As a small follow up to our post last week on Sofinnova Partners' hiring an Asia-focused professional, VentureWire Lifescience reported this week that Canaan Partners added a principal whose partial duties include finding deal flow from Asia.Mickey Kim will from Canaan's Westport, Conn. office. He joined the firm in July according to his bio.
Mickey joined Canaan from Pacific Point Ventures, a venture capital fund investing in healthcare infrastructure companies in Asia. Prior to co-founding Pacific Point Ventures, he invested in biotech and medical device companies at BioVentures Investors, including ActivBiotics, Applied Spine Technologies, Cylene Pharmaceuticals, Hydra Biosciences and Sciona. Mickey also served as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company and CSC Healthcare, and co-founded an Asian technology venture capital fund.
Canaan doesn't appear to have any health care portfolio companies in Asia at this point. It does have two IT-oriented deals in India.
No doubt there will be more news like this to come.
South Korea is an up-and-coming player in the Asian pharmaceutical sphere and recent research shows that it is increasingly attracting the interest of big pharma.
ReplyDeleteA survey recently conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) showed that a third of multinational pharmaceutical firms already established in Asia have plans to immediately expand in the region within the next year either through their own sites or through acquisitions.
And according to the PwC report, called "Gearing Up for a Global Gravity Shift: Growth, Risk and Learning in the Asia Pharmaceutical Market", South Korea ranked number four in the list of target countries for expansion, behind China, India and Singapore.
Raj Nihalani, MD, RAC
Irvine, Ca 92602
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