Tag Archives: RESI

Get Your Startup in the Spotlight at the RESI Innovation Challenge in San Diego

20 Apr

By Shaoyu Chang, MD, MPH, Director of Research & Asia Business Development Liaison, LSN

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RESI is going to BIO. As we join 2017’s largest life science innovation carnival, we aim to showcase the most promising, innovative new health technologies in the RESI Innovation Challenge. If you’re headed to San Diego with the aim of raising money or making deals for your startup, we’d like to see your application.

The RESI Innovation Challenge covers startups in therapeutics, medtech, diagnostics and healthcare IT companies from around the globe. All applicants will be vetted based on not only the quality of the company’s scientific work, but also the strength of the management team and how well-positioned the company is to receive investment.

On June 19th, RESI’s estimated 1000 attendees will receive “RESI Cash” to allocate to the entrepreneurs whose technologies they expect will be most influential. The capital invested will be tallied up and the top three winners will receive prizes and be featured in our RESI newsletter recap that will go out to LSN’s 20,000 newsletter readership. See below for the previous RESI Innovation Challenge first place winners – a diverse group of startups from every area of the life sciences.

Michael Quigley, VP of Market Research, Life Science Nation | Mark Elias, CEO, Co-founder, Steadiwear | Emile Maamary, CFO, Co-founder, Steadiwear | Natasha Eldridge, Marketing Manager – RESI Conference, Life Science Nation

RESI on MaRS 2017 Innovation Challenge 1st Place Winner – Steadiwear inc.

What makes the RESI Innovation Challenge so valuable?  We’ve included a few words from previously successful participants below, but in short, being part of the Innovation Challenge provides startups with a new way to get attention and start dialogues with the investors who attend RESI. Participants can share their message all day in the exhibit hall, with their Innovation Challenge display providing a starting point for a meaningful conversation about the opportunity.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: May 5, 2017

Here is what our previous winners are saying about the RESI Innovation Challenge:

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“It was an absolute pleasure to participate in the RESI conference held at MaRS in Toronto. The unique structure of the conference facilitated creating new relationships with potential investors and partners. In particular, the Innovation Challenge pushed us to introduce ourselves to new people, which will be useful as we look towards a future financing round. I definitely recommend the RESI conferences to entrepreneurs seeking financing in the bio / health space.”
 

– Raymond Shih, President, Co-Founder, QoC Health

3rd Place, RESI on MaRS, June 23, 2016

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“The RESI Innovation Challenge is a really good opportunity to meet investors and other companies in the space.  It’s a good showcase to reach that audience.”

– Jessica Ching, CEO, Eve Medical

2nd Place, RESI San Francisco, January 12, 2016

“The RESI Innovation Challenge is a unique way to pitch, and provides a great opportunity to see what other companies are doing in the industry, while allowing you to meet with potential investors and strategic partners outside of the partnering meetings.”

– John Connolly, VP Corporate Development, Rna Diagnostics

1st Place, RESI Boston, September 16, 2015

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Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) Conference on MaRS Report

13 Apr

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

RESI’s first MaRS landing was in Summer 2016, and the success of the event revealed a tremendous appetite for an early stage life science investment venue in Toronto.

For 2017, RESI on MaRS built on its initial success to become the centerpiece of the new Toronto Health Innovation Week – a sequence of summits, conferences and receptions that gathered together the most vital players in Toronto’s healthcare ecosystem.  As RESI continues its cycle of events throughout North America, we look forward to working with local bio-med innovation hubs in every RESI city to showcase their innovations and technology resources.

Last week’s RESI on MaRS grew significantly over our 2016 event. Delegates came to RESI from 12 countries. There was a 25% increase in investor attendance. In all, more than 600 attendees came to RESI on MaRS to pitch their ideas or to find new investment opportunities.

More bandwidth was added for RESI Partnering meetings – RESI attendees exchanged over 3000 meeting requests, and 1000 scheduled one-on-one meetings took place. Outside of RESI Partnering, the halls of MaRS Discovery District buzzed with ad-hoc meetings and networking encounters.

30 companies competed in the RESI Innovation Challenge. The victor, Steadiwear, was a MaRS portfolio company.

Partnering Forum

RESI on MaRS also featured three full tracks of content. In RESI’s 16 investor panels, attendees heard from a wide variety of early stage investors and strategic players who are looking to Toronto for new technology opportunities. Some panels focused on a particular funding source such as Family Offices, Public Private Partnerships and Corporate Venture Capital. Others looked at the diversity of the investment landscape in a specific technology vertical, such as Diagnostics or Medical Devices. Meanwhile, the Tales From The Road panel – seasoned life science CEOs who have recent experience of raising capital – spoke about how they’d met the challenge of attracting global investors to back their Canadian startups.

Incubator Accelerator New Models Panel (Ying Tam, Managing Director Health, MaRS Discovery District | Frédéric Lemaitre Auger, Senior Director, Investments, Accel-Rx – Canada’s Health Science Accelerator | Rebecca Yu, Head of JLABS @ Toronto, Johnson & Johnson Innovation | Randy Yatscoff, Executive Vice President, Business Development, TEC Edmonton | Kristi Ebong, Head Strategy Business Development, Cedars-Sinai Health System)

The RESI Asia-North America Partnering Track was added to the event, drawing high level decision makers from healthcare investment firms and major healthcare corporations from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. These investors defined their interest in investing in healthcare startups in Canada and the US, and explained how to work with a partner in Asia to reach a new marketplace and grow your company.

Asia Pharma Partners Panel (Hiroshi Kawai, Vice President, Mitsubishi Tanabe Holdings America | Tianle Redanz, Director of Business Development, Simcere of America | Weiyong Sun, Senior Director External Scientific Affairs, Daiichi Sankyo | Richard Soll, Senior Vice President, Research Service Division (RSD), WuXi AppTec)

It’s clear that Toronto has a strong ecosystem for generating new healthcare technologies and launching new companies, and RESI on MaRS has served as a catalyst to join those new technologies with relevant, active investors who see the advantages of investing in Canada. By building these new bridges between technology and capital, RESI on MaRS will move science forward in Toronto.

RESI’s next stop will be in San Diego on Monday June 19th – the first RESI event to take place concurrent with the BIO International Convention. If you’d like to join LSN for a day of investor meetings, new panel content and high level networking, you can register now.

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RESI San Diego, June 19, 2017 Early Bird Registration is Now Open

13 Apr

By Natasha Eldridge, RESI Conference Manager, LSN

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The 13th Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) Conference will take place in San Diego on Monday June 19th, 2017 during the 2017 BIO week. RESI SD will offer early stage companies and investors an opportunity to get the most out of the busy week when the biotech and medtech world gathers in San Diego.

Why RESI?

  • 500+ early stage investors seeking innovations across therapeutics, medical device, diagnostics and healthcare IT
  • Meet with 10 categories of early stage global investors
  • Great ROI – 16 to 20 meetings in one day that are a fit for your stage of development & product
  • 24 investor panels and entrepreneur workshops covering a wide variety of topics
  • Kick off your BIO week at a unique investor-centric gathering for early stage companies

Venue: The Westin San Diego Gaslamp Quarter, 910 Broadway Circle, San Diego, CA 92101

About RESI

RESI is a venue for entrepreneurs to meet with 10 categories of investors that LSN tracks including Family Offices, Corporate Venture Funds, Angel Groups, Venture Philanthropy, Venture Capital and more. Through the RESI Partnering, fundraising executives can have up to 16 scheduled meetings as well as many more ad-hoc meetings with diverse life science investors who fit their company’s technology sector, indication and stage of development. Additionally, through an expansive series of panels and workshops, attendees will have the chance to hear firsthand accounts from investors explaining their current investment mandates and process for identifying and qualifying candidates.

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RESI on MaRS Innovation Challenge – Winners Announced

6 Apr

By Nono Hu, Director of Marketing, LSN

On April 4, more than 600 entrepreneurs and investors entered the exhibition hall at MaRS Discovery District in Toronto. They were greeted by 30 Innovation Challenge finalists across therapeutics, medical device, diagnostics, and healthcare IT sectors. The 30 companies, hand selected by LSN’s scientific and commercial review team, competed directly on merits of innovation and commercial viability. Here, LSN would like to present the top 3 winners who attracted the greatest amount of “RESI Cash”.

First Place: Steadiwear

Steadiwear inc.‘s mission is to restore independence and quality of life to all tremor sufferers worldwide. We have developed the Steadiglove, a smart glove that responsively stabilizes hand tremors in Essential Tremor and Parkinson’s disease using novel vibration damping technology. This allows users to go about all daily activities such as eating and getting dressed with significantly less frustration.

Michael Quigley, VP of Market Research, Life Science Nation | Mark Elias, CEO, Co-founder, Steadiwear | Emile Maamary, CFO, Co-founder | Natasha Eldridge, Marketing Manager – RESI Conference, Life Science Nation

Second Place: BlueLight

BlueLight is a healthcare technology company specializing in the measurement of light energy. Our data-driven technologies, sold worldwide, target a quality gap in the multi billion-dollar dental composite market.

Natasha Eldridge, Marketing Manager – RESI Conference, Life Science Nation | Michael Quigley, VP of Market Research, Life Science Nation | JP Furey, CEO, BlueLight | Peter MacLareN, Director of Customer Relations, BlueLight

Third Place: Cyclica

Cyclica Inc. has developed, validated, and patented a structure-based proteome-wide screening platform, Ligand Express™, that currently features PROBEx (proteome-screening), SWITCHx (ligand effect prediction) and DIVEx (systems biology & drug-protein interactomes). Ligand Express™ is unique in that it is a drug-centric platform. For a small molecule ligand, Ligand Express™ automatically generates an intelligent list of ligand-protein interactions by searching through a large proprietary database of all available structurally characterized proteins. The platform provides a panoramic view of a small molecule ligand to better understand on- and off-target interactions, and is valuable in finding novel desirable or undesirable targets. By gaining insights into a ligand’s polypharmacology, Cyclica’s clients can identify unknown targets, prioritize lead candidates, elucidate adverse effects, and understand repurposing opportunities.

Michael Quigley, VP of Market Research, Life Science Nation | Naheed Kurji, President and CEO, Cyclica | Natasha Eldridge, Marketing Manager – RESI Conference, Life Science Nation

Thank you to all who competed in the RESI on MaRS Innovation Challenge, and to all the RESI attendees who took part by investing their votes in their favorite competing companies.

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RESI Panel Announcement – Diagnostic Investors

30 Mar

By Lucy Parkinson, Director of Research, LSN

Diagnostics is a challenging landscape for fundraising and commercialization; however, the sector attracts interest and backing from a wide variety of stakeholders. There are many unmet needs in the sector, from finding new disease biomarkers to improving monitoring of progressive diseases.

The range of diagnostic investors attending RESI on MaRS next Tuesday provide testament to this varied landscape, with interest in novel diagnostic technologies coming from major pharma and device companies, diagnostic service providers, venture investors, and government organizations. RESI will bring the diagnostics world together for a panel discussion, moderated by Bob Williams, Vice President, Business Development and Innovation – Bracco Diagnostics, and featuring:

These investors will introduce their own specific angle on the diagnostics sector, and will cover what they look for in an investment opportunity in this sector. Panelists will also provide advice on how to make a new diagnostic catch their attention as an investable product. If you’d like to hear the advice of these experts at RESI, there’s still time to sign up.

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Redefining Early Stage Investments Conference Series – RESI on MaRS 2017 Program Guide

23 Mar

By Nono Hu, Director of Marketing, LSN

With RESI on MaRS coming up in 10 days, the LSN team is getting ready to head to Canada’s hub of healthcare innovation, Toronto!  RESI on MaRS will bring more than 250 investors under one roof, providing you with one-of-a-kind networking and partnering experience.

LSN is proud to present the RESI on MaRS Program Guide. If you’re planning your day at RESI on April 4, 2017 to see full lists of the investor panel speakers, RESI Innovation Challenge finalists and service providers you could meet, look no further!

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Life Science Nation’s RESI Conference – The Sweet Spot

16 Mar

An interview with Life Science Nation’s CEO Dennis Ford regarding the up and coming Redefining Early Stage Investments conference series – By Ying Tam

Ying Tam, Head, Digital Health Cluster, Venture Services, MaRS:

Dennis, what is the key differentiator of the Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) Conference?

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

The sweet spot. RESI is the only “dedicated” early stage global investor conference out there that I can find. On another note, we actually deliver 10 categories of early stage investors. Also, to your point, RESI is unique and the only one that goes across the silos of Drugs, Devices, Diagnostics and Healthcare IT, which is one of the reasons why JLABS has stuck with RESI as title sponsor for three years now. Many investors have multiple investment mandates covering multiple silo’s in the life science arena.

Ying Tam: Who does the RESI Conference compete with?

Dennis Ford: There are other conferences that we share the marketplace with. RESI is focused on Preclinical, Phase I and Phase II funding strictly. Other conferences tend to be more general and more focused on Phase III and commercialization centric in their content and RESI has 16 panels of dedicated to early stage investment content aimed precisely at fundraising CEOs and scientist-entrepreneurs.

Ying Tam: Explain how you and other conferences know you are getting the right investors?

Dennis Ford: I attend these conferences regularly and pay very high fees ($3,500 + USD) to go and therefore get the attendee lists. From the last one I attended, I downloaded the alleged 120 investors attending and gave them to our research group to validate. What we found was 22 investors that actually had investment mandates for early stage preclinical and the rest were I-Banks, consultants, and finance BD folks who go to these events trying to get fundraising CEOs to pay them a monthly stipend for services to aid in raising capital. All of which is fine for them and a draw which creates revenue. RESI only allows “real” investors with vetted mandates. RESI Investors need to adhere to these strict guidelines. RESI@JPM had 500+ investors so the numbers speak for themselves.

Ying Tam: What about Pharma partners?

Dennis Ford: All of the Big Pharma players globally regularly attend RESI conferences and present on our RESI panels. They are seeking technology assets for their pipelines. Pharma attendees are the scouts and BD players and are typically the buy side staff for the Pharma.

Ying Tam: How is RESI business model different?

Dennis Ford: I created the RESI conference and the business model is a real challenge because the price point has to stay relatively low for our scientist-entrepreneur and fundraising CEOs audience. The challenge is investors don’t pay (and won’t) so only half the attendees pay and that makes it hard from the business side. I can understand why other conferences in the market are more general and have a broader content reach as that really helps the bottom line. That said, RESI is a success on many other fronts which is providing a vehicle every 45 days for CEOs to get in front of investors, start a dialogue, that leads to a relationships and hopefully an allocation. We now have 5 RESI conferences a year, JPM, Toronto, BIO, Boston, NYC and that means that a CEO can get 16-20 investor meetings per event and that is a BIG deal as fundraising is a numbers game. RESI provides a vehicle to match up investors and scientist-entrepreneurs and if they attend all 5 RESI meeting can have a dialogue with up to 100 investor meetings and that is a game changer.

Ying Tam: How successful is RESI in terms of getting companies funded?

Dennis Ford: We have run some metrics and have found 15-20% of the firms who buy our global investor database, attend our RESI conferences, and use the techniques outlined in my book do raise capital. We can do better than that but that would mean really getting the sell side players educated and more efficient at branding and messaging and understanding how to run a compelling fund raising campaign.

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

Dennis Ford is an entrepreneur and author with expertise in sales, marketing, and business development. He has spent most of his career launching new companies. Over the last decade, he has worked extensively with global alternative investors interested in high-growth early-stage technologies. His expertise encompasses using database subscription services to create business solutions and using the Internet to create an interactive dialog between buyers and sellers. He is a big proponent of using profiling and matching technology to find that all-important business fit in the marketing and selling process. Before LSN, Dennis was the President and CEO of Brighton House Associates (BHA). BHA was launched in order to improve the way hedge fund and private equity fund managers raised capital and marketed their funds to investors. Ford is the author of The Peddler’s Prerogative and The Life Science Executive’s Fundraising Manifesto, two well-received sales and marketing books.

Ying Tam, Head, Digital Health Cluster, Venture Services, MaRS

Ying Tam is a seasoned entrepreneur and business executive, and is currently Head of Digital Health, Venture Services for MaRS, one of the world’s leading urban innovation hub. MaRS works with a large network of corporate partners and venture funds to help entrepreneurs launch and grow the innovative companies that are changing the future. Ying has co-founded several start-up companies, including Mindful Scientific, a medical device company addressing concussion diagnostics and management, abridean (acquired by nCipher PLC), a software company developing application provisioning and identity management solutions, and i-HRx (acquired by Healthconnex), a digital health company focused on chronic disease management. He has significant strategic and functional experience with operating roles in a wide range of organizations, from early stage companies to major multi-national corporations.

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