Yearly Archives: 2012

Innovation paid dividends in 2012.  We often debate the relative “innovation quotient” of the companies we evaluate and invest in here at Atlas, and of the biomedical sector as a whole. The basic premise we hold is that high innovation

The recycling of equity capital through realized returns is a critically important element of biotech investing.  When public biotech companies get bought, like Genentech by Roche, or smaller deals like Cougar by J&J, a large number of biotech-focused equity funds

The translation of cutting-edge science into new clinically-relevant therapeutics is the ultimate goal of many academic investigators, industry researchers, and investors.  This stage of R&D is the most challenging, and typically frought with scientific and technical risks: taking a new

Many venture-backed companies assume they can escape the gravity of historic valuation ranges, and an anecdotal few may accomplish the feat.  But figuring out how to live within its probabilistic reality is an important element of successful venture portfolio construction. A thesis

Macrocyclic drugs are an emerging class of therapeutics that promise to open up drug target spaces which are poorly addressed by small chemical entities and larger biologics.  Cyclosporin is the classic template of such a drug: a cyclically constrained peptide

Medical innovation is the key to addressing the big unmet needs in neurodegeneration, metabolic and heart disease, cancer, among many other conditions.  Not only do new therapeutics and devices aimed at this diseases offer clinical promise, but they also can

Much of the public dialogue about venture capital returns is based more on myth than fact, which reinforces inappropriately limited views of relative sector attractiveness, underlying risk profiles, and the “business models” that work in venture.  A big part of

Like many things driven by human nature, venture-backed biotech boardrooms often swing between the emotions of fear and greed.  Fear of losing your shirt, or the greed of demanding more of the story than is warranted.  It’s the age-old imbalance

Two recent offerings, Kythera and Intercept, both ripped out of the gates with 20% rallies above their offer price last week.  A flood of new S1 filings is to be expected.  With all that inventory out there of emerging private

Correlation Ventures, a new analytics-driven venture firm, just came out with some interesting data on US venture capital returns over the past decade. Instead of taking a “birth” vintage approach to returns, which is the way venture fund vintages and

The lack of robust reproducibility in the scientific literature is both shocking and troubling, and has been a widely covered topic over the past couple years. One of the earliest blogs here at LifeSciVC was on the dirty secret that

Not a biotech conference goes by these days without a discussion about new models for financing or exiting companies, and BioPharm America in Boston this week is no different.  I’m on a panel discussing the topic on Wednesday afternoon. New

Earnout deals are back in the news with an interesting report from Shareholder Representative Services, or SRS, a firm who specializes in working for the selling party’s shareholders to follow up post-acquisition to ensure that escrows are paid, diligence is

Almost every biotech has a Scientific Advisory Board, but few use them particularly well.   Although SABs can be hugely valuable in helping shape a program or portfolio, or raising the visibility of a startup, they can also be a colossal

“Raise all the money you can whenever you can, and then raise some more”.  “The more a company raises, the more successful it is”.  Resumes boasting about how much an executive has raised in their prior companies.  These sentiments are

Big Pharma remains a highly profitable cash cow in spite of its well-known R&D challenges and perennial patent cliffs.  One of the biggest questions their Boards must wrestle with is what to do with all the cash. In recent years,

Biotech IPOs have long been viewed with skeptism, especially over the past few years in comparison to the high-flying media darlings in the Tech space.  But recently a number of the social media phenoms have fallen from grace: Groupon is

Most readers won’t believe the title, or at least not if they’ve read much in the past few years about the anemic early stage biotech environment.  But hopefully this post will convince them. It all comes down to what do

The past few weeks have been full of bad news about biotech venture: the numbers were abysmal as venture investments into biotech during the first half of 2012 were off some 40% from last year.  This drop can’t be a

Cash-burning R&D-stage biotechs have big appetites for cash, which is typically addressed with an equity-based diet.  It’s also supported through corporate partnerships and other less dilutive means such as grants and foundation funding.  But another important and often under-appreciated source

Three late stage oncology deals have made it through the IPO gauntlet in the past six months: Clovis Oncology in November 2011, Merrimack in March 2012, and just yesterday Tesaro.  Almost all came out of their offerings unscathed, unlike most

Time and again, life sciences VC deals have been outscoring their better-capitalized, super-hyped and oft-praised colleagues who do deals in the tech side of the asset class. – Jonathan Marino in a PE Hub Post titled “Quietly, VCs in Life

Just in time for the annual ASCO cancer circus, PhRMA released a new report listing the nearly 1000 projects in the industry’s pipeline for oncology – it’s an impressively long list against a whole range of cancers.  And this should

Pharma have been retooling their therapeutic strategies and R&D priorities considerably over the past decade, shifting in and out of various disease areas.  As they are the eventual home for many of the biotech programs we and other early stage

Pharma corporate venture was back in the biotech news today with the release of Burrill & Company’s June 2012 report.  An interesting article by Vinay Singh evaluated the impact of Pharma corporate venture capital (CVC) investing, and the key takeaway

“We Have Met the Enemy… And He is Us” is the very fitting title of a recent report on the state of the VC market with a focus on the GP-LP relationship.  This thoughtful and thankfully analytical report highlights a

Twenty years ago the biotech world was in the midst of one of the best IPO windows in its history.  Nearly a hundred biotech companies went public from 1991-1994, including a number of the great companies that have become household

Everyone knows about the Pharma industry’s R&D productivity woes, but few seem to have solutions that work. Part of treating the problem requires an accurate diagnosis, and this winter’s work in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery by Scannell et al from

Over the past decade biotech investments made by diversified venture capital firms have outperformed those by healthcare-focused firms.  Its unclear why the difference exists, but the historical data suggest it’s a striking differential. Examining the NVCA Benchmarking Database powered by

Debating the merits of various biotech business models is in vogue today, in part as a response to the proliferation of experiments around the right form and function of the companies themselves.  An often asked question: are we supporting CEOs

Everyone has heard of the monster returns to some venture funds from high-flyng social media and technology companies: Facebook’s potential 800x for Accel, Google’s 350x for KPCB and Sequoia, Zynga’s 100x+ for Union Square, Foundry, and Avalon.  These single big

Having a highly functional and productive Board of Directors is a key ingredient for success for most companies, but its of particular importance for early stage startups. The web is full of advice around what are the “best practices” for venture-backed

In recent years, acquisitions of early stage private biotechs have frequently included an upfront value coupled with significant future milestone payments. These earnouts resemble the “biobucks” common to product licensing deals: stretching out over 5-10 years, they get ravaged by

Biogen just announced its acquisition of Stromedix for up to $562M. Another solid M&A exit in biotech emphasizing how innovation matters. With a very different model than Avila Therapeutics, an exit we announced in January, Stromedix is a biology-focused, asset-centric

Biotech pundits often talk about the challenge of raising an initial round of capital for drug discovery startups, highlighting the perceived “gap” in early stage funding.   And it certainly isn’t easy raising that first significant round of institutional capital.  But

Today Celgene announced the acquisition of Avila Therapeutics for $350M upfront and up to $575M in future milestones.  Congratulations to the Avila team!  For those of us involved in the story, we certainly think Celgene’s got itself a great deal.

Today’s headlines were replete with the customary quarterly whinging about biotech funding. Several pieces emphasize the doom and gloom in the startup biotech landscape, and include quotes from respected venture investors lamenting the end of early stage and the broken

Corporate venture capital’s role in the new biotech ecosystem couldn’t be understated today.  They are a major syndicate partner for those of us in the early stage arena, and we couldn’t power up our startups without them. I’ve written on

It’s certainly not Breaking News that M&A deals are an important source of liquidity in biotech VC today.  But last year did mark an important milestone for biotech over the past few years: in 2011, the capital returned to investors

Flying home from JPM 2012 and thought I’d share a few reflections from our early stage venture perspective on what we heard (or didn’t) around the year’s kickoff biotech event. While most of the attendees were focused on Inhibitex and