Category Archives: R&D Productivity

2023 couldn’t end fast enough for most of us in biopharma; its been a tough year in the capital markets, and the industry is facing it’s fair share of headwinds. Fortunately, despite all that, great science and medicine continues to

By Jonathan Montagu, CEO and founder of HotSpot Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC. White Hat Hackers, sometimes called “ethical hackers,” are individuals that work to find and fix security problems in a system by

Biotech sentiment is super bearish today, as the sector has been crushed over the last year. There’s blood in the water, especially for small and mid-cap players, and everyone’s looking for what caused the carnage. There are many factors at

By Aoife Brennan, CEO of Synlogic Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC The COVID-19 pandemic has upended life as we know it. Given so much uncertainty, it is a normal human impulse to want some

By Aoife Brennan, CEO of Synlogic, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC I love to travel. While still in training in internal medicine, I earned extra money to fund trips abroad by covering for community-based general

M&A is an omnipresent reality in the biopharma industry, from Big Pharma mega-mergers to smaller acquisitions of emerging startups. We’ve recently witnessed several large M&A transactions get closed or announced, including BMS-Celgene, Takeda-Shire, and AbbVie-Allergan; according to BMO Capital Markets

It’s that time of year again when we pause to reflect on the state of the industry – and there’s more to focus on in biopharma today than just the drug pricing debate. As I described last year, we host

The IQVIA Institute released a data-rich report in April 2019 on the state of clinical R&D in the US pharmaceutical industry titled “The Changing Landscape of Research and Development: Innovation, Drivers of Change, and Evolution of Clinical Trial Productivity”.  The

The FDA recently approved Imfinzi (durvalumab) for the treatment of bladder cancer, making it the fifth new monoclonal antibody approved this year. More than twenty antibodies have been approved by the FDA since 2015. While not quite the magic bullet envisioned

Neural networks, cloud computing, deep learning, and in silico wizardry are on the cusp of disintermediating pharmaceutical drug discovery, cutting billions of billions off the industry’s cost of new drugs and reducing the time to get new medicines approved to

Pharma R&D productivity continues to be a critical issue for the industry. Making smart investments in R&D requires an understanding of the risk and return drivers across the product development cycle, as well as some good fortune. This week the

A new FDA approval marks a major milestone in the biopharmaceutical business; relatively few biopharma companies are ever able to lay claim to having discovered, developed, or marketed a recently approved medicine. As of mid-October, the FDA has approved 17

The past five years have been the greatest bull run in the history of the biotech industry. Stock market outperformance, significant fundraising levels both private and public, more IPOs in this window than ever before, and huge volumes of M&A.

This blog was written by Mike Gilman, CEO of Padlock Therapeutics, as part of the “From the Trenches” feature of LifeSciVC. I stumbled into a bit of a mess a few weeks ago. It was with the best of intentions, of course.

External models of R&D innovation are the rage in Pharma today, as they should be – the future of our industry depends on a great deal more rather than less collaboration. In a very healthy way, lots of experiments are

The cost of making a new drug has grown to nearly $2.6B, according to the latest and greatest from Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (here).  That’s a big and almost unfathomable number.  Critics immediately pounced on it,

Much has been written about the merits and demerits of the virtual biotech model.  In essence, a virtual biotech outsources all non-core activities and rejects the need for in-house laboratories.  Instead, a small internal team manages execution outside the company,

Startup Biotechs need bigger drug companies for lots of things, including R&D collaborations, investments, non-dilutive funding, and eventual liquidity via M&A. The health of today’s ecosystem depends on biotech and pharma working together. But one of the most important and

Extreme clinical phenotypes caused by rare genetic variations have been the basis of some of the most exciting drug targets in today’s pharmaceutical pipeline: PCSK9 in cholesterol, sclerostin in bone diseases, Nav1.7 for pain.  The rare gene signatures underlying these

Today’s biopharma industry has a richer and more exciting late stage pipeline of compelling new therapeutics than its had in years, drawing lots of enthusiasm from analysts and investors.  Goldman Sachs (GS) recently published a report on the “10 drugs

The Pharma R&D model is certainly suffering, and the industry’s pandemic sickness is best embodied by “Eroom’s law” of ever-decreasing R&D productivity. But it’s a lot easier to diagnose this disease than it is to prescribe a medicine. In fairness,