Modern research tools and approaches are rapidly implicating new types of disease targets beyond the scope that have been “drug-able” by traditional drug discovery techniques.
Deliver is pushing the limits by discovering next-generation therapeutics through the application of innovative chemical screening methodologies to enable the modulation of highly validated yet less traditional targets involved in the development and progression of cancer and aging.
FOUNDERS & OFFICERS
Kevin Slawin, MD. is the Founder and Managing Partner of Rapha Capital Management, LLC. He is a successful and experienced oncologic and robotic surgeon, biotech consultant, investor, and founder focusing on disruptive technologies in oncology, T cells and immunotherapy, as well as other breakthrough healthcare technologies. He is the founder of Bellicum Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: BLCM) leading Bellicum to a successful $161 million IPO in December, 2014. He also plays a guiding role in several of the investments managed by Rapha Capital in certain companies, serving as a board member at 3DBio Therapeutics, Inc. (https://3dbiocorp.com/), FIZE Medical, Inc. (https://fizemedical.com), Demeetra AgBio, Inc. (https://demeetra.com) and Imagin Medical, Inc. (https://imaginmedical.com). He served as a board member and interim CEO of portfolio company AsclepiX Therapeutics, Inc. (https://asclepix.com) in 2020, engineering their $35 million Series A financing led by Perceptive Xontogeny Venture Fund in mid 2020. Rapha Capital Management manages thirteen legacy SPIVs, Rapha Capital Investment I – XIII. Rapha Capital Management will be offering alternative asset management services to its inaugural venture capital fund, which will be the vehicle for all future investments managed by Rapha Capital Management.
He is also the founder and CEO of Ponce Therapeutics, Inc. (https://poncetherapeutics.com), which reunites the team that founded Bellicum Pharmaceuticals and is retooling their original cell control technology with state-of-the-art advances towards creating anti-aging products based on a scientific foundation, and DELiver Therapeutics, Inc. (https://delivertherapeutics.com), which is using novel, high throughput screening technologies to deliver therapeutics to address the most difficult problems in clinical medicine. Both have R&D facilities located at K2Bio in Houston (https://www.k2-biolabs.com/), a coworking research facility for biotech and pharma startups recently opened in Houston, where he is a co-founder, investor, and board member.
Slawin graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry from Columbia University, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his medical degree in 1986 from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha honor society. He trained in General Surgery and then Urology at the Mount Sinai Hospital and at Squier Urologic Clinic at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, both in NYC. Later, he was awarded a two-year fellowship, from 1992-1994, as an American Foundation of Urologic Disease (AFUD) scholar at Baylor College of Medicine to continue to study the development and treatment of prostate cancer under the tutelage of renowned prostate cancer surgeon and thought leader, Dr. Peter Scardino. Slawin joined the Baylor College of Medicine as Director of The Baylor Prostate Center in 1994 and was appointed the Dan Duncan Family Professor in Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases in 2003, established by the well-known Houston oil man and philanthropist of the same name. He is co-Inventor of the FDA-approved “prostate health index (phi)” test licensed and marketed by Beckman Coulter and utilized around the world. He has published extensively in top medical and scientific journals including the Journal of the American Medical
David is an internationally recognized leader in synthetic molecular biology with over 25 years of experience, focusing on biomedical applications with emphasis on regulation of vaccines and T cell immunotherapies. He is the scientific co-founder of Bellicum and its former Chief Scientific Officer. Among his scientific inventions, he conceived of chemically induced dimerization (CID) in the early 90s and is the inventor or co-inventor of most of its initial clinical applications, such as the CaspaCIDe® safety switch and the inducible activation switch, iMC, which was built into the DeCIDe® vaccine platform and the GoCAR-T cell platform, including adapting both technologies for Bellicum’s dual-switch technologies. CID technology is now in use in 1000s of laboratories worldwide and forms the basis of many related switch technologies being utilized in cellular therapies in preclinical work and clinically.
Before joining Bellicum, he served as the Vice Chairman of Pathology and Immunology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he was the Roger D Rossen Endowed Professor of Immunology. His lab focused on anti-cancer vaccination and animal modeling for prostate cancer, but his collaborative interests stretched into most areas of biology, such as Gene Regulation, Development, Cancer, Immunology and Aging. The animal models developed in his lab included the EZC-Prostate™ model for identifying and developing novel androgen axis inhibitors and the JOCK1 inducible prostate cancer model that demonstrated a critical inductive role of the Fibroblast Growth Factor Receptor 1(FGFR1) Axis in prostate cancer development.
He has published extensively in top scientific and medical journals, including Science, Nature, Nature Medicine, Molecular Cell, and NEJM and is also an inventor on at least 10 patent families, reflecting many areas of regulated cellular therapy. Dr. Spencer earned his BS in Chemistry (magna cum laude) at the University of California in San Diego and his Ph.D. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He completed his postdoctoral degree at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Stanford University.
In life sciences, Kayvon has developed dynamic patient-flow and other financial models to facilitate the forecasting and valuation of biopharmaceutical, medical device and diagnostic products, companies, complex securities, and royalty interests for transaction, bankruptcy, tax, and accounting oriented purposes. Kayvon has worked with companies ranging from large, publicly traded entities, to small, venture capital-backed organizations.
Kayvon serves as a Principal at RNA Capital Advisors, a financial and strategic advisory firm, and as VP, Finance & Strategic Analysis at Hawthorne Effect, Inc, a healthcare technology company focused on decentralizing clinical trials. Previously, Kayvon was a director in the consulting group at Burr Pilger Mayer, Inc., a consulting and accounting firm headquartered in San Francisco. Kayvon was also a director in the valuation and financial advisory services group within the corporate finance and restructuring division of FTI Consulting, Inc. His predecessor company, The Salter Group, LLC, a leading independent financial and strategic advisory firm, was acquired by FTI.
Kayvon holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Corporate Finance from the University of Southern California. He has been a guest lecturer and presenter at the University of Southern California and the California Institute of Technology, among others.
Damian W. Young, Ph.D. is Associate Director for the Center for Drug Discovery at Baylor College of Medicine and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology and Pathology and Immunology. His research is focused on applying modern synthetic organic chemistry to constructing collections of biologically active small molecules for drug discovery. He has applied concepts related to generating molecular diversity within small molecules for modulating a variety of disease-associated protein targets. His lab was among the first to apply the principles of diversity generation to fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) and DNA-Encoded Library (DEL) platforms.
Dr. Young received a B.S. in chemistry from Howard University and then worked as a process chemist at Trimeris Inc. on the HIV drug enfuvirtide. He received a Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry under the direction of Prof. Daniel Comins at North Carolina State University and subsequently pursued postdoctoral studies in the lab of Prof. Stuart Schreiber at Harvard University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Prior to joining Baylor, he was Group Leader within the Chemical Biology Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a Project Leader for the Harvard/Broad Centers of Excellence in Methodology and Library Development (CMLD).
