Shinya Yano, Ph.D., President & Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Yano has served as President & Chief Executive Officer of Astellas Venture Management since January 2009.  Prior to joining the company, Dr. Yano served as the Director at Department of Product Portfolio and Strategy, Astellas Pharma Inc.  As a corporate portfolio manager since 1997 with Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (one of the merger companies which eventually became Astellas in 2005), he was deeply involved in the discussion of the Yamanouchi-Fujisawa (Fujisawa being the other merger company which became Astellas) product portfolio merger.  He has extensive experiences in business development and management in R&D alliances with Genex, Damon Biotech, Protein Design Labs, Amgen, BMP, Genetics Institute (Wyeth), Searle-Pharmacia (Pfizer), Sanofi-Aventis, Agensys, FibroGen, and so forth.  Dr. Yano was trained as a molecular biologist and has expertise in mAb technology and hematology.  He is a member of the American Society of Hematology.

Sakae Asanuma, CFA, MBA: Managing Director Investment

Mr. Sakae Asanuma joined AVM in June 2011. Prior to joining AVM, he served as Director at Yasuda Enterprise Development America, Japan's major VC firm with $800M under management, from 2000 to 2011 and originated Yasuda’s biotech investment activities in the US. Based in Bay Area since 2000, he has invested in 20+ US biotech venture companies and deeply involved in the business development discussions with Japanese pharmaceutical companies on behalf of his portfolios. To date, his portfolio companies at Yasuda successfully achieved 4 IPOs and 7 M&As. Prior to Yasuda, he was venture capitalist and buy-side equity analyst in Japan from 1988 to 1999, managing $20B+ equity portfolios for Meiji-Yasuda Life insurance Company (one of the largest life insurance companies in Japan). He holds Master of Business Administration from Carnegie Mellon University.

Kenichiro (“Ken”) Shimokawa, Ph.D., Investment Director

Dr. Shimokawa joined AVM in March 2011. Prior to joining AVM, Dr. Shimokawa served as an Associate Director at Department of Licensing & Alliances, Astellas Pharma Inc since October 2010. He was involved M&A of Japanese Biotech Company, a license-in deal opportunity as well as evaluation of a couple of license-in opportunities. During 2006-2010, He served as a Global Project Leader (“GPL”) for CNS and bone therapeutic area at Project Management, Development, Astellas Pharma Inc. He brought “Bonoteo” for osteoporosis drug in Japanese market, as well as staged up a couple of compounds to P2/3, P1 and P0 in US/EU/JP. Prior to the GPL, he served as a medicinal and combinatorial chemist to synthesize number of compounds for various therapeutic areas, especially for CNS, Pain and Cardiovascular. Dr. Shimokawa received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania.

Makoto (“Mark”) Ohori, Ph.D., Associate Investment Director

Dr. Ohori joined AVM in April 2011. Prior to joining AVM, Dr. Ohori held the position of Senior Research Scientist at Drug Discovery Research, Astellas Pharma Inc. in Tsukuba, Japan. Dr. Ohori was trained as a pharmacologist in Immunology and Inflammatory therapeutics area. He has expertise in drug discovery research including therapeutic mAb using Regeneron's Velocimmune^® technology as well as low molecular weight NME research, and authored and coauthored more than 15 scientific publications. Dr. Ohori has a working experience at Post-marketing Development Research Center in Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd as a scientific advisory staff and was involved in product maximization research. Dr. Ohori received a Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo.