Dealmakers work below the radar with early stage partners
Large scale, late stage deals always steal the headlines and news of these agreements can move markets. Yet for business development executives at big pharma and venture capital firms, the real action is with upstream opportunities in meetings taking place at BIO-Europe Spring® 2009.
“Partnering starts with science scouts who are trolling their territories to find gems for us,” according to Pamela Demain, the Executive Director for Corporate Licensing at Merck & Co. who said three scouts were with her team in Milan to explore opportunities and renew contacts at the meeting.
Regina Hodits, Life Sciences Partner with Atlas Venture, said four people from her company were attending one-to-one meetings at the event seeking out opportunities to build up companies and novel programs from scratch.
“These kinds of candidates are here, giving us the opportunity to screen 20 potential investment opportunities in a very short period of time,” she said counting off the scheduled appointments on her agenda.
“Doing this otherwise would require significant travel and time,” she said. It is easier for her group to have informal meetings at the conference as opposed to calling up companies to set a meeting, she said.
“That can send too strong a signal,” Dr. Hodits said, adding that Atlas Venture may only be interested in catching up with a company when that company is not in a fundraising phase in order to stay close to developments.
Demain with Merck said what the industry calls ‘early stage’ or ‘pre-clinical’ is often what researchers at academic institutions attending BIO-Europe Spring have in their briefcases. Establishing contact with them in an informal setting allows the Merck team to begin a process of nurturing and advising on a potential candidate “to move a project forward to the point where a pharma company can become interested in it.”
The trend of partnering to include upstream research stage projects is highlighted by a casual search through the BIO-Europe Spring partneringONE™ database of participants using the term ‘university’,”for example. This search revealed 114 organizations with a connection to academic research institutions featuring 131 biotech/pharma products, 57 medtech products, and 62 technologies.
That list includes Copenhagen University, Hokkaido University (Sapporo, Japan ), Leiden University (the Netherlands), the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland, the University of Milan, the University of Valladolid (Spain), and Rutgers University, representing a wide scope and geographic reach of participation in the event.
Also among the candidates for big pharma and VC scouts to consider are companies associated with university technology transfer departments, examples include:
- B.G.Negev Technologies from Ben-Gurion University (Israel)
- WntResearch AB (Lund, Sweden) started last year to commercialize inventions based on small molecule synthetic peptides from Lund University
- Officina Biotecnologica from the University of Verona
- Pacific Biometrics, Inc. from the University of Washington
- FIBREX Medical Inc. a development stage bio-pharmaceutical company to develop and commercialize innovative therapeutics linked to the Medical University Vienna.
Related Posts
No related posts.