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Jean Yao, PhD, with 20+ years of extended experience in the areas of biology, medical research, and medical industry, has held various positions at Mayo Clinic and University of Minnesota. She funded Med Qiao Group LLC as for the Bridge between US and China in life science. Med Qiao provides business consulting services that include investment funding, market analysis, intellectual property protection, clinical trial arrangement, product approval application, China branch or division establishment as well as marketing, promotion, distribution and onsite manufacturing of medical products.

Mesa Verde Venture Partners is a Venture Capital company founded in 2006. The firm is currently making investments out of its 2nd fund that had its first close in 2013. The firm makes primarily equity investment into seed and early stage rounds ranging from $500,000 to $1 million initially and up to $1.5 million over the lifetime of the investment. The firm is focused on companies located in the Southwestern United States although they are open to review companies from throughout the US. The firm could make as many as 3 new investments over the next 6-9 months.

Mid Atlantic Bio Angels (MABA) founded in 212 is an angel investor group based in the New York City area which focuses exclusively on new and emerging life science companies. The group places no geographical restrictions or requirements for presenting companies as long as meaningful and effective post-investment monitoring of these companies can be achieved, MABA has considered opportunities in Europe and Israel as well as across the USA and Canada. Since the members are investing their own capital the investment size is highly flexible and will depend on the financial needs of the company. The capital structure is typically in preferred stocks or convertible notes in qualified cases. The group prefers to invest in companies with valuations of less than $5M. As MABA prefers opportunities that can be entirely angel-financed MABA generally requires that companies can achieve exit with $15 million capital or under (generally after raising a Series B round but no further rounds).

Company

Navitas Pharma (Navitas) is developing a new class of cardiovascular drug for the US.  On the basis of recent, proprietary research, Navitas has filed patents for use of its drug platform in three disorders for which no drugs are currently approved in the US.  Each has over 1,000,000 patients in the US:

> Portal hypertension (PHTN; hypertension of the liver)

> Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF)

> Group II pulmonary hypertension (Group II PH; lung hypertension secondary to left-sided heart failure)

Technology Platform

Navitas’ main platform is a new chemical class of compounds, known as furopyridines.  Cicletanine (CIC), the lead drug from this platform, has been launched for hypertension in France, and introduces a new mechanism of action to the US.  The drug activates endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), thereby reversing endothelial dysfunction, a root cause of hypertension and heart failure.  As part of this eNOS-activation mechanism, CIC has recently been shown to activate protein kinase G (PKG), an enzyme whose inactivation is important in HFpEF.

CIC is significantly de-risked:

> Launched in France for general hypertension, in which the drug has a long-established track record of efficacy and safety.

> Extensive safety data from

   > Clinical trials in >10,000 patients

   > Post-launch pharmacovigilance of ~2 million patient-years in France and Germany

> Clinical proof-of-concept data in several disorders, including

   > Hypertension

   > Group II pulmonary hypertension

   > Hypertensive hypertrophy (relevant to HFpEF)

   > Angina

   > Diabetic claudication

   > Diabetic microalbuminuria (early-stage kidney disease)

> Proof of relevance in an established animal model of portal hypertension

> Extensive data supporting new mechanism of action via eNOS

Target Markets

Portal Hypertension (PHTN; high blood pressure in the liver) is a significant, unmet medical need, with over 1 million patients in the US.  Current treatments involve decreasing blood flow into the liver, either with drugs or with surgery, rather than getting at the core problem of blood-flow resistance in the liver itself.  Recent laboratory research shows cicletanine directly (within the liver) reversing an accepted, reliable animal model of portal hypertension.  CIC looks promising as the first direct treatment of portal hypertension.  Conservative forecast puts revenues at $3 billion. 

Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) accounted for a minority of diagnosed heart failure until recently.  With about 3 million US patients, it now accounts for 50 – 60% of heart failure diagnoses.   The increasing prevalence of HFpEF is driven to a large degree by metabolic syndrome (“pre-diabetes”) and diabetes.  This is important, as retrospective analysis of hypertension trials have associated CIC with significant decreases in glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides among patients in whom these were elevated.  Additionally, HFpEF is now thought to be driven by inactivation of protein kinase G (PKG), an enzyme recently shown to be activated by CIC.  Navitas therefore believes that CIC has the potential to reverse the root, molecular basis underlying much of the pathology of HFpEF.

Group II Pulmonary Hypertension (Group II PH) is hypertension of the lungs associated with left-sided heart failure.  A small CIC study showed marked improvements in functional status vs. placebo and significant improvement of pulmonary pressures.  The drug appears to have a dual action directly on both heart failure and hypertension within the lungs.  With over 1 million Group II PH patients in the US and no approved drugs, CIC has breakthrough-treatment potential.

Management

Glenn Cornett, MD, PhD (founder, CEO) has over 20 years of consulting and industry experience.  His work at Eli Lily included strategy and financial modeling, including work on licensing Cialis, establishment of a competitive-strategy unit in R&D and a corporation-wide assessment of new therapeutic targets.  At McKinsey, he consulted on engagements in health care, technology and manufacturing.  He also served on the Core Groups for Complexity and Business Dynamics at McKinsey.  While consulting at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dr. Cornett authored a book on plutonium and public policy.

Running his own consulting firm, Glenn has done financial modeling and structuring for strategic transactions driving the addition of several hundred million dollars of market capitalization to his clients.  Dr. Cornett founded Navitas in 2004 and led it through its first liquidity event 3.5 years later in 2008.  He has run ten marathons (most recently: Cayman Islands in December 2014), and holds a black belt in karate.  He has a neuroscience PhD (UCLA) and an MD (Distinction in Research, U. Michigan).

Mark Alvino (corporate development) has extensive experience in investor relations, public relations and investment banking.  He held senior investment banking positions at Bradley Woods, Griffin and SCO Capital.  At the latter institution, he was responsible for over 20 transactions, driving in aggregate over $500 million of private financings in the biotech / pharma sector.  He was SVP at Ogilvy’s Feinstein Kean Healthcare, a pubic relations business focused on health care.   He was a Vice President at the investor relations firm Allen & Caron.  As an entrepreneur, he founded Advent Consumer Healthcare, where he holds multiple patents on a consumer-health product now available at 7200 CVS stores.  He remains active in competitive sailing.  He holds a degree form George Washington University.

Jim Page, MD, JD, MPH (founder, senior advisor) is a board-certified psychiatrist (residence: Stanford) and graduated first in his law school class.  Earlier, he was in natural resources, where he was a strategist and analyst for Fortune 500 corporations. 

The NYU Office of Industrial Liaison (OIL) promotes the commercial development of NYU technologies into products to benefit the public, while providing resources to the University to support its research, education, and patient care missions. NYU OIL also facilitates research collaborations between NYU researchers and industry on projects of mutual interest.

In 2013, NYU launched the Office of Therapeutics Alliances (OTA). OTA is a nimble, "virtual biotech" approach to advance novel therapeutic projects by playing on the strengths of NYU in dissecting disease pathways and those of external, professional capabilities in early stage R&D. OTA identifies NYU projects with potential for addressing unmet needs, delineates the path to therapeutic proof of concept and assembles internal and external resources tailored to each specific project’s needs to maximize the likelihood of successful partnerships with biopharma, new biotech startups or disease foundations. 

O2h has a track record of investing in emerging biotech, small molecule and frontier life science starts-ups

A passion for entrepreneurship and life sciences motivates o2h to participate in syndicated seed stage investments. O2h are ready to support the investments with active or passive support to further the objectives of the company.