Time to Connect

Now is the time to bring venture capital to Houston

Register for Venture Houston on February 4th and 5th, plus apply to pitch your startup and win thousands of dollars in investments. Photo via Getty Images

For so many, COVID has changed the game, and venture capitalists, startups, and corporations are in a flurry to learn the new rules. Investors and entrepreneurs now more than ever are seizing the opportunity to engage with tech ecosystems in cities like Houston to take advantage of large corporations as neighbors and possible customers to their startups.

Through the intersection of these groups comes great opportunity and massive unlocked potential. But the execution of this intersection must be curated in order to be effective. HX Venture Fund, Houston's strategic venture capital fund-of-funds, is working to not only bring these groups together, but to create a collision that paves the way for innovation and information to flow among all parties.

In a world in which we are "colliding" from our home offices and dining room tables, the stakes are high, and these intersection opportunities cannot be missed.

In February, HX Venture Fund — in collaboration with Rice Alliance, Houston Angel Network, and Houston Exponential — will bring this conversation to Houston through Venture Houston, a two-day virtual event connecting venture capitalists from across the country to Houston entrepreneurs and corporations.

Steve Case, Chairman & CEO at Revolution Ventures and co-founder of AOL, will kick off the conversation by discussing how this wave of innovation is coming to Houston and why our city is perfectly equipped to let it thrive. Venture capitalists from Houston, as well as the HX Venture Fund portfolio, will give their unique perspective on how to scale a startup in Houston and why they are looking to invest their capital in the city's growing innovation ecosystem.

Some of Houston's best success stories and founders — Shashi Narahari of High Radius, Joe Alapat of Liongard, Bryan Sansbury of AEGIS Hedging, Kim Raath of Topl, Ben Johnson of Spruce, and others — will discuss their successful navigation of Houston's startup ecosystem, from raising capital to finding talent.

And some of the city's most prominent corporations, including all of HX Venture Fund's Limited Partners — such as Insperity, Rice Management Company, and LyondellBasell — will discuss how their industry verticals are changing and how innovation is the key to their future successes.

The two conference days will end with a pitch competition specifically for Houston and Gulf Coast Region startups with over $1.7 million in investment and in-kind prizes from investors across the nation and the HX Venture Fund portfolio in an effort to showcase and power the very best entrepreneurs in our city.

While the landscape is changing and subsequent innovation more disruptive than ever, HX Venture Fund is determined to not let this opportunity go to waste and to fuel the innovation that comes with it. The experience of the venture capitalists, the rigor of the entrepreneur, and the network of the corporation are the key elements to setting the innovation ecosystem alight. Venture Houston 2021 will be one of the places that sparks the flame.

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Venture Houston is taking place online February 4-5. Click here to register. The startup pitch competition application deadline is January 15 — click here to apply.

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A research team housed out of the newly launched Rice Biotech Launch Pad received funding to scale tech that could slash cancer deaths in half. Photo via Rice University

A research funding agency has deployed capital into a team at Rice University that's working to develop a technology that could cut cancer-related deaths in half.

Rice researchers received $45 million from the National Institutes of Health's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, to scale up development of a sense-and-respond implant technology. Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh leads the team developing the technology as principal investigator.

“Instead of tethering patients to hospital beds, IV bags and external monitors, we’ll use a minimally invasive procedure to implant a small device that continuously monitors their cancer and adjusts their immunotherapy dose in real time,” he says in a news release. “This kind of ‘closed-loop therapy’ has been used for managing diabetes, where you have a glucose monitor that continuously talks to an insulin pump. But for cancer immunotherapy, it’s revolutionary.”

Joining Veiseh on the 19-person research project named THOR, which stands for “targeted hybrid oncotherapeutic regulation,” is Amir Jazaeri, co-PI and professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The device they are developing is called HAMMR, or hybrid advanced molecular manufacturing regulator.

“Cancer cells are continually evolving and adapting to therapy. However, currently available diagnostic tools, including radiologic tests, blood assays and biopsies, provide very infrequent and limited snapshots of this dynamic process," Jazaeri adds. "As a result, today’s therapies treat cancer as if it were a static disease. We believe THOR could transform the status quo by providing real-time data from the tumor environment that can in turn guide more effective and tumor-informed novel therapies.”

With a national team of engineers, physicians, and experts across synthetic biology, materials science, immunology, oncology, and more, the team will receive its funding through the Rice Biotech Launch Pad, a newly launched initiative led by Veiseh that exists to help life-saving medical innovation scale quickly.

"Rice is proud to be the recipient of the second major funding award from the ARPA-H, a new funding agency established last year to support research that catalyzes health breakthroughs," Rice President Reginald DesRoches says. "The research Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh is doing in leading this team is truly groundbreaking and could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. This is the type of research that makes a significant impact on the world.”

The initial focus of the technology will be on ovarian cancer, and this funding agreement includes a first-phase clinical trial of HAMMR for the treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer that's expected to take place in the fourth year of THOR’s multi-year project.

“The technology is broadly applicable for peritoneal cancers that affect the pancreas, liver, lungs and other organs,” Veiseh says. “The first clinical trial will focus on refractory recurrent ovarian cancer, and the benefit of that is that we have an ongoing trial for ovarian cancer with our encapsulated cytokine ‘drug factory’ technology. We'll be able to build on that experience. We have already demonstrated a unique model to go from concept to clinical trial within five years, and HAMMR is the next iteration of that approach.”

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