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

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