The corporate venture arm of a pharmaceutical company seeks to make strategic investments into early-stage companies that are aligned with its parent firm’s R&D focus. For equity investments, the firm will lead, co-lead, or participate in syndicated financings. The firm benefits from deep connections into its parent firm’s global research and development centers, and is well placed to nurture innovative pharmaceutical companies and to connect these into the parent organization.
The firm’s core focus is on therapeutics. Currently, the firm is most interested in oncology, gastrointestinal diseases, and CNS. The firm is also interested in breakthrough platforms technologies that improve peptide, antibody, cell, and gene based therapies. The firm does not invest in medical devices or diagnostics.
The firm’s primary focus is on start-up/seed rounds, through mid-stage financings – pre-clinical through Phase II. The firm respects the autonomy of the institutions it invests in and seeks standard institutional venture investment terms without special rights or options.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com
A multinational health technology group based in China is interested in strategic investments and M&A opportunities. The firm is looking for later stage opportunities from the USA, Europe, and Israel. For deals, the firm is looking for M&A deals that are no larger than $1Billion USD and prefers that the company has some form of sales in China.
The group is currently focused on medical devices, specifically dental devices. For these devices, they must have CE and FDA approval and they would prefer if the device had CFDA approval as well. The current short-term goal of the firm is to become the largest dental equipment and consumables supplier before expanding into other indications.
The firm requires companies that have revenue and would prefer a company with net profit and a good annual growth rate.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com
A venture investment firm based in the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA is focused on bridging Eastern and Western innovations and investment opportunities. The firm invests in early to mid-stage biopharma and medtech projects. With its own R&D facilities in China, in-licensing assets from the U.S. and Europe to China would be an important consideration although not requisite for their investment opportunities. With additional strategic investing partners in China, the size of investment can vary depending on the deal. The firm is currently looking for new opportunities globally.
The firm is generally interested in preclinical to phase 1/2 stage assets in biotech and medtech. The firm is open to all therapeutic modalities. Within medtech, the firm is more interested in personalized medicine/companion diagnostics and novel devices. In terms of disease areas, the firm is interested in therapeutics in most therapeutic areas, including autoimmune diseases, cancer, metabolic, liver and gastrointestinal conditions, but the firm generally avoids behavioral illnesses.
The firm is seeking strong management teams with products that could address large unmet medical need. The firm has R&D facilities in China that can facilitate product development and registration both for China local and global market. The firm is open to negotiating regional rights with flexible terms.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com
For the third year in a row, the NIH has sponsored a group of grantees to be part of the RESI Boston Innovation Challenge. This week, Dennis Ford(DF) interviews Program Director Todd Haim(TH) to explore how this relationship benefits the NIH’s grantees, and how RESI stands out as a venue for these companies to present.
Dennis Ford Founder & CEO, Life Science Nation; Creator of RESI Conference SeriesTodd Haim SBIR Program Director, National Cancer Institute
DF: What is the basic reason NIH is showcasing technology at RESI?
TH: The NIH is supporting the SBIR awardees to showcase their own technologies, and we do this at a variety of industry conferences. And the real goal from the NIH´s perspective is that we realize that we cannot support these companies forever; and that each individual company, in order to reach the patient and the market, will need a lot more funding than can be provided just through SBIR. They will need downstream partners and funders, and it is in our interest to help as much as we can to facilitate those partnerships. RESI along with other early stage investor conferences provides a forum for our portfolio companies to interact with these parties. The conference hosts a unique set of investors and partners that are a good match for our Investor Initiatives program. This is the third year that we will be sending our companies to RESI.
DF: How many NIH-funded companies apply for the RESI Innovation Challenge and how many are selected as finalists?
TH: Over the past 3 years, over 150 companies have applied, and 60 of those have been featured as finalists. 20 at each conference.
DF: What are some key differences you see in the RESI conference compared to other conferences you attend?
TH: I would say two things stand out about RESI. One is the inclusion of Family Offices and groups that you don´t see at many other industry forums and showcases. The other benefit of RESI is the broad base in terms of technology types. Many of the other conferences we have participated in are really focused on one technology area, whether it be devices or therapeutics. RESI has individual tracks that represent devices or that represent therapeutics, which really allows us to present a greater variety of our companies there, and I think that broad focus is very helpful at this early stage.
DF: Is this type of showcasing of NIH-funded technology going to continue?
TH: We continually evaluate the outcomes of our companies’ participation in conferences like RESI to ensure the value of such events to our portfolio companies. We recently found out that CellSight Technologies, one of the companies that attended RESI as part of NCI SBIR’s Investor Initiatives, signed an agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim to partner on a clinical study using CellSight’s technology. We hope that participation in NCI SBIR’s Investor Initiatives will result in additional partnerships and investment for our portfolio companies. Should RESI participation continue to prove effective for NCI SBIR’s portfolio companies and our program continue to have sufficient funding for these efforts, we are likely to continue considering participation in RESI.
DF: Typically, we see for the Innovation Challenge participants up to 50% get funded or get involved in partnerships but we haven’t correlated that to SBIR participants specifically (though I know of around a half dozen off the top of my head that have fared quite well by participating in RESI).
DF: Tell the readers some great stuff that is happening right now in the NIH funding domain:
TH: Sure. NCI and many of the other Institutes participate in both the Omnibus grant funding opportunity, which is available three times a year and the next receipt date is September 5th. About two thirds, if not more, of the funding for the NIH/SBIR program is actually through the Omnibus solicitation, which is an investigator initiated solicitation. You submit the application and you tell us what you’re working on; then it gets peer reviewed and we consider it from there. Then we have some of the Institutes within the Health and Human Services (HHS) including NCI, using a SBIR Contract Solicitation that goes out once a year to fund high-priority areas for each of those Institutes. The solicitation is now available and applications are due by October 20th. You can find the solicitation on NCI SBIR’s website (https://sbir.cancer.gov), as well as on https://sbir.nih.gov. I would definitely encourage all of the readers to look at both of those funding opportunity announcements with upcoming due dates and consider applying. We are here to work with potential applicants and help them understand how the program works, and how an application can be competitive. So I encourage you to reach out to our office (ncisbir@mail.nih.gov) or to the SBIR Program Officers and Coordinators across the NIH before you apply. If you would like to speak to a Program Officer before you apply, that is definitely something we can arrange and provide guidance. Come and talk to us, we’re always interested in supporting new companies through the SBIR program and new projects.
ByNatasha Eldridge, Director of RESI Conference Series, LSN
In the last 4 years, RESI has facilitated thousands of new connections between early stage companies and investors, and we often hear of successful partnerships and allocations that have begun at this hub of communication and dialogue. In this article, we’ll take a look at one example of a great RESI success.
An early stage therapeutics company was one of 30 companies selected to participate in a RESI Innovation Challenge, out of over 100 applicants. Prior to the event the company used the RESI Partnering software to book a meeting with an investor representing the corporate venture capital fund of a major pharma firm that was looking for assets in their field. Although the startup was a little too early in their development process to match the corporate VC’s criteria, the technology was a strong potential fit with the firm’s pipeline. The meeting went well, and the investor therefore connected the startup to the pharma company’s Business Development team. Two years later, with additional validation for the startup’s assets, they closed a significant collaboration deal with the pharma company. This is how it works in the early stage arena – by using venues like RESI to make your first early connections with major players, you can build bridges to future deals.
This startup was based in a city that’s not established as a major biotech startup hub. It’s an example of how LSN brings together buyers and sellers from all over North America, and indeed the world. Everybody is familiar with the obvious biotechnology centers like Boston and the Bay Area, but many players overlook less obvious sources of new technology. LSN not only marks these other hubs on our map, but we also develop relationships with startups in these areas via our outreach and our “Fundraising Bootcamp” educational workshops which help scientist entrepreneurs understand the details of partnering and fundraising. At the same time, the LSN Research team speaks to investment firms and large pharmaceutical companies worldwide about what kind of technology they need to see.
In this case, the LSN Research Team and Business Development Team were speaking with both the startup and the major pharma firm. Based on the relationships developed both decided to go to RESI and met through the partnering system which matched up their profiles as good fits to meet each other. That’s how we’ve seen RESI lead to so many deals over the last 4 years.
RESI Partnering is now open, providing attendees with the opportunity to book one on one meetings with investors. If you log in to Partnering, you will see a wide variety of investors available to reach out to, including venture capital firms, big pharma, angels – and family offices.
RESI Boston’s Biotech Family Office sesssion features family office investors from around the world who are making direct investments into early stage drug development companies. These firms have a variety of strategies, interests and motivations. If you’d like to know how family office investors think about early stage drugs and what kind of technology catches their eye, this is the panel for you.
Moderated by Colin Widen (CEO, Boston Innovation Capital), the panelists are:
Jayson Rieger (SVP of Business Development & Portfolio Management, PBM Capital)
We’ve extended the RESI discounted registration until Friday, so if you want to hear from these Biotech Family Offices now is the time to get registered.
A family office based in California invests in primarily early-stage (seed, Series A) companies with truly innovative technologies with a typical investment size of $2-5M per company and can invest as low as $500K. The firm will generally lead investments, and invests globally with no geographic preference.
The firm is seeking innovative technology that is outside traditional biotech. The company is agnostic across life science sectors, including therapeutics, devices, and tools, but will not look at Healthcare IT or digital health technologies. They are interested in therapeutics targeting novel first-in-class targets, and not in biosimilars or repurposed drugs. The firm focuses on early stage preclinical to clinical-stage technology, though may be open to commercial-stage technology depending on the opportunity.
The firm is seeking companies with founders who have big ambitions, and a demonstrated ability to sell their team, investors, and partners on their vision. Previous startup experience is a big plus, but not required, and they will invest in young and first-time entrepreneurs.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email mandates@lifesciencenation.com
