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28 n e w h a v e n B I Z | S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 1 9 | n e w h a v e n b i z . c o m INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP At Respironics, a manufacturer of medical devices to treat sleep and respiratory disorders, Smith joined a new-ventures group started by company founder Gerald McGinnis. "I learned to be creative about the next levels of company devel- opment while brainstorming and doing blue-sky [visioning] exercises on his back porch," Smith recounts. When Respironics was acquired by Philips in 2007, Smith le to cast her lot with startup and entrepre- neurial companies. Later, as senior director of invest- ments at the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), a Virginia-based nonprofit, she launched a life-sci- ences fund for the University of Virginia with funding from John- son & Johnson. Her next move was to New Haven, to become deputy director of the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI). "I was brought in to do more with faculty, students and student/ faculty teams," Smith says. She also launched the Blavatnick Fund for Innovation at Yale, where she first learned about ground- breaking research done by Yale neurology professor Stephen Strit- tmatter, who co-founded the Yale Program in Cellular Neuroscience, Neurodegeneration and Repair, and currently is director of Yale's Alzhei- mer's Disease Research Center. In 2010, Strittmatter formed a company called Axerion erapeu- tics with the Yale Office of Coop- erative Research. He and his team spent a half-dozen years investi- gating the body's inability to repair itself following injury to the central nervous system, and developing a drug to block growth inhibitors. e drug, AXER-204, is a decoy receptor fusion protein facilitating the growth of nerve fibers and neural networks, which has enabled laboratory rats to walk again. Smith says that approximately 300,000 people in the U.S. are today living with chronic spinal-cord injuries. Many are young men in their 20s and 30s dealing with the aermath of auto accidents and sporting injuries, without any currently approved therapeutics to restore sensory or motor function. Smith first met Strittmatter in the fall of 2016, while assessing his Blavatnik Fund application for an award for Alzheimer's Disease research, which then was part of Axerion's agenda. "I have seen dozens and dozens of companies in my career, but I had never seen anything as exciting as trying to reverse paralysis aer spinal cord injury," Smith recalls. "As I started to have more conver- sations with the company, every- thing just kept checking off. "Ninety-nine percent of the time, in any due diligence, you run into something ugly," Smith adds. "I never really ran into anything I couldn't deal with." Axerion erapeutics had already received nearly $18 million in fund- ing, including National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants and early sup- port from Connecticut Innovations (CI), which had added the company to its venture-capital portfolio. "We had done a ton of research and gotten many research grants, but hadn't been able to attract a lot of financial capital," says CI Executive Vice President and Chief Investment Officer David Wurzer, who was at the time an early mem- ber of the Axerion board. "ey had great potential to help people, they had wonderful science and they were on the cusp of getting funding for a clinical trial," Smith says. "e company was at a critical inflection point and just needed extra support. I knew I could help." And so she did, using her expertise and a personal financial investment to gain traction. e company's mission –– to provide first-in-class therapeutics to treat injury and damage to the spi- nal cord ––– became her mission. "It's not unusual that early stages of a company entails a lot of patience and le and right turns," Wurzer says. "What is unusual is for somebody with Erika's skill set to raise her hand and step up." Smith recounts a surreal day in May 2017, when, aer handing out prizes at the inaugural Blavatnik Fund awards ceremony, she, along with Strittmatter and other Axerion team members, boarded a plane for Salzburg, Austria to make a funding pitch to the Wings for Life Spinal Cord Research Foundation. e following day, they learned Axerion had been awarded $7 million. Two months later, in July 2017, the company announced it had rebranded as ReNetX Bio Inc. — and appointed Smith its CEO. (e name derives from the company's research mission: the REstoration of neural NETworks.) In May 2018, ReNetX Bio completed Series A funding with Spring Mountain Capital and Connecticut Innovations. Although Smith would not disclose the amount, she says it was enough to begin seeking a U.S. Food & Drug Administration Continued from Page 13 'I've been on the investor side for many years. Now, I'm the person in the ring — the fighter in the fight.' Erika Smith

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