As funders of early-stage medical research, HRA member organizations play a pivotal role in moving promising science from the lab toward real-world impact. A journey that everyone agrees takes too long and costs too much. This webinar is designed to help close one underappreciated gap in that process: the difference in how non-dilutive funders i.e. NIH and philanthropic grant-making organizations and dilutive investors such as angels and venture capitalists understand and use the same language.

Terms like milestones, progress, pivot, timeline and success may sound universal, but they carry very different meanings and expectations depending on who is at the table. By bridging this understanding gap, we can set clearer expectations with our grantees, design more effective funding strategies, and ultimately deploy our resources in ways that move more promising therapies from discovery to the point where larger investors are ready to step in and take them forward.

Guest Speakers

• Dana Upton, PhD – Scientific Consultant, Non-dilutive funding, Eva Garland Consulting
  Dr. Dana Upton excels at aligning both scientific and business objectives to help clients successfully advance their technologies. Her scientific training focused on DNA damage, repair, and replication in the context of cancer biology, immunology, and virology. Dr. Upton has served as a biotechnology strategy and writing consultant for early-stage companies and is an ASQ-certified Six Sigma Black Belt. At EGC, Dr. Upton enjoys helping companies with their commercialization strategies to transition innovative solutions from the bench to the marketplace. 
  
  
• Marie Wesselhoft – Co-Founder and Board Vice Chair, ZelosDx
  Marie Wesselhoft has spent the last fifteen years involved in the southern Arizona bio start-up community. Currently President of ZelosDx and a Mentor-in-Residence at the University of Arizona, Marie previously served as the Director for the University of Arizona Center for Innovation Business Incubator. During her 20-year career at Baxter, she held several senior management positions including General Manager of the diagnostic business unit. At Baxter she launched multiple $25-50 million diagnostic product lines. Early in Marie’s career she was a hospital laboratory director for one of the Humana facilities in the Chicago healthcare market. She earned a B.S. in Medical Technology from the University of Wisconsin, attended the University of Chicago Business School and the University of Arizona McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship.