Felix Frueh, Ph.D., Partner
Dr. Felix Frueh is a well-respected thought leader in personalized medicine with over twenty years of R&D, management, and policy experience. Formerly, he was Chief Scientific Officer at Human Longevity, Inc. where he helped lead the company's scientific efforts to harness state-of-the-art DNA sequencing with machine learning, to help change medicine to a more data-driven science. Previously, he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Boston-based venture capital firm, Third Rock Ventures. Dr. Frueh is the former President of the Medco Research Institute, where he led the PBM’s research initiatives in health economics and outcomes research after having formed Medco’s personalized medicine R&D organization. Prior to Medco, he was the first Associate Director for Genomics at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where he oversaw the development and implementation of policies around biomarker qualification and companion diagnostics. Dr. Frueh is a Board member at Enterome Biosciences, Ariana Pharmaceuticals, Intellos Health, and CredibleMeds, Inc., and also served on the Board of the Personalized Medicine Coalition. He is a Fellow of the American College of Clinical Pharmacology and was a faculty member at Georgetown University in Washington, DC and at the University of North Carolina. Felix is a published author on over 30 peer-reviewed articles. Dr. Frueh received his education at Stanford University and the University of Basel in Switzerland, where he graduated magna cum laude in biochemistry.
Laura Hunter, Esq., Partner
Laura has over 25 years of executive experience in life science law, corporate development and strategic financing. Most recently, she served as Chief Legal Officer and VP of Corporate Development and Government and Legislative Affairs for Proove Biosciences where she worked with Brian Meshkin and Khanh Nguyen as she was helping lead corporate governance, strategic partnerships, compliance, and strategy. Previously, Laura has been General Counsel and VP of Government and Legislative Affairs for global specialty pharmaceutical company, Obagi Medical Products, where she built the government affairs practice and led them through an acquisition by Valeant Pharmaceuticals. Earlier in her career, she was the Managing Partner of the Business and Technology Practice and Co-Chair of the Life Science Practice at the international law firm, Brobeck, where she represented a broad range of companies in the healthcare and life sciences sectors, including specialty pharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostics, health care IT and services companies. She was involved in approximately 75 IPOs and raised over $1 billion in corporate financings for various healthcare companies representing both companies and investors and underwriters. Over her career, she has advised numerous investment groups and venture capital funds on due diligence, strategy, and new venture creation. She earned her undergraduate degree in Business from the University of San Diego and her law degree (J.D.) from the University of California at Davis School of Law.
Brian Meshkin, Managing Partner
Brian Meshkin's social entrepreneurship began as an award-winning youth activist. At 13 years of age following the tragic death of a friend in front of his home, he led the lobbying effort to pass the nation's first bicycle helmet law for children. Following this tragedy, he worked with the National Safe Kids Campaign (now called Safe Kids Worldwide), along with many others to advocate for similar efforts across the nation. Today, Brian has become an award-winning entrepreneur and technology executive. He has been recognized nationally and locally for his achievements, having founded and led some of the fastest growing technology companies in North America - ranked in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and the Inc. 500. The Baltimore Sun selected Brian as one of five "Earthly Angels" for his positive impact. He was chosen as the 2016 Emerging Technology Company CEO of the Year by the OC Tech Alliance/OCTANe, as a 2016 Excellence in Entrepreneurship Winner from the OC Business Journal, and a two-time finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Previously, Brian was a Team Leader at the e.Lilly venture fund, a division of Eli Lilly, former manager of digital health for Johnson & Johnson’s largest product, and helped direct marketing efforts for Prometheus Laboratories. As a pioneer in big data and precision medicine, he founded Proove Biosciences which created the world’s largest clinical-genetics database of over 150,000 pain patients. Proove's R&D efforts involved leading academic centers across North America and won research awards from leading medical societies. In 2010, Brian became the youngest ever-elected school board member for one of the nation's leading school systems. He is graduate of the University of Maryland at College Park.
Khanh Nguyen, Partner
Khanh Nguyen has over 25 years’ experience as a technologist, 20 years of which as CTO and CIO. He started programming at a young age, was integral to the formation of the Internet backbone, and has worked with some of Southern California's most successful technology entrepreneurs. His accomplishments have been featured twice on the Discovery Channel. Most recently, Khanh was CTO of Proove Biosciences where he worked with Brian Meshkin and Laura Hunter as he led the team which built the cloud-based technology responsible for collecting, analyzing, and securely storing the world's largest clinical-genetic database of pain patients. Previously, he was with leading technology firms, Freedom Communications and Western Digital, as well as non-profit organizations like Michael Milken's venture to help build out technology infrastructures for educational institutions across the nation, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he developed a 200+ node supercomputer processing real-time data from one of NASA's first space-bound interferometer telescopes, which became the basis for the WIDAR supercomputer at the VLA interferometer telescope. As an entrepreneur, he has worked with former AMD CTO, Fred Weber, where he developed a big data marketing analytics system; Dr. Drew Pinsky of MTV Loveline, where he built an online collaborative community platform to address health issues with young to middle age adults which became the precursor to online social media websites, gaining over 1MM subscribers within 9 months before MySpace and Facebook reached 200k users; Guy Kawasaki of Garage.com Ventures; Softbank Ventures; Sky Dayton, founder of Earthlink; and Bill Grossman's IdeaLabs. Khanh is a graduate of the University of California at Irvine.
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