Our Firm •  Our Mission •  Our Values  •  About Us 

 
Our Firm    [TOP]

 
Cayenne Inc is a contract venture management and corporate development firm serving the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and life science device industries. We advise public and private clients in the areas of strategic planning, market evaluation, competitive assessment and commercialization assistance. From our headquarters in Maryland, we have clients with operations throughout the world.

Our Mission    [TOP]

 
Cayenne advances the commercial success of businesses in the life science industries. We apply proven and cutting-edge business techniques to accelerate commercialization of science-based innovation in pharmaceutical, biotechnology, life science device and other related industries. And we work in close partnership with our clients, to devise realistic solutions to difficult business problems.
 
 

Our Values    [TOP]

 
Clients rely on Cayenne to tackle difficult issues in important business areas. This requires a strong bond of trust between our clients and our consulting teams, one that we value highly and work hard to maintain.  We engender that trust by adhering to three primary values:

• Integrity  Acting consistently within the trust relationship established with our clients
• Responsiveness  Operating with a clear sense of urgency of our client's business needs
• Results   Delivering high value outcomes that have a clear impact on the clients' business success

R. Richard L. Hamer, Ph.D. – Principal
Rich has a 20-year background covering all aspects of pharmaceutical research and pharmaceutical research informatics systems development. He founded Cayenne after leaving Viaken Systems where he was the Chief Science Officer and VP of Research & Development providing guidance, management and sales for their contract research programs. Prior to Cayenne, he spent much of his career with the Hoechst /Aventis Group initially working on their U.S. Central Nervous Systems Disorders synthesis program and an inflammatory syntheses program. He initiated the US computational chemistry group for Hoechst, and created their U.S.-based automated screening facility and research informatics group to capture and integrate the screening data flow with a new chemical informatics system. Rich founded the global bioinformatics group for Hoechst Marion Roussel, and co-founded a biotechnology joint venture, Hoechst-ARIAD Genomics Center.

He received his B.S. in chemistry from Northeast Missouri State University and a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry from the University of Iowa. His doctorate research was directed toward the synthesis of rigid analogs of dopamine as anti-psychotic agents. Rich has produced 28 publications and presentations and is co-inventor on 42 U.S. patents.

Michael Provance – Principal
Mike has a background in management of emerging technology companies. Prior to Cayenne, he ran revenue operations that included consulting and infrastructure services for Viaken Systems, a life sciences informatics services and software company. He joined Viaken from U.S. Interactive, Inc., a strategic consulting firm where he served as the vice president and general manager for its Washington, D.C. office and grew this office to $16 million in profitable revenues. Before joining U.S. Interactive, Mike was the director of advanced technologies and strategic marketing for a Westinghouse/CBS interactive company. Earlier in his career, Mike held the positions of general manager for an Internet software company; and an investment manager at venture capital firm Ben Franklin Technology Center of Western Pennsylvania.

Mike received his B.S. degree in management science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his M.B.A. from Penn State’s Smeal College of Business Administration. Mike also served on the board of the Washington, D.C. Technology Council from 2000-2002.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS, DATA MINING AND ALGORITHM DEVELOPMENT

• Developed disease and toxicity models via statistical methods for analysis of microarray data
• Created protocols for the ranking of therapeutic targets based upon derived and extracted data
• Developed database, algorithms and interfaces for processing and analysis of Medline Citation references

IN-SILICO TECHNIQUES FOR TARGET SELECTION THROUGH APPLICATION OF DATA AND TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

• Developed methods for extraction of potential target therapeutics through automated analysis of text based information linked to structured data derived and captured from laboratory experiments

SOFTWARE AND COMPUTE ENVIRONMENT DEVELOPMENT AND ALGORITHM DESIGN

• Developed methods to discover single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and co-designed laboratory techniques and software for a high-throughput SNP discovery
• Developed grid computing environment and rewrote existing scientific algorithms to work efficiently in the grid environment
• Refined and developed optimal code to use large compute clusters as well as smaller Intel compute clusters

PROCESS ENGINEERING (RESEARCH, PROCUREMENT, QC, PRODUCT DESIGN, MANUFACTURING AND CUSTOMER SUPPORT) AND DATABASE DESIGN

• Engaged by a manufacturing group to analyze and improve their design and manufacture of high-density DNA microarrays. The output consisted of hardware and bioinformatics software, high performance computing and in large-scale database design.

DATABASE MODELING, DESIGN AND INTERFACE DEVELOPMENT

• Developed a unified derivative database with appropriate analysis tools for mouse sequence and library information
• Designed and implemented a data warehouse and supporting data collection and analysis tools for a NIDA clinical informatics management system. This system matched the specifications for multiple protocols, multi-year programs and large number of clinical trial sites.