Rudolf Gygax

Novartis Venture Funds (NVF) is a venture capital firm with headquarters in Basel, Switzerland and an additional office in Cambridge, MA. The firm was founded in 1996. NVF is a subsidiary of Novartis AG (VX: NOVN) and was created following the 1996 merger of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz.

The Genetics Company is a privately held drug discovery and development company active in the areas of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. The company has identified small molecule inhibitors of two proprietary targets with in the Wnt-pathway, which is believed to play a crucial role in colon cancer. It has also identified small molecule inhibitors of BACE (beta-amyloid converting enzyme). In parallel, the company has identified and is in the process of further characterizing a series of novel growth-related drug target candidate genes for exploitation in cancer therapy. Headquartered in Zurich-Schlieren, Switzerland, the company currently has 29 employees. The Genetics Company offers you a range of high quality products to analyze Amyloid beta peptides x-40 and x-42 for basic research but also for pre-clinical and clinical development and in vitro diagnostics (IVD). Its CE-certified ELISA kits are the only clinically validated products for the determination of the Abeta42/40-Ratio in human CSF. These kits enable the early diagnosis of incipient Alzheimer's disease and can be used for patient stratification and monitoring in clinical trials of Alzheimer drug candidates.

Covagen AG engages in the research in as well as development, production, and distribution of pharmaceutical and diagnostic products and technologies. The company was founded by Julian Bertschinger and Dragan Grabulovski in 2007 and is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland.

SynphaBase AG provides contract research and development services to the pharmaceutical and chemical industry. Its products and services include route finding and process development, production of multi-kg up to metric tons, lab scale synthesis and carbohydrates and glycans. The firm’s catalogue includes monosaccharides as building blocks for glycan synthesis with various protecting group patterns and linker systems, disaccharides, oligosaccharides, glycosyl amino acids; core structures and building blocks for carbohydrate-based vaccine. The company was founded by in Arthur Bodenmüller in December 2000 and is headquartered in Pratteln, Switzerland.

Nextech Invest AG (Nextech) is an independent venture capital firm with headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. It was founded by Alfred Scheidegger in 1998. Nextech's investors include public pension funds, banks, asset management companies and Swiss and German high-net worth individuals.

Pearltec AG develops and sells medical devices. The company specializes in medical devices for positioning and immobilizing a part of the patient’s body during medical scanning. The company was founded by Ralph Mueller, Thomas Muller, Patrizia Fischer and Mario Schmuziger in 2008 and is headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland.