From research to market: A discussion with seven Biotech Entrepreneurs

From research to market: A discussion with seven biotech entrepreneurs

Seven biotechnology entrepreneurs will share their experiences and answer your questions about building a startup, forming the right team, and launching products. Questions will be submitted and voted on in real-time via an online platform. Come learn about what it takes to turn research into the biotechnology innovations of tomorrow.

Panelists:

Aditya Rajagopal, ChromaCode

Aditya is the founder and CTO of ChromaCode a medical diagnostics company, and is the inventor of ChromaCode core technology on combinatorial signal multiplexing. Previously, he was a researcher at Google X, where he worked on novel medical imaging methods. Additionally, Aditya has an appointment as Visiting Faculty in Electrical Engineering at Caltech and Adjunct Assistant Professor at USC, and leads a research group exploring the interface between medicine and engineering. He is also the co-founder and member of the board of directors of Esperto Medical, a medical ultrasound company. Aditya completed his education at Caltech (BS, MS, PhD) and has over 60 patents and publications.

Peter Meinhold, Provivi, Inc.

Peter Meinhold, Ph.D. has 14 years of experience in leading commercial technology development programs. He was a member of the German national triathlon team while studying for his diploma in biotechnology at the University of Applied Sciences Weihenstephan, Germany. He proceeded to pursue a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Caltech where he studied with Prof. Frances Arnold. In 2005, he co-founded Gevo, Inc. a leading renewable fuels and chemicals company that uses engineered yeast to convert renewable sugars into isobutanol. In 2013, he co-founded Provivi, Inc. together with Prof. Frances Arnold and Dr. Pedro Coelho to create scalable, pheromone-based insect control solutions that will improve quality of life and the health of our environment. In 2010 he was recognized by MIT's Technology Review magazine as one of the world's top innovators under the age of 35. Peter holds 24 issued U.S. patents the with dozens more pending.

Lubna Ahmad, Invoy

Lubna founded Invoy to develop affordable breath analyzers for health and medical applications. Invoy’s first product provides personalized and predictive nutritional solutions by measuring chemicals from exhaled breath and engaging users through a connected App. Since founding Invoy, Lubna has led its product development efforts, developed a robust intellectual property portfolio, transferred the product design to manufacturing and recently begun commercialization efforts. In parallel, Lubna has designed and overseen clinical validation studies investigating the utility of chemicals in exhaled breath so as to determine the best engineering solutions to leverage this information to provide actionable health recommendations. Lubna holds a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and was a Goldwater scholar and National Science Foundation fellow.

Bassil Dahiyat, Xencor

Dr. Dahiyat has been Xencor’s president and chief executive officer since the Company’s incorporation in August 1997, and is the co-founder of Xencor, and co-inventor of Xencor’s breakthrough XmAb® technology. He has led the Company in raising over $700 million in public and private financing, creating a diverse portfolio of monoclonal antibody clinical programs for the treatment of life-threatening and debilitating diseases, and establishing alliances with leading biopharmaceutical companies that generated over $200 million in upfront payments. Dr. Dahiyat holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Caltech and B.S. and M.S.E. degrees in Biomedical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University. He has co-authored numerous scientific papers in the fields of protein design and drug delivery, is an inventor of over 30 US and numerous foreign patents, and has received scientific awards from the American Chemical Society, the Controlled Release Society, the Protein Society and Caltech.

Oliver Olson, 1200 Pharma

Oliver received a doctorate of biology from Caltech for his research of how mitochondrial shape is regulated. He performed his research in the laboratory of David Chan. Oliver and his research were supported by the NIH’s Kirchstein National Research and Service Award fellowship and also by the American Physiological Society’s Porter Pre-doctoral Fellowship. After graduating, Oliver joined Caltech’s Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate Partnerships, where he managed the patent prosecution and licensing of Caltech’s life science and chemistry technologies. In January of 2018, he left Caltech and joined 1200 Pharma, which is a Caltech startup developing oncotherapeutics using chemistry developed in the Brian Stoltz lab. Oliver manages 1200’s patent portfolio and 1200’s discovery pipeline. Oliver is a registered patent agent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Victor Pikov, Medipace Inc

Victor Pikov is a CEO of Medipace Inc, a Pasadena-based startup company developing implantable neuromodulation therapies for intestinal, auto-immune, and metabolic diseases. Prior to that, for the past three years Victor worked at Galvani Bioelectronics and GlaxoSmithKline, where he oversaw development and testing of implantable pulse generators and stimulation leads (nerve cuffs and percutaneous electrodes) for several clinical applications, including auto-immune and metabolic diseases. Prior to that, while at the Huntington Medical Research Institutes (2002-2015), Victor evaluated the neural interfaces for various chronic diseases, such as infertility, bladder paralysis, bladder spasticity/hyperreflexia, hearing and vision loss, tinnitus, obstructive sleep apnea, and obesity. His PhD work at Georgetown University (1995-2000) was on the spinal control of bladder voiding and postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology (2000-2002) was on optogenetic viral vectors for neuronal stimulation. Victor holds several patent applications for non-invasive glucose measurement device and neuromodulation therapies for several diseases.

Paul Sargeant, Clearbridge Biophotonics FPM Inc.

Dr. Sargeant is a seasoned, international life-sciences senior executive with varied startup and Fortune 100/500 successes globally including with Medtronic, Terumo, ThermoScientific and Clearbridge Health Pte Ltd. He has raised over USD$100M in venture capital and private equity financings, institutional investment and a recent listing on the Singapore Exchange (SGX). Dr. Sargeant’s career has been at the interface of high-technology and science and the business, investment and commercial realms where he leveraged a PhD in the biological sciences from Cambridge, UK combined with over 23 years of startup and corporate expertise. Dr. Sargeant is the founder of two successful management consulting firms with clients including Medtronic, Terumo and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation where he worked extensively in Africa. He has successfully identified, negotiated and closed 7 company/technology acquisitions and the $2.625BN sale of a major Swedish medical device company to a Japanese acquirer and successfully negotiated in- and out-license deals with the top 100 pharma/biotech companies globally. Dr. Sargeant has initiated and run three startups as CEO to profitable revenue-generating phases, including securing funding, team creation, strategy & business plans and closed strategic partnerships.