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TWST: May we begin with a historical sketch of your company and an overview of the things that you’re doing at the present time?

Mr. Wiese: The story of our company dates back to 1996 when we had the closing of our first fund which was called Global Life Science LP. The idea to establish our fund in the first place, came from Dr Stefan Engelhorn, who was our first sponsor. He was a member of the Engelhorn Family who owned, Boehringer Mannheim, which was sold a couple of years ago, to Roche for a few billion dollars. In 1996, there was no dedicated Life Science Fund here in Germany. He saw that market opportunity and was looking for additional sponsors who liked that idea. The second sponsor identified was Germany’s second biggest bank, HypoVereinsbank. The third sponsor who came aboard was ING Barings. With these three sponsors who, at the time, had committed 25 million Deutsche Marks each, we started off at the first closing with a total of 75 million Deutsche Marks. We then found additional investors. At the end, there was a small exclusive group of seven investors in total and we had raised 130 million Deutsche Mark which is roughly 66 million Euros. We invested most of that so far in 18 companies. Our strategy had been, and still is, to build up a dedicated group investing in Life Sciences only and us, at the time, didn’t think that investing only in Germany would be the right thing to do because the industry is international, the competition is worldwide. We try to pick those companies, worldwide, which offer for us, the most attractive returns. In order to do that we built a dedicated team, which consists of professionals from Pharma, biotech industry and venture capital. Dr Reinisch, my Swiss colleague, who advised Mr. Engelhorn on the set-up of our fund, had been in the Pharma industry with Boehringer Mannheim. He had been responsible for the strategic development of their diagnostics business. My background had been in venture capital. I had previously worked for 3i group and another private equity group in France, specializing on European deals. The two of us were the core team. The third partner who came aboard was Philip Morgan, he’s British, and used to work with 3i group. He studied chemistry and has been working all his lifetime also in the Pharma industry but, unlike Peter, who was mostly in diagnostics, he was in pharmaceuticals, marketing and medical devices. Three years later, we added the fourth partner, it was Doctor Küpper. He also has a long experience in the pharma industry and biotech in areas from research up to R&D management, technology assessment, spin-offs and acquisitions. He received his PhD at the University of Heidelberg and spent two years as a postdoc at the MIT. This is our team of four partners which has been working together since. After the closing of our second fund in 2002 we added additional investment managers. Younger professionals, a medical doctor and a molecular biologist with industry experience, and a controller and whereas the first fund was primarily advised out of our office of Life Science Ventures, that was the old name of our advisory company here in Munich, we then added two offices in Switzerland and in the UK. Those locations were where my colleagues, Peter Reinisch and Philip Morgan, had originally commuted to and from-their home offices. We professionalized that, rented office space, hired investment managers, office staff and now we’re running from three offices throughout Europe under the logo “Global Life Science Ventures, one team - three locations - global perspective.”