Today, privately held BioVex, Inc., announced that it raised $40,000,000 in a first close of a Series F round of financing. BioVex will use the proceeds of this financing to fund a phase III study in metastatic melanoma with its lead cancer product, OncoVEXGM-CSF.
One of the previous investors in BioVex that participated in this financing was Harris & Harris Group, Inc., the firm that I was associated with from 1984 through the end of 2008. I always felt privileged to get to spend the final years of my career making the sorts of investments that Harris & Harris Group makes. As an early-stage, venture-capital firm, Harris & Harris Group helps to develop, and puts capital behind, worthy ideas, intellectual property, and people.
Because I lack both proclivity for, and training in, science and technology, I never thought that I was qualified to be a venture capitalist. (I made sure to surround myself with people who were fully qualified.) Nevertheless, I thought that I had a useful role to play, because I seemed to be willing to take chances occasionally on people and projects that were not deemed fundable at the time by my peers.
There are a number of companies in Harris & Harris Group's current portfolio of approximately 30 privately held, risky companies that could, if they reach their potential, make a difference in the lives of people (as well as make a lot of money for Harris & Harris Group and its shareholders). Harris & Harris Group has actually played a much more central role in many of these companies than it has in BioVex, and BioVex is not its only portfolio company developing cancer therapeutics. But imagine if just BioVex, among Harris & Harris Group's portfolio of companies, reaches its potential and brings to market a cancer vaccine? Thinking of the lives that may be saved, and the suffering that may be averted, it seems to me that my entire career was more than well spent if only for having been in the position to aid in this one effort.
