ANN ARBOR – EDF Ventures, a member of the Michigan Venture Capital Association, knew it would be challenging to find the right CEO for its portfolio company Lycera, an Ann Arbor-based pre-clinical stage pharmaceutical company formed to license technology pioneered at the University of Michigan. And it had nothing to do with the demanding job description.
“Since virtually all of Lycera’s seed funding was dedicated to advancing the company’s science toward a product, without the MVCA our search would have been limited to networking,” said Mary Campbell, managing director of EDF Ventures. “While networking can be successful, by definition, the universe is limited. We wanted to do a national search and have many good choices.”
Using the $150,000 MVCA CEO Placement loan award and its own match component, EDF Ventures hired a Boston-based recruiting firm to supply top-tier candidates culled from a national search. Lycera, a longtime EDF Ventures-backed company, chose Dr. Mitchell Fink. Most recently, Dr. Fink has been the CEO of Logical Therapeutics, a venture-backed pharmaceutical company which he co-founded.
Prior to Logical, Dr. Fink founded Critical Therapeutics, also venture-backed, where he was a member of the Board of Directors and a Scientific Advisor. Dr. Fink is a world-renowned scientist whose expertise has been long recognized and admired by Lycera founder Gary Glick, PhD. Dr. Glick, Werner E. Bachmann Collegiate Professor of Chemistry at U-M and Lycera’s CEO until the recruitment of Dr. Fink, will become the company’s Chief Scientific Officer.
“The MVCA support was critical to Lycera’s ability to launch a national search to find the best CEO available,? Campbell said. ?The search met with success and Dr. Fink is now on board. Since finding a CEO was a condition of bringing together a very attractive series A round of financing, the MVCA indirectly helped the company’s financing prospects as well.”
For more information, click on MichiganVCA.Org
a>>
