Excel Venture Management
Excel Venture Management is a venture capital firm that was founded in 2008 and is based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm has managed one fund with committed capital of $125 million, and the firm is currently raising the second fund. Excel Venture Management seeks to make equity investments into life science companies from early to late stages. The typical investment size ranges from $3 million to $ 5million. The firm plans to invest in 4-5 companies over the next 6-9 months and prefers to invest in companies based in US.
Eric Zimmerman
Kevin Liang
FasterCures
FasterCures, is a center of the Milken Institute, which focuses on the barriers that prevent medical breakthroughs from reaching patients faster. Lisa serves as External Affairs Director and manages stakeholder relationships as it relates to programmatic and business development opportunities - particularly surrounding our Partnering for Cures conference, which is an annual event that brings together leaders in the R & D space each year with the goal of collaboration to move forward the entire R & D system.
Lisa Simms
External Affairs and Operations DirectorFlagship Ventures
David Berry
PartnerFormula Pharma
Formula Pharmaceuticals is a US-based oncology focused biotech company, developing Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) based therapies using a proprietary platform.
Formula's CAR therapies involve allogeneic immune effector cells and a NON-viral transfection method for highly efficient cell expansion and differentiation. Additionally, Formula's target effector cells primarily involve Cytokine Induced Killer cells, instead of T-cells or Natural Killer cells. These various characteristics offer distinct practical, clinical, regulatory and commercial benefits over other CAR approaches that involve autologous cells and viral transfection methods. Although not yet in clinical stage development, Formula believes that its CAR based development program will catch up with competing clinical-stage development programs, based on the significant CMC and regulatory advantages that Formula's CAR approach offers.
Formula is interested in meeting with investors and prospective pharmaceutical/biotech partners. Near-term value driving milestones (including clinical trial results) are expected within the next 2-3 years.
Significant industry and investor interest in CAR based therapies have been established over the past 12 months, with 4 leading industry players (Pfizer; Novartis; Celgene and Juno Therapeutics). Formula's CAR therapy is distinctive, and is believed to offer significant advantages of the aforementioned CAR technologies. CARs represent a new and important paradigm for cancer therapy, with the leading pharmaceutical players expected to acquire and develop their own position into this space.
Maurits Geerlings
CEOFoundation Fighting Blindness
Tom Capetan
Business DevelopmentFreeMind Group
FreeMind is a consultancy firm that specializes in raising funds from government agencies and other non-dilutive sources through grants and contracts.
FreeMind is the largest consulting group of its kind whose goal is to assist its clients in maximizing their potential to secure funding from non-dilutive sources. Established in 1999, FreeMind's proven long-term strategic approach has garnered its clients, academics and Industry alike, over $1.5 Billion to date. Our expertise in applying for grants and contracts extends throughout every government mechanism open to funding the life sciences including all NIH Institutes, DoD, BARDA, etc., as well as private foundations. FreeMind's knowledgeable and experienced team of Analysts and Project Managers are dedicated to guiding its clients' non-dilutive funding efforts from identification of the most suitable opportunity through to submission and subsequent award. Our team of experts will assist in making non-dilutive funding a key tool in a long-term financial strategy.
Ayal Ronen
Fusion Genomics Corporation
Fusion Genomics Corp (FG) is a molecular diagnostic test development company that is introducing diagnostic kits with companion analysis software that offer superior clinical information, faster turn-around-times and ease of use for hospitals and clinical laboratories. Fusion is the first of two companies in the world to bring a validated Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) diagnostic test complete with highly secure cloud based analytical service for childhood cancers (ChildSeq-RNA SRCT) into the clinic. This test was validated in the renowned medical testing facility at the Texas Children Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine.
FG is completing development of kits for facilitating absolute diagnosis of pediatric and adult blood cancers. In addition, FG has partnered with the Royal Tropical Institute (Dutch: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen; KIT) a World Health Organization reference diagnostic laboratory for infectious diseases to design the next generation of assays for the detection of infectious diseases including drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis, influenza, hepatitis and hemorrhagic fevers including Ebola.