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39 JANUARY 2015 LIFESCIENCELEADER.COM What if we only hired diabetics to work in the active cold chain? Would they take more care handling healthcare products? We think they would. They know what happens if they don't get insulin. Of course we don't just employ diabetics. But we do share their understanding of the value of what we ship in our containers. We educate the members of the active cold-chain on the difference they make to the lives of diabetics and others who rely on healthcare products. Because people do a better job when they understand the importance of why they are doing it. Gunay Hadjimehmed is a diabetic. And his son Mehmet works for us. envirotainer.com was time to migrate the research out of the university to the pharma company, which would then add its expertise. But Neoantigenics and UVA had more value to gain by taking the science further than it was when Pfizer wanted to license it, acknowledging the risk is the expense. The cost has been ~$1.1 million since the point that Pfizer wanted to license it. So the university has to ask whether the start-up has the management team and the capability to raise the money through grant funding or investment in the com- pany, or are they just going to stall or fiz- zle out and end up licensing the technolo- gy to pharma anyway. It's the university's role to make this decision. If the start-up can advance the technology, then there is a greater return for the university because it would end up with a higher royalty rate than it would have had there not been as much science proven as there is now. Dr. Herr has expertise in reproductive biology, characterizing the targets and creating antibodies to those targets. But ultimately the company will need a part- ner that has expertise in combining or conjugating those antibodies to various effectors such as antibody-drug conju- gates (ADCs), chimeric antigen receptors (CARs, artificial T cell receptors are under investigation as a therapy for cancer), or vaccines. Typically, this kind of partner would be a pharmaceutical company. This could be done with Pfizer, but it doesn't necessarily have to be Pfizer. According to Pollok, "The most likely path is that we develop the IP to the point where we de- risk the target biology for the pharmaceu- tical company partner." Neoantigenics is well on its way to fulfilling what it had pro- jected to accomplish, which was to raise $2 million and then have the antibody to a specific cancer target by end of 2014. According to Straightiff, UVA hopes for rapid progress in the partnership of Neoantigenics with the pharma experts for later-stage therapeutic development. "With Neoantigenics we were very fortunate that a very compelling strategic partnership evolved almost immediately. That gives us a great amount of confidence. L A total of 60 percent of our seed funding has been nondilutive funding. E D L E A R Y CFO, Neoantigenics