Dr. Chain: The company started in 2005 as a private company. It acquired its core assets from another company called Mindset Biopharmaceuticals, a company based in Israel and of which I was the founder, and it also licensed technology from various academic institutions in the U.S., notably New York University, and the University of South Alabama and various other academic organizations. That's how it started. To give you a few minutes on my background, I trained as a biochemist. I did my Ph.D in Israel, and then I spent several years at the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University, working on the fundamental mechanisms of learning and memory in simple organisms and got interested in Alzheimer's disease, which was then a very strong debate, a scientific debate as to what was the molecular basis for the disease, and especially what may be the valid target for therapy. I got interested from this general interest in thinking about memory, and then one day developed an idea for a potential therapy for Alzheimer's disease based on using monoclonal antibodies that would uniquely target the beta-amyloid toxin, which accumulates in the brain of Alzheimer's patients. With that idea I decided I would leave academia and start a biotech company. I spent the next several years assembling a technology portfolio for the new company, Mindset Biopharmaceuticals. My original idea was somewhat ahead of its time and very difficult to get investors interested in. Because it was very early in the field, we decided to license additional technologies into Mindset using various different therapeutic approaches for Alzheimer's disease. Given so, it was extremely difficult to raise capital and after several years the company was out of money. Fortunately we were able transfer the assets over to Intellect Neurosciences, which I co-founded in New York in 2005. My focus has not changed for 12 years now, and we are still developing therapeutics for Alzheimer's disease.
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