Category Archives: Pharma industry

Today we announced a pair of Corporate Strategic Partnerships (CSPs) with Amgen and Novartis, as part of our closing of Fund IX, with the aim of working closely with them during our venture creation process of starting new biopharma companies. 

Pharmaceutical R&D is a very low velocity, high cost process, which makes it hard for any individual to gather the large body of experience required to inform better decision-making.  This is why pharma’s embedded institutional knowledge should be the source

As 2013 begins, and the JPM conference is behind us, it’s a great time to reflect on the state of the biotech industry and the sentiments around early stage investing in particular.  While pessimism abounds in many corners about the

Most of the news flow around the JPM Healthcare conferences centers around the main event: public companies presenting their earnings forecasts, R&D updates, new partnering deals, and the like.  There’s also a small private company track at JPM, and there are

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

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

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,

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

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

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

Happy New Year! Its another January and we’re taking stock of last year and pondering the one before us. Reflecting on the Life Science landscape, there are a number of good reasons to be optimistic about where things are today:

Malaise and despair seem to have taken over the biotech venture and startup community of late. “Venture’s stress” is the cover story of BioCentury.  Biotech VCs are so distraught they are taking the case to Washington DC to lament the fate

With lots of venture investors fleeing early stage biotech over the past few years, many have questioned where the next vintage of great startup companies will come from.  This theme was touched on a few weeks ago in my post

Corporate venture capital’s rise to prominence in biotech over the past few years is now a well worn subject.  It was yet again debated this week at the Windhover PSA meeting, in part triggered by the recent widely-covered launch of

The sustainability of the biopharma sector depends on a continual flow of new startups to both feed Big Pharma’s pipelines and to create the next generation of emerging mid-cap companies.  At the BioPharma America conference this week, several panelists asserted

Not a day goes by that pundits aren’t bemoaning the struggles of the drug industry: R&D productivity declines, FDA uncertainties, restructurings and downsizings, payor and reimbursement dynamics, pricing pressures, generics and patent cliffs, etc…   Many critics worry about  slowing growth

The FDA approved 20 new molecular entity NDAs in the first half of 2011, which is an impressive count.  Of the 20, eighteen are new therapeutics (two were diagnostic reagents).  This number of approvals is exciting, especially since in 2011

Most of Big Pharma have been trying to reinvent themselves as nimble Biotechs, at least in the eyes of Wall Street, in order to be perceived as being innovative R&D-driven companies.    Despite the restructurings, Big Pharma is struggling with that

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

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

Lots of folks have been talking about the demise of Pharma R&D spending, especially with the recent cuts at Pfizer, GSK, and others.  But the truth is far from that, as they still spend an enormous sum and dwarf the

Slate’s piece on drug costs has really caused some fun and excitement in the life science community.  For those that haven’t followed, Tufts Center for Study of Drug Development published a widely cited number in 2003 of $800M+ to bring