Our founding story

Meet Praespero Founder Laurie Venning. Extreme work ethic is in his DNA. Literally.

While his drive and passion opened doors to staggering entrepreneurial success and innovation, it carried a dark secret that was only uncovered after a debilitating diagnosis at age 42.

Laurie Venning’s autoimmune system works almost as hard as he does.

Before being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, Laurie and several of his family members suffered through the consequences of a health system too severely under-evolved to understand, diagnose and safely treat their debilitating diseases. As an autoimmune disease patient, the only off-ramp from the suffering was the dangerous and costly world of immune suppressing rheumatoid arthritis treatment (RA treatment) – a world fraught with trial, error and huge risk. As Laurie sought the right rheumatoid arthritis medication he noticed a gap in the research space and among charitable organizations.

Nonprofit organizations and research centres are not exploring root causes, allowing for preventing and curing (rather than just treating) autoimmune diseases.

Driving cross disciplinary research

He also observed that traditional structures of publication and medical research funding in biomedical science were creating barriers to collaboration, finding a cure and getting autoimmune disease patients off the treatment treadmill… once and for all.

He envisioned a space where the world’s top scientists could safely and freely explore the science of autoimmunity – the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful.

He imagined better medical research collaboration across labs, cross disciplinary research and crosspollinating ideas without the barriers of knowledge gatekeeping, cut-throat competition, idea theft and, well… plain old ego.

Laurie observed that many of the same challenges confronted his previous adventures in the oil and gas industry. After fine tuning 31 patents, Laurie’s sand control technology allowed additional oil to be produced that could not be produced with conventional technologies in oil and gas. His invention singlehandedly transformed the scale of oil well recovery, taking reserves that were very difficult to produce conventionally, and allowing several countries to increase their oil reserves from probable to proven and launching the next innovation revolution for oil completions around the world.

Laurie established a charity called Praespero, believing that the same material science, entrepreneurial freedom and gritty wisdom that led to his game-changing oilwell invention, will lead to similar breakthroughs in autoimmune disease research.

Rather than using his oil and gas wealth to force Praespero scientists into “fixing him” and focusing on rheumatoid arthritis research, Laurie sensed that the breakthrough would come from bigger picture thinking - more autoimmune disease research collaboration, exploring and sharing knowledge on all autoimmune diseases.

Whether it’s through an oil reservoir, or the infinite recesses of the human immunome, Laurie believes new depths of unlimited potential are ready to be tapped.

They could be just one idea, one conversation or one donation away.