| Name | Title | Contact Details |
|---|---|---|
Jason Kawata |
Vice President of Technology, Food Division | Profile |
Ikena Oncology is a clinical-stage biotechnology company that discovers and develops patient-directed, biomarker-driven therapies for cancer patients.
Sera Prognostics is a leading proteomic and bioinformatics company dedicated to improving the lives of women and babies through precision biomarker-based tests designed to enhance pregnancy care. Sera’s vision is to deliver pivotal information in early pregnancy to physicians, to help them to improve the health of their patients and reduce costs of healthcare delivery. Sera’s PreTRM® Test reports to a physician the individualized risk of a pregnant woman to deliver prematurely, enabling earlier proactive interventions in patients with higher risk. Rigorous clinical validation of PreTRM® Test performance (accuracy of predicting premature delivery) was reported in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2016 in a U.S. cohort of 5,501 patients across 11 centers. Preterm birth is defined as any birth before 37 weeks gestation and is a leading cause of illness and death in newborns. The 2020 March of Dimes Report Card shows that of nearly 4 million babies born annually in the U.S., more than one in ten is born prematurely. Prematurity is associated with a significantly increased risk of major long-term medical complications, including learning disabilities, cerebral palsy, chronic respiratory illness, intellectual disability, seizures, vision and hearing loss, and can generate significant cost throughout the lives of affected children. The annual U.S. health care costs to manage complications of prematurity were estimated at $31.5B for 2015. Sera is also developing a robust pipeline of innovative tests focused on other complications of pregnancy. Using its advanced proprietary mass spectrometry and bioinformatics platform technologies, Sera detects biologically important protein expression differences to build high performing predictions of risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes (including preterm birth, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, growth restriction, and others).
Ben Venue Labs is a Bedford, OH-based company in the Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, and Biotech sector.
The mission of 4D Molecular Therapeutics is to design and develop transformative gene therapy products using our proprietary technology to create novel adeno-associated virus variants to be utilized as treatments for serious unmet medical conditions. Our products are unlocking the full potential of gene therapy to treat, and potentially cure, genetic diseases. A large number of patients and diseases, who previously were not treatable by gene therapy, will be addressable by 4D products. 4D has one of the deepest and most diverse product pipelines in the gene therapy field. Adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors have emerged as a favored delivery vehicle for gene therapy in the human body. They can deliver the genes for therapeutic proteins to accessible tissues in the body and are generally considered safe. Several AAV gene therapy products are in late-stage clinical development, and one product is approved in the EU (Glybera, Uniqure). However, these first-generation AAV vectors have limited utility for the majority of diseases. Many of these common AAV were discovered as laboratory contaminants and monkey infections, for example; they have not been customized as targeted medicines. In contrast, 4D customized AAV vectors, and the products made from them, are designed to unlock the full potential of gene therapy. Through 4D`s Therapeutic Vector Evolution, we are able to create customized vectors solutions to overcome the hurdles identified with first-generation AAV vectors. 4D is creating the ultimate gene therapy products to cure genetic diseases using new customized delivery vehicles (vectors) to shuttle genes into the cells in any organ in the body. This 4D “library” of vectors will soon include several for the liver, several for the brain, several for the heart, the eye, muscle, and so on. Doctors will be able to hand pick a vector for any patient based on the organ that is diseased.
Dendreon is a biotechnology company with a singular mission: to harness the power of the body`s immune system to safely improve and extend the lives of people battling cancer. Dendreon`s PROVENGE® (sipuleucel-T), which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in April 2010, is the only cellular immunotherapy cancer treatment available. Dendreon is working to expand the application of its technology to discover, develop, manufacture and market additional product candidates for a variety of cancers in the future. Dendreon headquarters are in in Seal Beach, California.