Ritchie Capital is a diversified alternative asset management firm established in 1998 with interests in private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, commodities, insurance, energy and real estate and with offices in Chicago and Geneva IL, New York, London, Bermuda, Hong Kong and Menlo Park, CA. Ritchie Capital's Biotechnology Venture Group invests in late-stage private and publicly traded life science companies and takes an active, long term role in developing its portfolio companies into successful businesses.

Serenex is an integrated oncology-focused drug discovery and development company. The company's mission is to improve the lives of cancer patients by developing proprietary therapeutic and supportive care products. Serenex's clinical-stage program, SNX-1012, is a supportive care product for chemotherapy and radiation-induced oral mucositis which is scheduled to begin Phase II clinical trials in early 2006. Additionally, Serenex has a novel preclinical small molecule inhibitor of Heat Shock Protein 90 which is scheduled to begin clinical trials in 2006. Hsp90 is a chaperone protein for a variety of oncogenes (such as Her2 and Raf) and their downstream signaling molecules (such as Akt and Erk). Serenex's pipeline is fed by a proprietary chemoproteomics platform which enables the company to profile compounds, in high throughput, against thousands of important therapeutic and toxicity targets simultaneously. By screening compounds in this manner Serenex is able to better understand specificity and toxicity issues, drive structure-activity relationships (SAR) and help determine mechanism of action. Since 2001 Serenex has worked with leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies in return for revenues and milestone payments.

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