Investors Esco Ventures X (left) and Avendesora (second right) joined forces with Dr Raymond Lee (second left) and Professor David Epstein (right) to form PairXBio
Singapore venture capitalist XQ Lin has long had his finger on the pulse of cutting-edge cancer therapies. For more than two years, he tracked the progress of a team of Duke-NUS cancer scientists as they made inroads into a new way of using the immune system to fight cancers, a field known as cancer immunotherapy. When the field of engineered T cells used to treat cancer achieved initial clinical validation, Lin knew that it was time to enter the fray.
“So when the field got hot earlier this year, we had a case of 天時地利人和 (tiān shí, dì lì, rén hé),” said Lin, using the Chinese phrase meaning ‘the right person in the right place at the right time’.
By August, Lin’s Esco Ventures X, along with another local investor, Jeffrey Lu from Avendesora, teamed up with David Epstein, former Duke-NUS Vice-Dean for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and now an associate professor with the School’s Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Programme, and Dr Raymond Lee, a research fellow in his lab, to establish PairXBio.
Read full story here: https://www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus/sep2020/from-eureka-to-an-invention