Happy Holidays! With just under 3 weeks until the 4th annual RESI San Francisco, LSN is proud to announce this year's crop of innovative new life science companies participating in the RESI Innovation Challenge.

The RESI Innovation Challenge covers startups in therapeutics, medtech, diagnostics and healthcare IT companies from around the globe. All applicants are vetted based on not only the quality of the company's scientific work, but also the strength of the management team and how well-positioned the company is to receive investment...

Major pharma firms are increasingly looking to startups to supply new assets for their pipelines, and LSN's research has found that many are interested in inking deals at the earliest stages of drug development. Going into 2017, we found that a plurality of pharma deals announced in the previous year concerned preclinical assets.

Due to RESI's focus on early stage life science companies, the vent has become known as a venue for top pharma firms to uncover new therapeutic opportunities. At RESI San Francisco, the panel on Big Pharma will provide an opportunity to hear straight from five experienced scouts on what they're looking for, how they make deals and what makes a pharma partnership work. 

Moderated by Chris Haskell, VP, Head of West Coast Innovation Center, Bayer Healthcare, the panelists are:

• Kevin Lynch, Vice President, Search & Evaluation, AbbVie
• Chris Sheldon, Head, Oncology Search & Evaluation, AstraZeneca
• Lesley Stolz, Head, JLABS California, Johnson & Johnson Innovation
• Chris DeRespino, Director Transactions, Amgen

A large number of early stage biotechs are pursuing orphan disease indications. This trend is driven by the large number of rare diseases with either no current treatment options or severely inadequate therapies as well as the unique regulatory/development advantages available for these therapeutics. However, orphan drugs also face some unique challenges, such as clinical trial recruitment, pricing, and small market sizes. Recent developments in the space should make for an interesting year to come with the new FDA head, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, planning to eliminate the backlog of orphan drug designation requests and the halving of the orphan drug tax credit.

In the highly anticipated RESI @ JPM conference on January 9, 2018, a varied group of investors active in the orphan/rare disease space will discuss the financing and business development environment for startups working on developing drugs for orphan indications.

Moderated by Ken Kengatharan, General Partner, Atheneos Capital panelists include:

• Gregory Fond, Business Development & Licensing (Rare Diseases), Sanofi
• Ben Yerxa, CEO, Foundation Fighting Blindness
• Jose Antonio Mesa, Life Sciences Director, Caixa Capital Risc
• Basheer Zada, Business Development Manager, Brace Pharma Capital