PharmaTelevision - Merck Serono: Launching a New Corporate Venture Fund

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Video title: Merck Serono: Launching a New Corporate Venture Fund

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In this episode of PharmaTelevision News Review, Paul Larsmon talks with Roel Bulthuis, Head at Merck Serono Ventures.

Filmed at BIO-Europe 2009, they discuss:

• Merck Serono's new corporate venture fund
• the motives behind the new venture fund
• how investees can still develop other partnerships
• a typical deal for Merck Serono under the new fund model
• how early Merck Serono invests in 'early stage' biotechs

Full video transcripts are available with PharmaTelevision Premium Content. Click here to buy a subscription or sign up for a 14 day free trial.

Merck Serono Ventures's new corporate venture fund.

Paul Larsmon:

Hello and welcome to BIO-Europe 2009 here in the Austrian capital of Vienna. With me is Roel Bulthuis of Merck Serono Ventures, welcome. You've just launched a corporate venture fund for emerging biotech's, tell me a little bit about it?

Roel Bulthuis:

It's a strategic corporate venture fund that we launched it's a relatively small 40 million Euros corporate venture fund that we put in place earlier this year. We launched it as you just said in March of this year to invest in early stage biotech companies with the focus obviously on the areas, the therapeutic areas that Merck Serono Ventures is most active in, so the focus for us is to invest in drug discovery, drug development and technology that can lead to discovery in the fields of Neurodegenerative Diseases, Oncology, Autoimmune & Inflammatory Diseases, Endocrinology and Fertility. We are looking to do these deals quite early as you can see from the size of the fund and the commitments that we can therefore take in companies it's important for us to get involved with companies at the seed stage, series A stage type of investment where I think we can have an important contribution both in terms of funding these companies, but also in terms of using our R&D assets, our R&D organization support the development of technologies and our products.

Paul Larsmon:

What's different about this fund to other ways of funding small biotech's?

Roel Bulthuis:

I think, I think in a broad sense it works along the same structures as any traditional VC or any other corporate venture fund. We do invest in the same types of equities, we don't take rights or options to technology, it's really based on building relationship with entrepreneurs that could lead to strategic collaborations on a later point in time, where it is different I think is in the investment model where we aim to build a venture relationship at the early stages fund technologies for three, four-years until we see them mature to the level where the data would justify file a licensing deal, strategic collaboration potentially an M&A transaction at that point we are certainly looking to expand our exposure to this, to the asset to the company, but we will do that through different ways so we can do a licensing deal at that point, we could even take equity as part of the licensing deal part of the philosophy at most probably at that, if we have a broader interest in the a technology we also want to own part of the company that, that develops the technology, so that's certainly possible and for those equity components we are certainly not restricted to the, to the venture funding.

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Roel Bulthuis
Head
Merck Serono Ventures

Merck Serono Ventures

Merck Serono is the division for innovative small molecules and biopharmaceuticals of Merck KGaA. Merck Serono’s global headquarters are located in Geneva, Switzerland. In the United States and Canada, the division operates as EMD Serono.