Entrepreneur CEO to take BioSignal to market
Tuesday, 09 April, 2002
Sydney start-up BioSignal has appointed a CEO, Swedish entrepreneur Michael Oredsson.
Oredsson has been hired to help the company commercialise its broad spectrum platform technology.
He recently raised $US100 million for a Swedish biotech that listed on the Norwegian stock exchange, before deciding to take on the Australian company.
Oredssen said that if world markets were as healthy today as they were two years ago, BioSignal would also be looking to raise that sort of money.
Since August the company has been looking for finance and talking to a number venture capital firms to invest across three areas - human health, consumer and industrial - said BioSignal GM Rohan McDougall, who started the company as a spin-off from the University of NSW in 1999.
"We are looking for investment in the company as a whole so that we could get products out into the market earlier, in areas where the regulatory hurdles are low in industrial and consumer areas," McDougall said. "Then we want to progress into human health and pharmaceuticals."
The company is in discussion with one German, one US and three Australian VC firms.
"We are now at the stage where we'll be able to find capital by quarter three and we're looking for three to six million dollars," Oredsson said.
Oredssen has broad-ranging experience. In 1997, he worked in Australia for Pharmacia, then a Swedish pharmaceutical company, where he managed over-the-counter items such as quit-smoking drug Nicorette.
For the past two and half years Oredsson has been back in Scandinavia working with NutraPharma, a biotech that develops neutraceuticals based on soya bean products, for preventing heart disease and diabetes.
"I was actively looking for opportunities to come back [to Australia]," he said. "The economic environment is quite good here compared to Europe where it is quite depressed.
"The biotechnology industry is smaller here but there are interesting companies, and the government has been encouraging the industry and those efforts are starting to pay off."
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