AN Venture Partners (ANV), a global biotech venture capital fund, today announced the addition of Atsushi Shimada and Shiho Hirose, PhD.
At ANV, Mr. Shimada is joining as a Senior Principal and will work on deal sourcing and company formation and provide support to the firm’s portfolio companies. Dr Hirose is joining as an Analyst responsible for analyzing and evaluating the bio-related technologies of the potential portfolio companies.
ANV has been established by a group of experienced venture capitalists from Japan and the United States, who have a wealth of experience in founding and growing start-ups. It will primarily focus on sourcing innovative scientific research from Japan and building global biotech companies. The two new members join ANV Partner Takashi Futami, PhD based in Tokyo, Japan.
“I am delighted to welcome our new colleagues,” said Dr. Futami. “Atsushi has long and highly relevant experience in finding and evaluating promising university research and will help us source ideas that we can turn into valuable startups. Meanwhile, Shiho brings much-needed analytical horsepower to our young team and will build out our knowledge in the oncology field.”
"I am thrilled to be joining a dynamic VC firm with a genuinely novel approach to building Japan’s biotech ecosystem,” said Mr. Shimada. “What ANV is doing is important for Japan, and in my professional experience taking Japanese research to create companies in the US has enormous potential.”
“Joining ANV is a great opportunity for me,” said Dr. Hirose. “After doing academic research both in Japan and the US and then working for a Japanese pharma group, I am looking forward to gaining experience at the ‘sharp end’ of the industry by working for a VC firm.”
Atsushi Shimada, Senior Principal
Shimada has more than 20 years of experience in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry with a track record of successful business development, including M&A transactions, licensing and option deals, co-marketing and promotion. He spent more than six years at UTEC, the University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners, where he had sole responsibility for screening hundreds of annual inventions emerging from academic research, helped the company formation, licensing alliances and IP strategy development. He is a patent attorney by training.
Shiho Hirose PhD, Analyst
With a strong background in cancer immunotherapy research and drug discovery. As a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) fellow (DC2), she earned her Ph.D. in Life Science from Tokyo University. Her research elucidated the role of IL4I1 in immunotherapy resistance and CD8+ T cell infiltration in melanoma, paving the way for potential therapeutic strategies to combat immunotherapy-resistance. She is currently a visiting researcher at the School of Medicine, Keio University.
About AN Venture Partners
ANV is a Tokyo and San Francisco-based biotech venture capital firm. ANV is dedicated to building high impact global biotech companies and specializes in sourcing scientific opportunities from Japan. For more information, please visit www.an.vc.
Media Contacts
Email: info@an.vc