MTI LIVE: BioTools

Chad is Vice President at RCT Ventures. He is responsible for sourcing, evaluating, planning, and managing RCT’s life sciences investments. Chad’s focus has been on investment opportunities in platform technologies used in drug discovery, development, and manufacturing as well as laboratory reagents, instruments, cells, and other research products used in the laboratory setting. Recent investments include Halo Labs, seqWell, and TD2.

Bill Snider is a Partner at BroadOak and leads the firm’s growth capital investing activities. Mr. Snider has more than 20 years of institutional investment experience. Prior to BroadOak, he was a general partner and co-founder of Emerging Technology Partners, LLC, a life sciences focused venture capital firm. Prior to ETP he was a vice president and portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price, where his responsibilities included managing $2 billion of mutual fund and institutional client portfolios.

Jenny is the founder and managing partner of Genoa Ventures, where she leverages her unique toolkit of genetics domain expertise, strategic business acumen, and venture investing to launch and empower the next generation of category-defying companies at the convergence of technology and biology. Jenny loves working with teams of brilliant scientists and engineers to transition great ideas and technologies into great products and companies. She earned her Ph.D. in Genetics from Yale University and her B.S. in Physics from Georgia Tech.

Charlie Purtell is Vice President New Ventures at Danaher Innovation Center. He has 30 years of experience working across a breadth of biotech related companies from industrial enzymes, to bioinformatics, to drug discovery and development, to bio analytical tools. During the last 11 years at Danaher, Charlie has spent half his time in M&A, a few years heading up strategy and business development for billion dollar operating companies – Sciex and Beckman Coulter and the last 4 years starting up Danaher’s corporate venture group. Charlie heads up investments on east coast in life sciences and diagnostics and serves on multiple board of directors and advising numerous start ups.

Don Kakuda is a Business Development Director at Thermo Fisher Scientific focusing on external partnering relationships in the area of cell biology, including cell & gene therapy, nucleic acid delivery, cell models, cell culture media & supplements, and cell culture workflow solutions comprising reagents and instruments.

Don has licensing, start-up formation, and technology transfer experience working as a Licensing Officer at UC San Diego’s Technology Transfer Office and as a Commercialization Manager at UniQuest Pty Ltd, based at the University of Queensland, Australia.
He was a board director for university start-up companies including: Vaxxas Pty Ltd, Dendright Pty Ltd (Chairperson), Progel Pty Ltd (Chairperson), Polyvacc Pty Ltd and Bio Energy Solutions Pty Ltd. Don managed university start-up companies including: Neurotide Pty Ltd and VasCam Pty Ltd, and worked in Product Development at ForBio Research Pty Ltd.

Don is a registered Australian and New Zealand patent and trademark attorney and worked with Fisher Adams Kelly (now part of Spruson & Ferguson) in Australia, focusing on biotech innovations.

He received a Ph.D. from UC San Diego, Biomedical Sciences program, was a postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego and The University of Queensland, and completed his undergraduate Biology degree at UC Santa Barbara.

Patrick Schneider, Ph.D., is Head of Strategy, Business Development and Innovation for the Research Solutions Business Unit, and Chair of the Life Science Innovation Board as well as Chair of the Connected Lab and Gene Editing and Novel Modalities Promise Ventures at MilliporeSigma. His teams develop a wide range of research reagents, specialty chemicals, analytical instruments and kits for protein detection and biomarker discovery, as well as disposable devices and kits for sample preparation and processing, while also leading the Business Unit strategy development.

As Chairman of the Innovation Board and Promise Ventures, he leads the review of important scientific trends, oversees the performance of innovation across Life Science, and ensures cross-business collaboration.

Over 20 years of leadership experience with MilliporeSigma, he has held various leadership roles in R&D, business development, management of research reagents portfolio and new business initiatives. Prior to MilliporeSigma, Patrick was the Vice President of R&D and Business Development for Research Reagents at Serologicals. Past appointments include Chief Scientific Officer at Chemicon International and Vice President of Genome Biosciences.

Ryan was trained in genetics and cell biology at the University of California at Davis. Since 1988 he has worked in several biotechnology companies and as an independent biotech consultant focused on adding value to early stage therapeutic and technology efforts. Early in his career Ryan worked in teams that applied cutting edge genetic engineering technologies to advance the development of gene therapy and cellular therapeutics.

In 2002 Ryan transitioned to research and product development for biopharmaceutical instrumentation, where he held customer-facing positions related to the introduction of novel technologies. In this role, Ryan grew to be a recognized expert in label-free biosensors, presented at numerous international scientific conferences, and was invited to chair several scientific symposia. Ryan is co-inventor of five US patents, has published multiple scientific communications, developed many applications for the drug discovery market, and lead collaborations worldwide with well-known pharmaceutical research teams from companies like Merck, Amgen, J&J, Novartis and AstraZeneca.

After spending 30 years in management positions of leading biotech, pharma and diagnostic companies, Oliver opened his own boutique consultancy called ODICON. He support small and mid-size companies in their early setup and growth phases with focus on operations, covering disciplines such as manufacturing, QC, SCM, LCM, logistics and planning.
His target is to develop sustainable strategies and solutions and support my customers in programme definition as well as execution of projects.

Dr. Stephane Budel is a partner at DeciBio Consulting with over 20 years of combined experience in life science business consulting, entrepreneurship and academic research. He specializes in helping companies commercialize novel and disruptive technologies in the life science research tools and diagnostic spaces, with a focus on precision medicine applications. He has deep genomics expertise, especially as it relates to the impact of next generation sequencing. He has supported clients facing a broad range of challenging business issues, including large scale strategies and commercial due diligences. Dr. Budel earned his Ph.D. from Yale University for his research on the molecular mechanisms of schizophrenia.

Onyi brings robust experience in the Diagnostics and Life Science space with progressively increasing responsibilities in R&D, Sales, Commercial Excellence, and Marketing. As a Marketing Director at Beckman Coulter, she is responsible for driving marketing strategy and execution for $500M+ clinical chemistry and immunoassay business. She led commercialization of 5 COVID-19 assays and spearheaded a team to develop and execute Test Menu Expansion program to grow incremental assay revenue to a goal of $9M. She served as a key member of the Radiometer America leadership team overseeing Commercial Excellence where she was instrumental in driving a culture of continuous improvement and working cross-functionally to establish the framework for the global customer experience strategy. Onyi began her career at Zymo Research developing and launching patented products for nucleic acid analysis and extraction before she was promoted to spearhead global marketing initiatives. In her sales role at VWR, Onyi planned and oversaw strategies to drive growth in VWR’s proteomics, genomics, cell biology, and microbiology portfolios where she consistently exceeded targets.