Omnes Capital France

Comprising 10 investment professionals, Omnes Capital’s venture capital team acquires minority stakes in young companies with high growth potential. Its main areas of interest are financing innovative business ventures in the information technology and life sciences sectors (drug development, diagnostics, medical devices, bioproduction).

For 12 years, Omnes Capital has managed FCPI mutual funds (French regulated mutual funds investing in innovative companies).

Bruno Montanari
Director 

ORIGIMM Biotechnology Austria

ORIGIMM is a young, ambitious Austrian biotech company striving to become a market leader in the treatment of acute and chronic infectious diseases, and dermatological conditions associated with various pathogens.

ORIGIMM is developing the worldwide first therapeutic vaccine for treatment of acne vulgaris; the disease with enormous market potential, afflicting 85% of teenagers and more than 20% of adults below 40 years of age.

Using its proprietary ProVaDis® technology platform ORIGIMM overcomes the challenges in vaccine and immune therapy development by early focus on protective efficacy of antigens in the context of human disease. This translates into a rapid selection of best, most protective candidates with a significantly improved success in clinical trials. ProVaDis platform enables ORIGIMM to rapidly build its product portfolio in many other lucrative areas.

Website:
www.origimm.com
Year Founded
2014 (Seed phase/LLC), 2012 (pre-Seed,o.p.)
Biotech Subsector
Biotech Phase of Development
Technology Overview
Proprietary functional immunologic screening platform which enables rapid and reliable identification of best antigens and vaccine or mAb candidates.
Alliance & Collaborations
Clinicians and scientific KOLs. Initiation stage (pharmaceutical companies).
Supporting Metrics or Evidence
Proof of principle completed; priority patent application submitted and approved, high industrial interest
Current Financing Needs
$1.5 M
Current Timeline
Acne vaccine clinical phase start (2017). Vaccine candidate antigens against second indication selected (2017).
Current Investors
No private investors yet. Financed by the founders and public funds.
IP Status
Technology patent priority date 2014 (2015). Acne vaccine antigens patent pending (Q1/2015).
Recent Milestones
Technology POC completed. Acne vaccine candidates identified. Successful fund raising from several public research institutions supporting high technology development.
Management Team Highlights
Sanya SELAK, PhD – Founder, inventor and CEO. 20+ years of international scientific and industrial experience in antigen discovery, validation and immunology. Author of many publications, recipient of many scientific and funding awards and inventor on several patents. Tamás BERKE MD, MSc – Co-founder and COO. Physician, trained in pediatric infectious diseases, molecular virology, and a biotech professional with 20+ years of scientific and industry experience in project management during all stages of pre-clinical and clinical vaccine development. Thomas FISCHER MBA – CFO. Serial entrepreneur since his university degree 25 years ago. Thomas has dedicated know-how and experience in strategy building, fundraising, business and corporate development, finance and administrative affairs.
Dr Sanya Selak
Dr Sanya Selak
LinkedIn logo CEO 

Pappas Ventures

Pappas Ventures is a Venture Capital company based in Durham North Carolina founded in 1994. The firm manages 4 funds for a total of approximately $35 million in assets under management. The firms is currently investing out of its $1 million 4th fund focused exclusively on the life sciences. The firm looks to provide up to $5 million of preferred equity capital in the initial round and up to $1 million over the life of the investment. The firm is very flexible in terms of period to exit but generally looks to exit in around 5 years. The firm plans to make 2-3 investments over the next 6-9 months and will consider companies throughout North America.
Jayson Punwani
Associate 

PATH

PATH is an international nonprofit global health organization that was founded in 1977 and is headquartered in Seattle with 12+ employees in more than 3 offices around the world. PATH is one of the largest nonprofit organizations in global health today. PATH works on a wide array of emerging and persistent global health issues in the areas of health technologies maternal health child health reproductive health vaccines and immunization and emerging and epidemic diseases such as HIV malaria and tuberculosis. PATH is best known for developing and adapting technologies such as improved vaccination devices and new tools to prevent cervical cancer to address the health needs of developing countries. It targets health problems evaluates possible solutions and assesses whether they would be useful in finding health solutions.
Bill Cadwallader
Senior Commercialization Officer Diagnostics 
Greg Zwisler
Commercialization Officer 

PBM Capital Group

PBM Capital is a hybrid family office and operating company based in Charlottesville Virginia with an additional office in New York City. The firm is funded and led by the successful life science entrepreneur Paul Manning who started and sold several companies in his career. The firm can make investments ranging from approximately $5 to $1 million into companies and due to its funding structure has no requirements for holding period or capital structure. The firm makes investments in the forms of equity controlling interest in-licensing MBO/LBO growth capital and is also willing to co-invest. The firm is looking for companies located around the globe and makes around 5-15 investments in a given year.
Jayson Rieger
SVP of Business Development & Portfolio Management 

Pfizer Venture Investments United States

Pfizer Venture Investments (PVI) is the corporate venture capital arm of Pfizer and was founded in 2004. PVI has an annual investments budget of $50 million and invests up to $10M per investing round. The firm focuses mainly on U.S. startups but has global reach. PVI attempts to allocate 80% of its funding to U.S. based companies and utilizes the remaining 20% for international ventures. PVI provides equity funding for private companies in need of seed, growth, or venture financing. Remaining opportunistic, PVI focuses entirely on high growth prospects in all sectors and all phases of development. The ideal candidate has a potential for high growth and returns. Additionally, PVI will seek to in-license products and buyout companies if the opportunity arises.

Barbara Dalton
Vice President 

PlantForm Canada

PlantForm Corporation is a Canadian company formed in 2008 to commercialize a low-cost, plant-based manufacturing platform for monoclonal antibodies, protein drugs and vaccines for cancer and other critical illnesses.

The company’s technology platform provides several advantages over mammalian cell culture and other fermentation systems used to produce most biologic drugs on the market today: it’s fast, efficient, highly versatile (for new product development) and easily scalable. Best of all, it’s capable of reducing manufacturing costs for life-saving drugs by up to 90 per cent.

PlantForm licenses its technology from the University of Guelph, where it was developed by Dr. J. Christopher Hall, a PlantForm founder and the company’s Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. Hall held the Canada Research Chair in Recombinant Antibody Technology from 2002 to 2014 and is a leading authority in the field. All relevant intellectual property is protected by patent filings.

PlantForm’s pipeline features both innovator and biosimilar products, including:

• biosimilar trastuzumab, a plant-produced version of the $6-billion breast cancer drug Herceptin® (animal studies successfully completed, human clinical trials scheduled for 2014, market entry anticipated 2017)

• biosimilar versions of two additional oncology drugs with combined annual global sales of $11.4 billion (2010)

• innovator antibodies for HIV/AIDS, funded by the Government of Canada and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

• recombinant butyrylcholinesterase (rBuChE), an enzyme used as preventative medicine for people vulnerable to attack by nerve agents, organophosphates or other stimulants ($1.8-million contract with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and $800,00 contract with Defence Canada)

Year Founded
2008
Biotech Phase of Development
Technology Overview
Plant based disruptive platform technology enabling us to produce ultra-low cost drugs
Alliance & Collaborations
JV in Brazil
Current Financing Needs
Series A Round - $10 million
Current Timeline
pre-clinical and moving into clinical
Current Investors
Angels, Founders, Atlantic Asset Trust
IP Status
4 families of patents
Recent Milestones
Mfg. of material for Phase 1 clinical trial
Management Team Highlights
Experienced Industry and Business Professionals
David Cayea
David Cayea
COO 
Don Stewart
CEO 

Prize4Life

Prize4Life is a non-profit organization founded in 2006 in Cambridge, MA focused on accelerating therapy development for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, aka Lou Gehrig's disease). Prize4Life uses incentive prizes to attract new minds and drive innovation in ALS drug development. The organization is running the $1M Avi Kremer ALS Treatment Prize4Life challenge for preclinical validation of a novel ALS therapeutic in an ALS mouse model, and submissions to this prize will be accepted until June 6th 2015. In addition to prizes, Prize4Life also runs infrastructure programs to support the ALS research community, such as the ALS FORUM, an online portal of cutting edge research and drug development news in ALS (www.researchals.org).

Sara Shnider
Executive Director 

Prolog Ventures United States

Prolog Ventures is a venture capital firm based out of St. Louis Missouri that was founded in 2001. The firm is currently making investments out of its vintage 2013 4th fund of approximately $100 million. The firm is looking to make equity investments in companies ranging from $500,000 to $3 million. The firm will invest in companies across the United States and plans to make approximately 3-4 investments over the next 6-9 months.

Brian Clevinger
Managing Director 

Quintessence Bioscience United States

Quintessence Biosciences, Inc. is a private, clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel anti-cancer compounds based on our patented EVade™ Ribonuclease technology. The lead candidate, called QBI-139, completed a first in human dose escalation Phase I clinical trial in patients with solid tumors. Quintessence is looking for funding for a proof of concept clinical trial (Phase Ib/IIa) with a defined patient population.

Biotech Subsector
Biotech Phase of Development
Technology Overview
EVade™ Ribonucleases (RNases) are the only proteins under development to target the RNA in cancer cells. These RNases are based on naturally occurring human RNases, which have a few amino acid substitutions to evade their natural inhibitor inside cells. The lead candidate, QBI-139, is 95% identical to human RNase I. The EVade™ RNases are taken up by endocytosis. Relative selectivity has been demonstrated with a good therapeutic window in xenograft models. QBI-139 has a strong therapeutic window against a variety of in vivo xenograft models including: colon, non-small cell lung, ovarian, pancreatic and prostate cancer.
Alliance & Collaborations
The Phase I trial of QBI-139 was done at MD Anderson Cancer Center and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Supporting Metrics or Evidence
Dose escalation of QBI-139 in a Phase I trial has recently been completed. The drug showed a distinct safety profile relative to already approved drugs. The exposure profile in patients was similar to animal models. Based on encouraging indications of efficacy, an expansion cohort in a defined patient population is being planned. Based on pre-clinical and clinical results as well as market and regulatory considerations, the company is particularly interested potential expansion cohorts in: - Second or third line non-small cell lung cancer regardless of mutation status in combination with a platinum doublet, - Second line platinum refractory/resistant ovarian cancer in combination with a platinum doublet or - Post-androgen receptor antagonist in hormone resistant prostate cancer (HRPC) in combination with a SOC agent.
Current Financing Needs
Quintessence is looking for $8M to fund a proof of concept (Phase Ib/IIa) clinical trial.
Current Timeline
Once funding is available, QBI-139 can be advanced to manufacturing for the next clinical trial.
Current Investors
Quintessence has been funded by individual investors as well as some support from NCI SBIR grants.
IP Status
The company has a strong portfolio of intellectual property related to the use of human RNases as therapeutic agents, including composition of matter patents running through 2029.
Recent Milestones
QBI-139 has completed a first-in-human, dose escalation Phase I clinical trial in patients with solid tumors.
Management Team Highlights
Ralph Kauten, CEO, has been founder or senior management at a variety of successful biotech companies, including Promega, PanVera (now part of ThermoFisher), and Mirus Bio (now part of Arrowhead Research). Laura Strong is a scientist by training and overseen advancement of the RNase from discovery to end of Phase I clinical, including managing the communications with FDA.
Laura Strong
Laura Strong
LinkedIn logo President & COO