Early-stage life science venture firm Medical Excellence Capital closed on $145 million for its Medical Excellence Capital Partners (MEC) fund.
Founded by John Prufeta, the firm leverages both an experience investment team and a network of physician-scientists to focus on company creation and venture investing. The investment themes include cell therapy, gene therapy, artificial intelligence/machine learning applied to drug discovery, synthetic biology and regenerative medicine.
The investment platform includes a network of more than 1,200 top physician and scientist leaders across 33 major academic medical centers and research institutions in the U.S. The Medical Excellence Capital team operates out of the significant health care innovation markets New York, California, and Pennsylvania.
“Through warm relationships in the medical research community cultivated while CEO of MedEx, I became acutely aware of numerous underserved, yet exciting, opportunities to catalyze healthcare innovation,” said Prufeta in a statement. “As MEC launched, we were thrilled to add to the MEC investment team three seasoned investment professionals having decades of experience from their tenures at Domain Associates.”
The firm views the next decade as being one that will be consequential with respect to healthcare innovation with a greater impact on patients and their families, added Brian Halak, MEC managing partner.
“We are seeing exciting discoveries and technologies in multiple areas of healthcare,” added Eric Heil, MEC managing partner in a statement. “We believe that with this exclusive medical network, MEC is well positioned to accelerate the development of these discoveries in critical unmet need areas where patients and doctors can realize significant improvements in patient outcomes.”
The fund’s seven initial investments are in companies leading research in novel therapies for Parkinson’s disease, cancer and ALS. The investments were in: Aspen Neuroscience; Immunitas Therapeutics; Nobias Therapeutics; Pleno and ProJenX.
Kim Kamdar, Ph.D., MEC Managing Partner, added, “We focus our energies on developing successful partnerships with creative scientists whom we believe have the best ideas,” commented Kim Kamdar, MEC managing partner, in a statement. “Our operating structure is dedicated to fully support early-stage ventures at the Company Creation, Seed, Series A and Series B stages.”
