CT Innovations takes bioscience victory lap in New Haven

HBJ PHOTO | DAVID KRECHEVSKY Yale Ventures managing director Josh Geballe, left, introduces a panel of bioscience entrepreneurs during an event held Tuesday at BioLabs in New Haven. With Geballe are, from left, Kevin Rocco, former CEO of Biorez; Tim Shannon, co-founder of Arvinas, and Dr. Vlad Coric, CEO of Biohaven.

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By David Krechevsky

Connecticut Innovations (CI), the quasi-public state agency that provides venture capital for startups, paused its second annual Tour de Connecticut on Tuesday to celebrate its biggest bioscience wins.

The Tour de Connecticut is a 200-mile bicycle ride across the state in which CI CEO Matt McCooe, other investment team managers and special guest riders visit companies that are part of the agency’s investment portfolio. The tour kicked off Monday in Stamford with a 54-mile ride.

Tuesday, before heading off on another 50-plus mile ride, CI convened an event attended by about 40 people at BioLabs in New Haven. The event included a panel of top Connecticut bioscience leaders to discuss their successes and the state of the market.

McCooe, dressed in white shorts, sneakers and a blue T-shirt that included “Beep if you love startups” (with the word “love” replaced by a heart) on the back, introduced the panel by saying CI wants to “celebrate the successes … of the Connecticut biosciences hub,” which he noted really didn’t exist “four or five years ago.”

The discussion was moderated by Josh Geballe, managing director of Yale Ventures, and the panel featured:

Dr. Vlad Coric, CEO of Biohaven, a pharmaceutical company developing treatments for neurological diseases. Pfizer completed its acquisition of Biohaven in 2022, in a $11.6 billion transaction.
Kevin Rocco, former CEO of Biorez, a medical device company that developed and commercialized the BioBrace implant to improve tendon and ligament repair. Biorez was acquired by Conmed for $250 million in 2022, and
Tim Shannon, co-founder of Arvinas, a biopharmaceutical company developing therapeutics to treat various diseases that went public in 2018. Shannon now serves as a general partner with Canaan, a venture capital firm.

Connecticut Innovations had invested in all three.

The panelists talked about starting up their ventures, with each describing just how difficult it was to find investors and how often they heard the word, “no.”

Coric, for example, said he founded Biohaven at a time when other biopharmaceutical companies were getting out of the neuroscience field.

“I went into the drug industry to purposefully try to develop drugs for neuroscience,” he said. “And so wouldn’t you know, I go to Bristol Myers Squibb and BMS exits neuroscience. AstraZeneca exits. Everyone’s out because it was too difficult, right? And so, in my mind it was a perfect time to start a neuroscience company.”

Coric noted that, “I think as entrepreneurs, we gravitate towards our passion. And so for me, that was the opportunity, when all of pharma was leaving an area, to go towards it.”

He added he had several investors say to him “you’re out of your mind.”

Shannon said he was told the same thing. “A common theme is, we would go around and talk to people, and people would say, ‘you’re crazy. This can’t work.’”

He said he believed that “if we could make it work, it was worth a try.”

“I’m a physician, and there’s a lot of pain and suffering out there, and I went into this field because as a physician, I was always shocked how crappy our tools were to help people.”

He added, “Part of the skepticism is transformative,” and said his success was in large part due to “marrying the academic scientific creativity with the talented people who know how to convert that into drugs. … That’s why the ecosystem is important, and those relationships are important.”

Rocco said that he began his company to develop a way to replace an ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) graft, but realized it was “crazy to start that path. But we were also not so crazy that we didn’t listen to anybody or to the data that we were generating.”

Eventually, he said, his company “got to a place that nobody else really had ever seen before, and that changed the way we thought about what we were doing, and so we actually ended up pivoting. We pivoted off the plan. So I guess … yes, you need to be crazy enough to kind of get started, but don’t be so crazy that you just drive the car off the cliff.’

Shannon agreed. “We had a plan A and a plan B, and I’ve never executed Plan A,” he said.