Registration is now closed, but you can register on-site at the Westlake Village Inn.
Wednesday, November 7th, 2012
The Biotech / Biopharm Sector
7:00 AM - 9:00 AM
From Classroom To Boardroom: How Tech Transfer Propels California's BioTech Industry
California is home to more than 2,400 biomedical/biotechnology companies, more than one third of all of the biotech companies in the nation. The sector has attracted more than $5 billion in venture capital in the last five years, employs about 270,000 Californians, and has nearly 1,000 new medicines and medical treatments in the pipeline.
As our November 7 panel discussion will explore, a big part of the reason for the health of California's biotech sector is the continual flood of breakthrough ideas and brilliant researchers produced by the state's colleges and universities.
The panel:
Davis Brimer, founder and CEO of Active Life Scientific, Inc.
Sean Caffey, MD, CEO of Replenish, Inc.
Paul Meyer, CFO of Cynvenio Biosystems, Inc.
Brent A. Reinke, corporate partner with Musick, Peeler & Garrett LLP.
All our panelists work with companies that exemplify the power of technology transfer from campus to corporation.
Davis Brimer is a founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Active Life Scientific, Inc., a Santa Barbara-based manufactuer of medical devices. Davis co-founded Active Life in July 2007 after graduating from the University of California at Santa Barbara. The company develops life science and medical instruments to take in vivo measures of the properties of bone and tissue that would otherwise be impossible to obtain.
Active Life's products are based on the research of Dr. Paul Hansma, of UC Santa Barbara's Biomedical Engineering Department. They include applications for researching the risk of bone fracture and the effects of related treatment. The company is also developing products and application for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of musculoskelatal injuries, diseases and disorders.
Sean Caffey, MD, is Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of Replenish, Inc. The Pasadena-based company is has developed a tiny drug pump (currentlyavailable only for investigation) that can be implanted in the eye, refilled every six months, and programmed and recharged wirelessly. Replenish specializes in delivery of nanoliter-sized doses of drugs delivered via the pump on a precise schedule with the goal of improving vision by maintaining a more consistent therapeutic level of drugs in the eye.
Replenish was founded in 2007 from technology developed jointly at USC and CalTech. The idea for the MicroPump originated from the National Science Foundation's Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems USC/CalTech/UCSB Engineering Research Center, or BMES, which specializes in implantable devices for neural stimulation for chronic diseases of the central nervous system.
Paul Meyer is Chief Financial Officer of Cynvenio Biosystems, Inc., based in Westlake Village. Cynvenio Biosystems was launched in 2007 on the strength of technology developed at the University of California - Santa Barbara. I
The company is commercializing methods to isolate and recover the tiny number of tumor cells from solid tissue cancers that circulate in the blood of cancer patients. This would allow those rare cells to be analyzed and used to develop individualized drug treatments to target the patient's specific cancer. If successful, recovering tumor cells from the blood would avoid the need for tissue biopsies which are invasive, expensive and impractical as a clinical tool for large numbers of patients.
Our moderator is Brent A. Reinke, a corporate partner in the Westlake Village office of Musick, Peeler & Garrett LLP. Brent is active in promoting the growth of the life sciences industry along the 101 Corridor, and is a co-founder and current chairman of the Bio Science Alliance, based in Westlake Village. His practice emphasizes the areas of mergers and acquisitions, venture capital, advising emerging growth companies, corporate securities and finance, strategic alliances and licensing. His clients are in a broad range of industries, including biotechnology and the life sciences.
California's university labs and professors were instrumental in the founding of an impressive list of biotech companies in the state, including Genentech, Celgene, Amgen and Biogen. Biotech is a high-risk, expensive area of research, but the potential payoff in everything from new drugs, disease-resistant crops and "green" products have attracted venture capital investors and major chemical and pharmaceutical companies as investment partners.
Click to listen to Lynda Roth's interview with Brent Reinke about the biotech/biopharm sector on ACG 101 Online Radio.
Registration is now closed, but you can register on-site at the Westlake Village Inn.