Monthly Archives: April 2011

Two recent observations prompted me to think about a topic broader than just the life sciences: the information intensity of the world we live in and some of the unhealthy behaviors it has fostered. I met with a biotech entrepreneur

There’s been talk about a “bubble” in venture capital recently.   If there is one to debate, its not in the life sciences. While we’ve been relatively steady on an annualized pace in 2009 and 2010, we are down considerably

Academic-industry partnerships are popping up all over the place these days to fund early stage programs as part of ‘”open innovation” initiatives and “external sourcing” of new pipeline projects.   Here’s a non-exhaustive list of a few such deals this year

Today we announced a novel alliance with Monsanto to identify new life science technologies and explore the potential for creating/investing in new seed-stage startups around them.  It’s an exciting collaboration that brings a complementary set of interests, capabilities, and access

Contract Research Organizations (CROs) have historically been sleepy fee-for-service partners for the drug industry, widely disregarded as not innovative, and their scientists certainly not treated with the same professional respect as their counterparts in Pharma R&D. But this is clearly

Several recent stories from WSJ and VentureWire have highlighted the challenging performance of the IPO markets for biotech in 2011.  It has indeed been tough: more shares offered at lower prices = more painful dilution.  From a pricing perspective, the

Tranzyme just got public and will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol TZYM on Monday. Unfortunately the pricing wasn’t an April Fools joke.  They had to sell 53% of the company in the IPO in order to raise under $50M

Jus Singh doesn’t look much like James Bond, but he’s nearly as cool (see pic below). He’s the founder of Avila Therapeutics, a company we’ve backed that is focused on the discovery of targeted covalent inhibitors. When he and Roy