Building Biotechs - Mixer & Discussion on Building and Funding Biotechs

We're very pleased to announce the first meeting in our series called "Building Biotechs" which focuses on the opportunities and challenges facing those who are pushing the frontier of modern science forward. Please come and join us and share your perspectives on the journey from the lab bench through to commercialization!

We'll be hosting the first meeting in the new Berkeley Biolabs space in Southwest Berkeley.

Short speaker talks will be covering the following topics:

1. Raising non-dilutive financing (SBIR's and other Grants)

2. Crowd based financing for Biotechnology

3. Raising Angel and VC investment for your Biotech company/project

Speakers:

http://photos2.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/5/c/1/4/600_314243572.jpeg John Schloendorn, PhD founded Gene And Cell Technologies in 2013 and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Prior to founding Gene And Cell Technologies, John was the CEO of ImmunePath, a venture-backed regenerative medicine startup. At ImmunePath, John oversaw the development of immune cell therapies from embryonic stem cells from 2009 to 2012.

John also served as the Director of SENS Foundation’s intramural Research Center from 2006 to 2009, where he oversaw the development of enzyme therapies for age-related storage diseases and a variety of other projects through the pre-clinical stages. A native of Germany, John holds a Green Card under the National Interest Waiver, a program designed to retain technology leaders considered of national interest to the USA. At 34, he is author of several pubmed-indexed publications and inventor on several active patent applications.

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Elizabeth Iorns, PhD is an Australian scientist, entrepreneur and researcher, and the founder and CEO of Science Exchange, a Silicon Valley startup which operates a platform to allow scientists to outsource their research to scientific institutions such as university facilities or commercial contract research organizations. Science Exchange has received considerable media attention since it first launched in August 2011, particularly following its participation in the Y Combinator incubator program in Summer 2011 and its role in launching the Reproducibility Initiative in Summer 2012. Iorns has been profiled in many leading publications including Nature, FastCompany, the San Francisco Business Times and Xconomy. Iorns lives in Palo Alto, California, where Science Exchange is now headquartered.

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Antony Evans in the CEO and Co-Founder of Glowing plants, the most successful DIY Bio project funded on Kickstarter (raising over $480k) and covered in Scientific American, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Wired, Nature and many other publications. Antony has an MBA with Distinction from INSEAD, an MA in Maths from the University of Cambridge and is a graduate of Singularity University’s GSP program. He is both a Louis Frank and Oppidan scholar and worked for six years as a management consultant and project manager at Oliver Wyman and Bain & Company. Prior to Glowing Plants he co-founded the world’s first pure mobile microfinance bank in the Philippines and launched a mobile app in partnership with Harvard Medical School.

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Ethan Perlstein, PhD, Independent Scientist, Head of the Perlstein Lab and consultant to Microryza (a science crowd financing platform). Ethan focuses on the intersection of cell biology, personalized medicine and quantitative evolutionary theory – a cross-disciplinary perspective he calls evolutionary pharmacology. His team deploy rapidly advancing DNA sequencing, targeted chemical synthesis and phenotypic screening technologies to enable human disease-ortholog discovery in the powerful model eukaryote budding yeast, though this approach over time will be extended to more complex model organisms.

Moderators:

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Jun Axup, PhD, is a Protein Engineer working at Sutro Biopharma and aspiring entrepreneur living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a Ph.D. in chemical biology from the Scripps Research Institute and a B.S. in biochemistry from Indiana University. Her research involves developing next-generation antibody-based cancer therapeutics via unnatural amino acids.

Jun created Biochemies (http://biochemies.com/), a science outreach and education startup that makes interactive DNA toys and is active in many communities, such as Science Hack Day (http://sciencehackday.com/) and Quantified Self (http://quantifiedself.com/).

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Ryan Bethencourt is CEO of Berkeley Biolabs and a Managing Partner at LITMUS Clinical Research where he oversees strategic growth initiatives for the company. Ryan works in the clinical, biotech hardware and next generation healthcare space as part of his current work and consulting.

Ryan has held strategic positions at Cephalon (BD), Genescient Pharmaceuticals (COO), Halpin Neurosciences (CEO and co-founder), ICON (BD), Merck, PAREXEL (BD), Pfizer and Quintiles. During his time in the biotech/pharma industry, Ryan has worked with large and emerging biotech firms to efficiently and effectively manage clinical research programs from initial IND through to FDA approval.

Ryan is also co-founder of two non-profits in the San Francisco Bay Area focused on advancing STEM and biotechnology education, Sudo Room which is a community Tech hackerspace in Downtown Oakland and Counter Culture Labs which an emerging Biotech non-profit group focused on Citizen science. Ryan is also a published author in the field of biotechnology business development and speaker on innovative biotechnology business models.