Dear Friends and Colleagues

We hope you and yours had a healthy, happy Holiday Season and best wishes for a prosperous New Year!  The Locust Walk Partners team wanted to take this opportunity to update you on the recent progress of our firm. We continue to offer high value transaction advisory and strategic consulting services to a broadening array of life science companies. For further information on completed transactions, please visit the case study page on our website.

We added Chris Ehrlich to our team opening a West Coast office in San Francisco.  As many of you know, Chris was previously a General Partner at InterWest Partners and a business development executive at Purdue.  In addition, we expanded our team to seven experienced deal professionals and two support staff and plan to continue our expansion next year. Our new office in San Francisco is temporary as we hope to expand to a larger dedicated space sometime in 2014.

• We closed our 9th transaction in three years and have continued to build momentum with our 10 existing client engagements in a mix of sell and buy-side transactions for private and public biopharmas. This year we advised Otsuka on their strategic follow-on investment in Proteus Digital Health.  As a consequence of our growing digital health experience, as well as a comprehensive strategic review and screen of digital health opportunities for a major client, we are formally launching a digital health practice at Locust Walk Partners to serve larger biopharmaceutical companies.  The goal is to help them access new innovations and high value digital companies, as many big pharmas evolve to become healthcare outcomes companies.
• Together with our business and corporate development achievements, we continued to deliver on high value strategic projects for our biotechnology and pharmaceutical clients having completed important work for Shire Pharmaceuticals’ rare disease group and Grünenthal.  We are currently engaged with three additional clients on commercial assessments and strategic planning projects.
• We successfully held our first Locust Walk Institute, an interactive two-day sell-side business development course for biotech/pharma executives.  Locust Walk Partners is also co-hosting and helping to organize this year’s Allicense conference April 29 – 30, 2014 in San Francisco.  We will hold our second Locust Walk Institute the two days prior to the conference.  For additional information about Allicense or Locust Walk Institute, click on the links over their names.
• Locust Walk Partners has initiated a business advisory board where prominent executives across a range of disciplines and organizations within the life sciences are partnering with us to improve access, dealflow and provide guidance on the strategic direction of the firm.  Those executives include: Mark Altmeyer (CEO of Otsuka America Pharmaceutical),Scott Chappel, PhD (Co-founder of Arteaus Therapeutics), Robert Coughlin (CEO of Mass Bio), Rod Ferguson, PhD (Partner at Panorama Capital), Kevin Kwok, PharmD (Head of life science practice at Russell Reynolds), Gary Phillips, MD (SVP and Chief Strategy Officer, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals) and Bryan Stuart (CBO of Civitas Therapeutics)

We value our many industry relationships and colleagues, your continuing support, and look forward to learning more about your 2014 objectives and discussing how we can help you succeed. We wish you and yours the very best for the New Year!

The Locust Walk Partners Team