Brian Johnston - Somogenics

Todd Wipke - UCSC Chemistry/Discover Grant program.

David Deamer - UCSC Biochemistry: proteins, origins of life. the human genome project.

Tony Fink - UCSC Biochemistry: brain proteins

Marc Canabou - Earlybird - Biotech Venture Capital

Moderator: Don Steiny

Anyone will tell you that biotech is one of the the hottest technology around, but what is it really? What are people doing? How is it funded? What are the opportunities for investors? What are the opportunity for entrepreneurs?

The Central Coast chapter of International AngelInvestors.Org is continuing its monthly series of events to bring together resources to start and grow businesses in the Central Coast area by bringing together businesses, investors and experts with an interest in biotech to explore some of these issues.

Our panel:

Moderator: Brian Johnston - President/CEO of Somogenics. Brian is a PhD and an associate professor or pediatrics at Stanford. Somogenics has new processes for terminating RNA.

Todd Wipke: Todd is a UCSC chemistry professor. Todd is co-founder of Molecular Design Ltd. The company provides database software to the chemical industry. He will be speaking about the Discover Grant program, which has $20 million to fund research in Biotech and Life Sciences information technology.

Marc Canabou: Marc is a senior associate of Earlybird. He focuses on life sciences investments with a specific interest in enterprise software applications. While at Earlybird he has been involved in the firm's investments in Entelos (system biology company developing in silico models of human disease), Calypso Medical Technologies (tumor targeting system for radiation and surgical oncology) and iScribe (physician prescribing application on handheld PDA). He gained early-stage company experience as a co-founder and director of Strategy & Business Development for Queestium, an e-health start-up incubated by HealthNet, the fourth largest health insurance company.

The following companies will present their business plans.

1747 - 1747 is a leader in direct-to-participant clinical trials conducted directly with participants by means of the Internet. 1747's founders have decades of experience in teaching research methodology and conducting standard clinical trials for industry and the NIH. Eli Lilly is currently 1747's customer. 1747 will be presented by Naomi Fried. Naomi earned her BS in chemistry from UCB, and her PhD from MIT in Materials Science Engineering.

Medsphere - Medsphere(TM) is a healthcare informations system (HIS) company that provides a fully integrated suite of software products and associated services for managing clinical, financial and administrative data for delivery networks, hospitals and clinics. Kris Duggan, COO, will be presenting. Kris is an MBA and formerly of Deloitte & Touche.

Endoscopic Technologies, Inc. is a medical technology company focused on developing and marketing products to enable surgeons to perform heart surgeries using the least invasive methods possible. Art Bertolero, PhD will be presenting. This company was the overall winner out of 24 companies from many fields at IAI's Two Page Executive Summary workshop.

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