MANCHESTER -- Two firms and their leadership teams were named yesterday as recipients of New Hampshire High Technology Council's Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

They are:

• Manchester-based Active Shock Inc., President and CEO Bill Larkins and Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering John LaPlante.
Lebanon-based Adimab Inc., co-founder and CEO Tillman Gerngross, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Dane Wittrup and Chief Operating Officer Errik Anderson.

"I've been a judge for four years now, and this was the hardest year to be judging," said Matt Pierson, chairman of the High Technology council. "There was a really strong field," he said.

The awards will be presented by high-tech council at its 22nd annual Awards Banquet on Monday, May 10, at the Radisson Hotel, Manchester. "It's interesting, the team dynamic," Pierson said. "In New Hampshire, the best odds of putting a successful company together are to get two or three entrepreneurs together who play off each other's strengths."

Active Shock developed patented, semi-active suspension technology based on its Ride State Aware algorithm that reads sensors embedded in the shock absorber. Officials of Active Shock could not be reached immediately for comment.

Adimab developed yeast-based technology that has reduced the process of developing new human antibodies from months or years to several weeks. Gerngross is a professor of engineering at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. His co-founder, Wittrup, is J.R. Mares Professor of chemical engineering and biological engineering at MIT.

"We are a drug discovery company," Gerngross said. "What we actually sell to people is a protein sequence that encodes a drug for them."

"The output is essentially information," he said. "We are doing that at a commercial scale and on track for being cash positive this year, which is unusual for a biotech company and particularly unusual for a company that is not even three years old," Gerngross said.

Adimab has established research collaborations for the discovery of fully human antibodies with Merck, Roche, Pfizer and an undisclosed company. Diseases targeted range from cancer and autoimmune diseases to infectious diseases, neurological disorders and diseases of the central nervous system. "That's one of the advantages of this technology," Gerngross said. "It's very broadly applicable across a range of different diseases."

In a little over two years, Adimab has grown from 5 to 50 employees, and last year doubled its space to 9,000 square feet. But employee growth is likely to remain flat in the short term. "We can do what we said we would do with the number of people we have now," he said.

Gerngross sold his previous startup technology company, GlycoFi, to Merck for $400 million in 2006.