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Date & Time

Monday, June 29th, 2026

5:00pm to 8:00pm

Location

One Logan Square

130 N 18th Street, Suite 3000 (30th Floor)
Philadelphia, PA 19103

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Event Summary

Attendees gathered for an engaging fireside chat featuring Dr. Chris Burns, founder and former CEO of Venatorx Pharmaceuticals, alongside John Pennett, Partner in Charge of the Technology and Life Science Practice at EisnerAmper. The discussion documented Dr. Burns’s founder’s journey—spanning the initial founding, raising capital through investors and grants, navigating out-license deals, and achieving key regulatory milestones. Throughout the conversation, they explored critical lessons learned, the strategic partnerships built along the way, and the various capital market successes and challenges encountered while building the company.\

Speakers

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The Founder’s Journey

Venatorx Pharmaceuticals is a private pharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of novel anti-infectives to treat multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacterial infections and hard-to-treat viral infections.

Initially founded virtually in 2010 by Dr. Chris Burns, Dr. Daniel Pevear, and Dr. Luigi Xerri, Venatorx has earned more than twenty U.S. Government grants and contracts totaling more than $700 million, including awards from BARDA, NIH, CARB-X and the Department of Defense across three clinical portfolio assets, all invented in Venatorx’s labs. Included amongst these awards is a recent $318 million Project Bioshield contract encompassing both R&D reimbursement and product procurement for the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile. Together with private investments of over $150 million and business out-license deals with Roche, Everest Medicines, Melinta, Menarini, and GARDP, such funding has helped propel the Company’s R&D portfolio. The most advanced home-grown asset (cefepime-taniborbactam) recently successfully completed a Phase 3 clinical trial and is under regulatory review. Venatorx is a recipient of the PACT Emerging Healthcare Award and has been named a “Best Places to Work” in the Greater Philadelphia area numerous times.

Dr. Chris Burns is a highly entrepreneurial life science executive with >30 years of experience building and leading Management and R&D teams in both Big Pharma and start-up settings. As CEO and co-founder of Venatorx Pharmaceuticals, he led the Company’s evolution from a 3-person virtual entity to a recognized world leader in antibacterial and antiviral drug research and development. He is the architect of Venatorx’s creative public-private capital-efficient business model that raised over $150 million in private capital and was awarded over $700 million in non-dilutive US Government funding (BARDA, NIH, DoD) to help navigate the challenges of the anti-infectives’ capital markets.

He was recently named both Life Sciences Pennsylvania’s ‘CEO of the Year’ and Ernst & Young ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ and is now consulting and participating in life science angel investing groups. Dr. Burns holds a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under two-time Nobel laureate Professor K. Barry Sharpless.

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