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Southeast Life Sciences AdvanSE Safety Protocol Update

As announced last week, we are following the situation with the Delta variant of Covid closely and remain optimistic in our ability to safely host the 2021 AdvanSE Conference in October as planned. Today we would like to update you on our safety protocol for the event.

After careful consideration and consultation with internal and external health and safety experts, Southeast Life Sciences has decided to require all attendees and staff to be fully vaccinated* to attend the event. We determined that the AdvanSE Conference can be the most robust, productive and interactive conference possible by requiring vaccinations for entry.

We have not made a decision on masks or available on-site testing, but we will continue to update you on our safety requirements as soon as possible.

We are working with Destination South, our conference planning team, on protocols, such as uploading your vaccination card, to make the process as simple as possible for you. There will be multiple ways to confirm your vaccination status.

If you are not comfortable with an in-person event, please consider registering for the virtual component. We plan to have all conference sessions available virtually starting on the morning of October 28.

Naturally, we can’t wait to see you.

*For the purposes of right of entry to AdvanSE 2021, a person is considered fully vaccinated:

2 weeks after their second dose in a 2-dose series, such as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, or
2 weeks after a single-dose vaccine, such as Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine

About Southeast Life Sciences

SLS cultivates, convenes, and connects the Southeast entrepreneurial ecosystem to foster life science innovation & investment across the region for the greater good.

We’re the network that brings all southern life science innovation together in one place: for investors, we bring your next investable opportunity; for young companies, we introduce you to your investors and potential partners; universities & corporations, move your research or innovation into the commercialization pathway; for solution providers, we bring your next clients.

We are the proud creator and producer of the AdvanSE Life Sciences Conference, an annual gathering of the most innovative life sciences companies, researchers and discriminating, accomplished investors and corporations that want to do business with them.

The 2021 AdvanSE Life Science Conference, Southeast Life Science’s flagship event, will be October 27-29, 2020 in Charleston, SC.

In 48 hours at AdvanSE, investors can see the very best of what the southeast life sciences innovation ecosystem has to offer.

Register

Seeking the Best in the Southeast Life Science Innovation Ecosystem

SE PitchRounds is Southeast Life Sciences’ presentation program held during the AdvanSE Life Sciences Conference, October 27-29 in Isle of Palms, SC (just outside Charleston).

According to pitchbook data accumulated by our leadership committee more than 400 late and early stage companies have participated in previous SE BIO and SEMDA forums. To date, they have raised more than $6 billion in public and private funding.

Companies from seed stage to those looking for expansion capital are encouraged to apply to present. It is not only a way for innovative early and later stage life science companies to highlight their technologies and interact with investors, successful applicants enjoy access to the following:

Mentoring to refine your pitches leading up to the event,
The opportunity to present to the full conference on October 28 (startup and seed stage),
The opportunity to present to breakout session attendees (later stage companies, which we define as those with Series A rounds complete or institutional investors),
In depth workshops on topics such as Your 100 Day Plan, interactive Persuasive Pitch Coaching, and more.
Networking opportunities with investors, prospective partners, and solutions providers.

We tell our investor colleagues, in 48 hours at AdvanSE, you can see the very best of what the southeast life sciences innovation ecosystem has to offer. If that’s you, apply today.

Successful applicants qualify for two deeply discounted full conference registrations.

“Three weeks before [the conference], SweetBio wasn’t even incorporated. Six months later, Innova and MB Venture Partners co-led a $900,000 seed round to support FDA 510(k) clearance and commercialization of the company’s Guided Tissue Regeneration Membrane (GTR).” – Kayla Rodriguez, COO, SweetBio. Read more.

Only applications from southeastern United States-based businesses in the life sciences will be considered. Please do not apply if you do not fit the criteria. If you have a question, please direct inquiries to Jason Rupp at jrupp@southeastlifesciences.org.

AdvanSE2021

Here are the Highlights from the Virtual 2021 SE Color Pitches/Women@SLS Conference

On Thursday, June 24, Southeast Life Sciences hosted the virtual SE Color Pitches and Women@SLS Conference that featured a dynamic group of presenters and speakers discussing some of the biggest challenges that women and minorities continue to face in the industry today.

Here are some of the key insights and takeaways from this year’s event.

SE Color Pitches Summary

Keynote with Dr. Melanie Ivarsson

Dr. Melanie Ivarsson, Senior Vice President & Chief Development Officer with Moderna, kicked off the SE Color Pitch event in a fireside chat with Dr. Jayne Morgan, Executive Director of the Covid Task Force at Piedmont Healthcare.

Melanie and Jayne started with an overview of Melanie’s career, spanning her childhood to her current position at Moderna. Melania recounts her childhood through her PhD and path to Moderna. She makes a note to compare her parent’s education opportunities, particularly for her mother, stating that education for women has moved “from a luxury, to being in the room but the minority, to where we are today.”

The discussion then turned to Moderna’s path from a relative start up to creating one of the most important products in our lifetimes. When Melanie first started at Moderna she was told that she would work on a “side project” on Covid, but within three weeks it would become the focus of the company.

Moving on, Melanie and Jayne discussed Moderna’s leadership role in health equity in their Covid vaccine clinical trial, finishing with the highest percentage of minority enrollment of any company. Melanie noted, “ you don’t have to be one of the big giants to be the one who changes the way we do things”

There was much more to the fireside chat, so be sure to watch it all here.

SE Color Pitches

The meeting continued with seven presentations from minority-led organizations based in the southeast. The winner of the event and the $10,000 prize was TruGenomix, led by Charles Cathlin. You can see the TruGenomix pitch here.

To view all of the presentations, check out our YouTube page.

Women@SLS

Mentorship vs. Championship

Deanne Kasim, Executive Director of Health Policy for Change Healthcare, touched on the key differences between having a mentor and having a champion in the workplace during her opening keynote. While mentors are always good to have, champions go above and beyond when it comes to your success. In addition to sharing advice and giving guidance as a mentor, champions are there to open doors for you and put your name in the running, playing a much more active role in your success.

“Men have evolved into natural champions and I feel like they’ve had more opportunity to do so, while women have become aces at mentoring each other,” Deanne explained.

So, how do we cross-pollinate these roles and connections between men and women? Deanne’s number one answer was networking, whether it be in-person or online. Opportunities are increasing for women in the life sciences despite the fact that it’s still a male dominated industry, so it’s crucial to continue moving forward and challenging biases by building a community of allies for the current and future generation of leaders. You can watch the opening keynote here.

Finding the right seat at the table

Tiffany Wilson, President & CEO of The Science Center, moderated the panel discussion on expanding the representation of women in the boardroom. Although there is some room for improvement in the number of women on life sciences boards, there are opportunities out there.

Tara Kochis-Stach, Slone Partners President, shared that networking is critical to find these kinds of opportunities. Being bold about what you want to do and reaching out to the people that can help you get there will create opportunities for yourself. However, making sure you’re joining the right board for you is just as crucial.

“Don’t pick whatever board offers you a position just because you want to be on a board,” stated Valerie Darling, CEO & Chief Business Officer of Life Science Management Consultants. “It needs to match with your lifestyle and current job in terms of time commitment.”

Arlene Morris, Board of Director Member for the MUSC Foundation for Research & Development, also suggested, “Interview with everyone on the board to make sure you gel with them and get along. If you know people on the board already, reach out to them to see what the environment is like.”

Watch the full panel here.

Identify the champions of your technology, and fast

The panel discussion on what early-stage companies should know as they begin sourcing their first customers, moderated by Jesse Goodwin, PhD, featured insights from Vice President of Client Success at Pieces Technologies Lehanne Doyle, Senior Director of Clinical Operations at Moterum Technologies Lauren Rashford and ASKBio CEO Sheila Mikhail.

Lehanne stressed the importance of finding several key champions in the facility to help support the change in process when your new technology is implemented. Identifying the procurement or IT personnel is also critical, as projects can easily fail because they weren’t involved early on.

Lauren agreed that relationship management is key during this process. Finding these individuals that will be doing the day-to-day tasks and having their support will help leverage and drive your technology through the system smoothly. Click here to watch the full panel.

Breast cancer treatment has come a long way, but there is always room for improvement

This year’s conference ended with a closing keynote on the evolution of care and opportunities for improvement in breast cancer, featuring presentations from Regina Hampton, MD, FACS, Medical Director of Breast Center at Doctors Community Hospital, and Nikki Jensen, Vice President at Essentially Women.

While Dr. Hampton illustrated the progress made in breast cancer treatment with the shift to patient-centered care and the passing of the Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act in 1998, Nikki touched on some of the necessary steps that have not yet been taken when it comes to fully protecting and accommodating breast cancer patients and survivors. This includes breast prostheses and how they have not yet gotten the same treatment from the CMS that other breast cancer treatments have received. Watch the closing keynote in its entirety here.

Southeast Life Sciences would like to thank everyone who participated in or attended this year’s SE Color Pitch/Women@SLS Conference, and the event sponsors who made it all possible. If you were unable to attend the live event, visit our YouTube channel to watch the recordings.

Southeast Life Sciences Announces the winner of the SE Color Pitch

July 6, 2021 – The first SE Color Pitch event, hosted by Southeast Life Sciences, was held on June 24, 2021, featuring top minority-led, early-stage life science companies from the southeast United States.

We’d like to congratulate the winner of the SE Color Pitch event, TruGenomix, which will receive the $10,000 prize, sponsored by Moderna. Presenting for TruGenomix was Charles Cathlin. CEO & Founder.

TruGenomix is a precision behavioral health company focused on advancing the diagnosis and treatment of mental health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Our behavioral health platform incorporates our core products, TruGen-1and TruBase. TruGen-1 is a 1000 gene neuropsychiatric panel, designed in collaboration with Illumina, that includes our patented markers for PTSD predisposition. TruBase is our custom-built machine learning and bioinformatics engine, which is designed to support behavioral health research, clinical decision-making, and biomarker discovery.

See the presentation HERE.

Congratulations Charles & TruGenomix!

About SE Color

SE Color, a division of Southeast Life Sciences, was established in 2020. SE Color is an organization designed to support minority life science entrepreneurship, increase investment in minority-owned life science businesses, and improve minority access to information and clinical opportunities.

About Southeast Life Sciences

In 2019, the Southeastern Medical Device Association (SEMDA) and Southeast BIO (SEBIO) officially merged to form Southeast Life Sciences. The merger created a single, unified platform for medtech and bioscience innovation, partnering and investor relations.

Southeast Life Sciences Recognizes Women’s History Month.

SLS Medtech Women AdvanSE aims to provide an infrastructure to help women achieve equity as decision-makers in the life science industry . Today, on International Women’s Day, we’d like to acknowledge & honor the many female members of Southeastern Life Sciences for all their contributions to our world. The 2021 theme of International Women’s Day is ‘Choose to Challenge,’ reminding us that we can choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality. Southeast Life Sciences encourages continuous networking, education and funding opportunities for the life-science industry to grow and evolve – and offers a salute today to it’s women membership! #choosetochallenge https://www.internationalwomensday.com/

SE Color Webinar: Beyond Tuskegee, Covid Vaccination in Communities of Color

SE Color Webinar: Beyond Tuskegee, Covid Vaccination in Communities of Color
February 25,
12:00 – 1:00 PM

REGISTER

In communities of color in the United States, there is severe distrust of the medical community that spans generations. This distrust, combined with the medical community’s lack of effort to engage and educate communities of color has resulted in significant differences between health outcomes of minorities compared to whites.

This difference has never been more apparent than in the Covid-19 pandemic. In the United States, blacks are 3 times more likely to contract and die from Covid than whites. The vaccines being developed offer a light at the end of the tunnel, yet whites have been vaccinated at a much higher rate than blacks. According to CDC data, whites are being vaccinated at a rate 3 times higher than black Americans.

Although not the only reason, trust may be a big factor in this discrepancy, 35% of Black Americans said they don’t plan to get the vaccine, citing fears about safety and concerns that the vaccines are so new. The webinar is designed to engage and educate on both Covid 19, reasons to be vaccinated, and the bigger cause of inclusion into clinical trials. We hope to take a step toward alleviating the distrust by bringing together a researcher, a clinical trial expert, and a prominent member of the black community to discuss the issues and concerns, as well as try to educate the population on the vaccine.

Panelists:

Dr. Jayne Morgan
Clinical Director, Covid Taskforce
Piedmont Healthcare

Joshua Sclar
Chief Medical Officer
BioIQ

Pastor Jeremy Tuck
Senior Pastor
Living Faith Tabernacle

Southeast Life Sciences Announces Award Winners and PitchRounds Winners for the first AdvanSE Life Sciences Conference

Southeast Life Sciences Announces Award Winners and PitchRounds Winners for the first AdvanSE Life Sciences Conference.

November 13, 2020

On the closing day of the first annual Southeast Life Sciences conference, the AdvanSE Life Sciences Conference, we want to congratulation the winners of our awards and PitchRounds.

Southeast Life Sciences awards include awards for best initial funding, best venture funding, best strategic partnership, best M&A, and best IPO. The winners of these are as follows. These awards go back more than a decade from both Southeast BIO and the Southeast Medical Device Association prior to the merger. Some of the biggest success stories from the southeast have been included in these awards and we expect the same big things with our winners this year!

For best Initial Funding (seed or angel), the winner is Acclinate Genetics, from Huntsville, Alabama.
For best Venture Funding (>$1mm from institutional investors), the winner is Embody Inc., from Norfolk, VA
For best Strategic Partnership, the winner is SiO2, of Auburn, Alabama
For best M&A, the award goes to AskBio, from RTP, NC, which was acquired by Bayer AG.
For best IPO, the award goes to Shattuck Labs, from Durham, NC and Austin, TX

SE PitchRounds this year took in more than 70 applications from across the region for only 22 slots. These 20 companies represented the most exciting technologies and some of the most experienced entrepreneurs in the region. From the initial 22, we selected four finalists that presented on the closing day of the conference. The finalists were Embody, Inc., Moterum, HeamGen, and Stuart Therapeutics.

The winners from the bipharma/diagnostic group was Stuart Therapeutics.

The winner from the medtech/digital group was Embody, Inc.

Congratulations to Everyone!

Southeast Life Sciences Launches SE Color

Southeast Life Sciences Launches SE Color
SE Color will initiate “We Are In” Campaign to encourage minorities to participate in Clinical Trials.

On September 9, Southeast Life Sciences announced the formation of SE Color, an organization dedicated to support minority life science entrepreneurship, increase investment in minority-owned life science businesses, and improve minority access to information and clinical opportunities.

The founding advisory board members are Jayne Morgan MD, Clinical Director, Covid Task Force at Piedmont Healthcare, Kornelius Bankston, Managing Partner with techPLUG, and John Newby, Chief Executive Officer for Virginia BIO. As executive director of Southeast Life Sciences, Jason Rupp will staff the organization.

SE Color’s initial effort will focus on increasing the number of minorities in clinical trials. In an article published in Healthcare Tech Outlook, Dr. Morgan notes that, “African Americans make up 13.4 percent of the US population, yet only 5 – 7 percent of clinical trial participants nationally.”

Dr. Morgan further states, “Nearly every advance in medicine today was first evaluated in a clinical trial. Clinical trials offer our best and most forward thinking and can be the gateway to provide earlier access to life saving medicines and therapies years ahead of FDA approval. Equitable participation in clinical trials is therefore a critical call to action in ensuring that medicines, devices, and vaccines that are developed are relevant to all populations.”

Although there are many aspects to facilitate minority recruitment in clinical trials, SE Color will initially focus on education through the “We Are In” campaign. The initial priority will be to share information on clinical trials available throughout the southeast. SE Color will partner with state associations in the region to ensure we have updated information and extend the network.

Southeast Life Sciences recognizes the great need for effort in these areas and though we will only be one part of the solution, we will be part of it. In closing, Bankston adds “I believe the greatest social injustice in modern history is health inequalities which disproportionately impact people of color. We can create more effective therapeutics, applications and medicines for all populations- by addressing the systemic issues in clinical research.”

Clinical Trials SE Color Southeast Life Sciences

Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath Headlines Medtech Women Conference

We are very excited to announce that our Keynote Speaker this year will be Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath, President & CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, who took over the CEO position at BIO in June, replacing Jim Greenwood. I’ve spoken to many of my former colleauges at BIO, who say she is a dynamic leader who’s hit the ground running. BIO recently annouced a new diversity & inclusion program, The Right Mix Matters, so we’re thrilled that she will close our event this year!

Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath

President & CEO
Biotechnology Innovation Organization

Michelle McMurry-Heath assumed the leadership of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) as President and CEO on June 1, 2020. A medical doctor and molecular immunologist by training, Dr. McMurry-Heath becomes just the third chief executive to steward the world’s largest biotechnology advocacy group since BIO’s founding in 1993.

The common thread in McMurry-Heath’s work across academia, government and industry has been her focus on broadening access to scientific progress so more patients from diverse backgrounds can benefit from cutting-edge innovation. Driven by her own past family experiences navigating clinical trials and funding uncertainties within the rare disease community, McMurry-Heath calls “the distribution of scientific progress the social justice issue of our age.”

She comes to BIO from Johnson & Johnson where she served as Global Head of Evidence Generation for Medical Device Companies and then Vice President of Global External Innovation and Global Leader for Regulatory Sciences. She was also instrumental in bringing J&J’s incubator, JLabs, to Washington, DC. She led a global team of 900 with responsibilities in 150 countries around the globe.

Prior to her time at J&J, Dr. McMurry-Heath was also a key science policy leader in government. The Obama-Biden transition team tapped her to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the National Science Foundation’s policies, programs and personnel. President Obama then named her associate science director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health under Commissioner Peggy Hamburg. In that role, she championed clinical trial evolution, the use of real-world evidence in product evaluation, and an embrace of the patient’s voice in health research so new medical products deliver outcomes that matter to them.

McMurry-Heath was the founding director of the Aspen Institute’s Health, Biomedical Science, and Society Policy Program, where she promoted personalized medicine and bolstered international preparation for pandemic disease threats. She received her early training in science policy from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and later served as Senator Joe Lieberman’s top legislative aide for science and health. In that role, she drafted legislation to protect the country from biological attacks.

McMurry-Heath received her MD/PhD from Duke’s Medical Scientist Training Program, becoming the first African-American to graduate from the

August 5 Covid-19 Update

Most of the trends from two weeks ago continue, with a couple of notable exceptions. Cases in Florida and Louisiana appear to be leveling off, with some decline over the last week or so in both states. With universities (potentially) opening in the next month, that trend will be tested. If cases continue to level and/or drop, this is tremendous news for this Fall.

Also notable is Alabama’s continued dramatic surge of hospitalizations remains puzzling. As you’ll see in the chart below, hospitalizations are so high that it would mean nearly everyone who tested positive over the last couple of weeks ended up in the hospital. I was skeptical two weeks ago and now I find it almost impossible to believe. Again, I checked the numbers with Alabama’s health department and the totals add up, but I remain convinced that hospitalizations were inaccurately counted for weeks or months and the data is now catching up to reality.