Ronne is a biotech enthusiast who explores innovative science and platform technologies to build biotech companies that would advance medicine and impact human health. Since joining Esco Ventures in 2016, Ronne has played key roles towards developing its capabilities in biotech venture creation. He is a founding member and leads the R&D for Carmine Therapeutics, the first of EVX Ventures’ portfolio companies to establish a base in Boston, US. Carmine is developing a novel class of extracellular vesicle-based gene therapies, with Professors Harvey Lodish, Minh Le and Jiahai Shi as scientific co-founders, and has recently been awarded the 2019 Golden Ticket to LabCentral by Bristol-Myers Squibb.

 

Recognizing the importance of the biotech ecosystem for venture creation, Ronne also conceptualized and pioneered two initiatives with the aim to enhance the biotech startup ecosystem in Singapore. The first is the Morphosis fellowship program founded in 2018 with the aim to nurture bio-entrepreneurs, and this is followed by the PLATINUM grant launched in 2020, a funding initiative to support proof-of-concept experiments for academic platform technologies.

 

Prior to joining EVX Ventures, Ronne was a Senior Research Fellow at A*STAR Institute of Medical Biology, where he was involved in the preclinical development of mesenchymal stem cell extracellular vesicles - a novel therapeutic modality. During his postdoctoral stint, he also co-invented an active ingredient for skin barrier restoration that led to a spin-off company. Ronne obtained his PhD from NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS), and a BSc in Biological Sciences from Nanyang Technological University.