NEWSWORTHY
Naked Biome closes $5M Series Seed Financing for microbiome treatment of acne

Led by dermatologist Dr. Emma Taylor, the Naked Biome team is developing microbiome-based acne therapeutics.  They have now closed a $5 million seed round to get them through clinical proof-of-principle.   
NEWCOMERS
SyntheX

SyntheX has a synthetic biology discovery platform for disrupting protein-protein. They design peptide-based compounds using their intracellular live/dead selection system to target the 'undruggable' space. Only 15% of the proteins within cells are considered 'druggable' by current enzymatic inhibitor drugs. Protein-protein interactions are considered 'undruggable' due to cumbersome assay readouts and the difficulty of achieving disruption with conventional small molecules. They are also select targets based on synthetic lethality - exploiting features unique and essential to tumor cells to obtain selectivity on a molecular basis.
Quartz Therapeutics

Quartz is bringing together chemical and biological expertise to develop effective therapies for patients suffering from RAS-driven cancers. They are targeting key steps in the MAPK pathway with a novel degradation technology and have plans to be in the clinic by 2019.
RECENT GRADUATIONS
Please join us as we celebrate the graduation of Whole Biome! They were one of our first tenants when we opened and we are so proud to have been a part of their road to success. Celebrations will be on Tuesday, April 25, 2017 at 3:30 PM.

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UPCOMING EVENTS
Office Hours: April 6, 2017, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

To schedule for Office Hours, please contact Donna Magnano.
Dr. Ali R. Alemozafar is an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he focuses on patent prosecution, strategic patent counseling, and IP due diligence in a wide range of technical fields, including diagnostics, therapeutics, genomics, and clean technology.

Ali received his PhD in chemical engineering at Stanford University, where he investigated the reactivity and atomic-scale changes accompanying reactions on various catalysts. During his postdoctoral research fellowship at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, he investigated the dynamics of TiOx nanoparticles and the use of gold as an oxidation catalyst. Prior to attending law school, Ali worked on data warehousing, business intelligence, and enterprise data integration.
Dr. Mike Hostetler is a partner in the SOMA and San Diego offices of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he provides strategic intellectual property counseling to more than 100 growth enterprises in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology, and information technology industries. He works with both venture-backed and public companies. His expertise includes patent strategy, patent prosecution, and patent diligence (both buy and sell side) for venture financings, public offerings, and mergers and acquisition. He has provided patent counseling in support of pharmaceutical and biotechnology, and information technology products in all stages of development, from proof of concept to regulatory approval to product launch. He leads a talented team of patent associates and patent agents that can meet virtually any technical and strategic need.
Elton Satusky is a partner in the Palo Alto office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. He specializes in public and private corporate finance and corporate law and governance. Elton also has considerable expertise in the areas of mergers and acquisitions and venture capital.
Demo Day: April 6, 2017, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
VWR Onsite: Equipment, Life Science, and Lab Chemical Specialists
 
Enjoy some refreshments and get to know your VWR Team. Learn about new products and techniques, and bring any account or ordering questions. VWR offers full solutions for all research applications including molecular biology, genomics, proteomics, microbiology, chemical analysis and synthesis.
Happy Hour: April 13, 2017, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
WuXi AppTec Sponsored Happy Hour

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As an innovation-driven and customer-focused company, WuXi AppTec provides a broad and integrated portfolio of services to help worldwide customers and partners shorten the discovery and development time and lower the cost of drug and medical device R&D through cost-effective and efficient solutions. WuXi's platform is enabling nearly 3,000 innovative collaborators from more than 30 countries to bring innovative healthcare products to patients. Their mission is to continue strengthening their open-access capability and technology platform enabling anyone and any company to discover and develop pharmaceuticals and healthcare products benefiting patients.
Lunch Seminar: April 18, 2017, 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
Amgen Innovator Series:
Scalable cell engineering via ultrasonic microfluidic vortex shedding

Ryan S. Pawell
CEO, Indee


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Cell-derived gene therapies (CDGTs) - cell-based therapies requiring an intracellular delivery step - offer the opportunity to radically impact patient outcomes across several challenging disease areas. A potential limitation in the application and distribution of these therapies is their ability to be manufactured in a scalable and affordable manner.

Indee is working to address this problem by developing an intracellular delivery platform that scales up and out to meet the demands of the diseased patient populations by delivering functional macromolecules (DNA, RNA, endonucleases, etc.) to therapeutically­ relevant cell types (HSCs, iPSCs, T­Cells, etc.).
Ryan Pawell is an Eagle Scout, engineer, inventor and scientist turned biotech entrepreneur. He is an alumni of Y Combinator's Winter 2017 cohort and recently submitted his PhD on biomicrofluidics. Ryan is a graduate the NSW Health Ignition Medical Program. He completed a BSci Mechanical Engineering at UC Santa Barbara while working with NuVasive and Inogen on medical device development. More recently, Ryan raised a meaningful amount of both private and venture financing to develop biomicrofluidic devices for scalable cellular engineering.
Lunch Seminar: April 20, 2017, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
An Introduction to Risk Management
Harvard Risk Management Corporation

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Legal protection when you need it: Life is unpredictable. You never know what's around the corner. LegalShield gives you the confidence of knowing whatever comes your way, your law provider is there when you need it.
Azita Alavi, Regional Manager. Azita Alvai joined Harvard Risk Management Corporation in October 2016. She has over 14 years of working expericne in the federal government, teaching with a Masters of Arts in French Literature and Language as ell as an accounting designation. Azita purchased membership with LegalShield in October and was impressed by the level of expertise and professionalism of the services she received. She decided to accept the job offer to join the company as the Regional Manger, recruiting agents and helping families and employees equip themselves with legal protection and peace of mind they deserve in a very affordable manner.
Bob Nissim, Regional Vice President. Bob spent 25 years in the investment business as a bond trader and portfolio manager with both local and global firms. He has been self-employed since 2002 and has worked with Harvard Risk Management as a Certified Risk Management Consultant since 2008. Bob is going to share with you how identify theft can quickly become a legal issue. The costs of cleaning up the mess can be expensive. To defend against this, he is also going to share with you how you and your family can have a top rated law firm on your side 24/7/365 for just pennies a day.
Seminar: April 27, 2017, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Collaborative Bioprocess Development and Scale-Up
Todd Pray
Program Head, ABPDU


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Berkeley Lab's Bay Area community resources for collaborative bioprocess development and scale-up for microbes, proteins, chemicals, materials and biofuels.

The Advanced Biofuels (and Bioproducts) Process Demonstration Unit (ABPDU) at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Emeryville is available to industry researchers in need of bioprocess development and scale-up. The team and facilities at the ABPDU in Emeryville are experienced and flexible enough to accommodate nearly any feedstock and produce and purify nearly any type of biobased product, from small molecule chemicals to proteins, plastics and microbial consortia. The ABPDU has worked with 30 companies over the past three years, to help advance their technology and corporate development. One of our mandates is to search out and identify new technologies and partnerships we can help develop, in order to advance the commercialization of new bioproducts in an accommodating environment with startup-friendly cost and IP structures.
Throughout his career Todd has been committed to developing bioscience technologies that improve human health and environmental sustainability across a broad spectrum of pharmaceutical, food science and renewable fuel and chemical product R&D programs. As Program Head at ABPDU, his role is to lead the development and execution of R&D projects with clients and collaborators.

Prior to the ABPDU, Todd spent a year at Impossible Food, Inc., a cutting-edge Bay Area start up in the emerging food biotech space, as Sr. Director of Product Development. Before his time there, Todd progressed through several roles at Amyris, Inc., most recently as Senior Director of Product Management. Todd helped direct strategic collaborations for bio-based fuel and chemical product development and scale-up with the US Department of Energy and as a Steering Committee member for Amyris' commercial partnerships with Total New Energies and Beta Renewables.

Before entering the renewable fuel and chemical industry Todd was a scientist and project leader at a number of Bay Area pharmaceutical and biotech companies such as Rigel, Exelixis and Acumen Pharmaceuticals. In this role he developed pre-clinical and clinical products in therapeutic indications as diverse as oncology, Hepatitis C virus, and Alzheimer's disease.
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