This blog was written by Bill Marshall, CEO of miRagen Therapeutics, as part of the “From the Trenches” feature of LifeSciVC. The opportunity to use nucleic acids as therapeutic agents is extremely exciting. Creating drugs that affect protein targets that are

A few weeks ago, Michael Gladstone wrote a blog, here, about infusing young blood into the ‘C’ suite of biotech. I thought he made a number of important points and great suggestions about the topic. Today, I’d like to expand

As anyone following the biotech sector knows, the market for new public offerings has been incredibly strong over the past couple years. And the larger cap stocks in the sector have also outperformed, propelled by product launches and exciting clinical

In a period of surging optimism for our industry, it’s easy to forget that historically most of the therapeutic projects we undertake don’t make it to the market (see the data here if you absolutely have to remind yourself of

A great CEO makes all the difference, and a poor one destroys a ton of value. But recruiting great CEOs is often hard, especially when picking, as is most often the case, from a list of potential first-time CEOs. How

Over the past decade, in contrast to widely held misperceptions, the Biotech sector has witnessed time-to-IPO metrics very similar to other venture sectors, as I recently blogged on regarding the 2014 IPO Class (here). What wasn’t covered in the prior post was

This afternoon Nature Biotechnology published its annual review of the “some of the best that academic research had to offer the startup world in 2014.” The article, in the March 2015 issue, covers the editors’ selections of the top startups

Last week on February 28th – as I sat down to write this short blog– was Rare Disease Day 2015. Rare diseases, and there are estimated to be 7000 of them, impact almost 30 million people in the US alone, according to

Getting a drug from discovery to market requires more than a dozen years, so you just can’t do biotech in a 10-year venture fund – it just takes too long, right?  Fortunately, wrong.  The data just don’t support this premise, although this

Three years ago, I was walking across One Kendall Square in pursuit of a late lunch and bumped into a friend – another biotech CEO. I was a year into my role as CEO of Idenix, a publicly traded biotech

Every week it feels like there’s yet another big event happening in the engineered T-cell therapy space. Recently it’s been biotech-pharma partnering (link). Before that it was the biggest biotech IPO of the year (link). And before that, it was

Biotech fills the news these days – whether it’s the announcement of exciting new clinical data, another high-flying IPO, or a big M&A deal. Amidst the significant “share of voice” in the coverage of young and emerging biotech in the