DURHAM, N.C. - Starting Tuesday night with a speaker reception at the headquarters of the Center of Innovation for NanoBiotechnology (COIN), the fourth annual Nanotechnology Commercialization Conference will kick off with United States Congressman GK Butterfield in attendance.

The event, in Durham this year, features local, national and international nanotech commercialization leaders who will discuss topics such as how to grow this sector through university research, thoughtful regulatory guidance, corporate partnerships and increased investment.

The lunch keynote on Wednesday includes four heavy hitters from North Carolina and will be hosted and moderated by Chris William of the PBS show Carolina Business Review.

This fireside chat includes former CEO of the North Carolina Biotech Center, Charles Hamner, and now Chairman of the Hamner Institute. The discussion also includes John Hardin, the Executive Director of the Office of Science and Technology, who works with the NC Department of Commerce on science and technology policy. Finally, the CEO of a global leader of nanobiotechnology, and from our own backyard, Neal Fowler of Liquidia will discuss his experience and vision from the private sector.

The idea of the panel is how to create the infrastructure to create more companies like Liquidia that license technology from our leading research universities, develop the technology, attract investment capital, attract management and retain and attract the best and the brightest talent to the region.

The technology behind Liquidia started with Dr. Joe DeSimone and his team of researchers at his labs at UNC and NC State. The technology was spun out of the university labs, raised capital from local and regional VCs such as Wakefield Group, PPD, Pappas Ventures, and NEA and eventually the Gates Foundation. The company attracted experienced management such as Mr. Fowler.

Liquidia now has 54 employees and presumably some of the best talent in the world is working on this cutting edge technology called PRINT, where drug companies and vaccine companies are coating Liquidia’s nanoparticles with their drugs to attack fatal diseases.

So how are we addressing these important issues of a nurturing ecosystem to build nanotechnology companies and great jobs in the region? Several federal government leaders are coming to discuss policy. Several national investors in nanotech companies, including two leaders from Harris and Harris, a publicly traded venture capital, will present at the conference and there will be an investor pitch room - a tough love feedback session for early stage nanotech companies.

A former FDA executive will give a morning keynote speech after meeting with company executives at a VIP Breakfast. Another session addresses how to sell your nano product to larger companies and to bigger markets. Executives and VIPs from around the country have agreed to meet with our regional companies in hopes of making a match to bring some new out of region resources to our market at VIP Partnering sessions during the conference.

And to improve the appeal to the non-nano crowd, there will also be a first of a kind Nano Art Exhibition on Wednesday night, during the networking reception, where images taken from a microsocope have been enlarged and colored to show beautiful images never seen before. These images will light up Bay 7 at the American Tobacco Campus like no other event since the renovation of the old tobacco warehouse.

Using technologies common to the semiconductor industry, a team of
investigators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and
Liquidia Technologies has created a polymer nanoparticle that can
encapsulate large loads of therapeutic molecules that may have use in
treating prostate cancer. The research, led by Joseph DeSimone,
co-principal investigator of the Carolina Center for Cancer
Nanotechnology, was published in the journal Nano Letters.

Nanotechnology firm Liquidia partners with PATH on new pneumonia vaccine

North Carolina nanotechnology company Liquidia Technologies is partnering with nonprofit organization PATH to develop a new pneumonia vaccine that could be deployed globally.

Research Triangle Park-based Liquidia is working with PATH to conduct preclinical studies on a “next generation” pneumococcal vaccine that could be more effective than existing vaccines and more efficient to produce. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed. But it’s not the first time the two entities have worked together. Liquidia has also partnered with PATH’s Malaria Vaccine Initiative to develop a new malaria vaccine.

Pneumonia vaccines in the United States have all but eliminated childhood pneumococcal disease. But vaccines are too expensive in the developing world. Even when they are available, they do not cover all variations of the bacterium.

Liquidia’s proprietary “PRINT” technology can control the size and shape of a nanoparticle, which optimizes the delivery of a therapeutic to the cells of the human body. Liquidia says it can use its technology to bring together multiple vaccine components in a nanoparticle, which can optimize a vaccine’s safety and efficacy. Because the Liquidia technology is scalable, it makes vaccine production more cost efficient.

Pneumonia represents a large global market. The World Health Organization estimates pneumonia kills 1.4 million children younger than age 5 each year. More than half of these deaths are caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, a bacterium with many variations that are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

“By improving vaccine performance and reducing manufacturing costs using our PRINT technology, we believe this collaboration has the potential to significantly impact the spread of pneumonia in the developing world,” Liquidia CEO Neal Fowler said in a statement.

Privately-held Liquidia has raised more than $60 million in equity financing. Its investors includes venture capital firms Canaan Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Morningside Venture Investments Limited, Pappas Ventures and Firelake Capital as well as Wilmington, North Carolina-based clinical research organization PPD. Liquidia earlier this year received a $10 million equity investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support vaccine development and commercialization.

Major foundations are increasingly relying on program-related investing to achieve their goals, putting money into for-profit firms whose work meshes with the donors’ causes, according to The New York Times.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has increased its pool for such investments, known as PRI’s, from $400-million to $1-billion since 2009, and earlier this year it bought a $10-million stake in Liquidia Technologies, a commercial firm working on vaccine delivery. The Omidyar Network, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, and other funding entities have also stepped up PRI’s.

Money invested in PRI’s can go toward the federal requirement that foundations pay out 5 percent of their assets every year.

Grant makers “are increasingly agnostic about how they achieve their goals,” Independent Sector CEO Diana Aviv said. “If their purpose is, say, to eliminate food deserts, they may see supporting a grocery store chain as the best way of doing that rather than funding a nonprofit program.”

But, she said, the trend could have dire consequences for charities addressing the same issues, which are already experiencing a “slow erosion of nonprofit funding streams that threatens to undermine organizations that have been built over decades to meet high standards of public trust.”

The Seattle-based nonprofit, the world’s largest philanthropy with $36.4 billion in assets, made its first direct equity investment in a for-profit biotech company last week when it pumped $10 million into Research Triangle Park, NC-based Liquidia Technologies. While the foundation has made grants to companies for years, and has linked its support to specific programs with clear global health goals, this is the first time the foundation has structured a deal to take equity ownership, and have board-level oversight of a startup’s work, much like a venture capital firm.

Liquidia Technologies today announced the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has made a $10 million program-related investment (PRI) in the company to support the development and commercialization of safer and more effective vaccines and therapeutics. This follows recent announcements of the first Liquidia clinical trial of its lead seasonal flu candidate (LIQ001) and a collaborative agreement with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI).

Liquidia Technologies has started early clinical testing of its first vaccine developed using nanotechnology.