology with advanced machine learning and quantum machine learning techniques for intelligent drug discovery for the diseases of the central nervous system.

CEO Yasaman Soudagar got a late start preparing for RESI, since she didn’t decide to attend until about 10 days before the conference, when she was informed that she would compete as a finalist in the Innovation Challenge. So I wanted to ask her how she managed to have such a successful conference, not to mention winning the Innovation Challenge, on such short notice.

Greg Mannix: Yasaman, you attended RESI alone, How did you get so many players to “invest” their RESI dollars in Neurescence and win the IC? Did you spend the whole day at your poster?

Yasaman Soudagar: Actually no! I moved around and looked for the places where the most people seemed to be hanging out, and I brought a tablet around so I could show them what our technology does, in a video of the actual imaging we do.

GM: Who did you target?

YS: One thing I really like about RESI is that all the investors are easy to spot because they have a red ribbon on their nametags. So it was really easy to approach investors and start a conversation.

GM: Was it difficult to get a conversation going, or did you find that most of the investors were approachable?

YS: I just went up to them and said “Hi, I am the founder of the coolest company on the planet”, which always at least drew a smile and a funny comment. Once I got their attention, then I had the chance to say “Here, let me show you”.

GM: Did you have very many one-on-one partnering meetings?

YS: I didn’t really have time to book a lot of meetings—I only had 2 scheduled, which I took at the poster. But I made a lot of great connections just by networking. In fact, I have already had follow-up meetings with investors I met at RESI.

GM: So all in all, it sounds like you had a good experience at RESI. What did you like most about the conference?

YS: It was a great event for me. I liked the density of relevant people and that it was easy to identify the investors. It was a great opportunity to network.

Yasaman Soudagar, Founder & CEO, Neurescence

Dr. Yasaman Soudagar holds a PhD in the field of experimental quantum optics, under the supervision of Dr. Nicolas Godbout at École Polytechnique de Montréal and Dr. Aephraim Steinberg at the University of Toronto. She then tenured an NSERC IRDF scholarship at Attodyne, a picosecond laser manufacturing company in Toronto. The exposure to the demands of a startup gave her the confidence to start her own, which is called Neurescence Inc. Soudagar has been building up Neurescence full time since Aug. 2015. Since then the product is developed and commercialized to the scientific research market.

Greg Mannix, VP of International Business Development, LSN

Greg Mannix is Vice President of International Business Development at Life Science Nation. After graduating from the University of California, he moved to Europe where he began a career in the life sciences and obtained a Master’s degree from IE Business School in Madrid. He has extensive experience in sales and marketing management in the medical devices field. He has worked extensively in Europe, North America and Latin America and he speaks English, Spanish and French. Greg’s role at LSN is to provide international early-stage companies with the tools and strategies to succesfully fundraise and to facilitate cross-boarder investments, licensing and M&A transactions.

About Neurescence

Neurescence has developed and commercialized a miniature microscope initially targeted to the Neurology research market. Our Quartet™ system gets implanted in multiple regions of the brain and spine and follows the activities of 100s of neurons in each region for months while the subject freely moves around. Our hardware-software suite is the only technology that allows establishing a causal connection between the effect of the treatment, such as a drug, on both the neuronal micro-circuitry and the disease phenotype. This extremely powerful approach takes the process of discovering and developing treatments from a trial and error method to an intelligent design.