Recovering scientist turned early stage VC A biotech optimist fighting gravity

Big BioPharma Stock Buybacks: Are There Better Alternatives?
August 22, 2012

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,

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The Quiet Outperformance of Recent Biotech IPOs
August 1, 2012

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

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More Than Half of Biotech Venture Financings Are Early Stage Deals
July 26, 2012

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

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Where Is Everyone? Biotech’s Dwindling Number of Venture Firms
July 24, 2012

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

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Venture Debt: Under-Appreciated Tool for Building Biotechs
July 11, 2012

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

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Reflections on Oncology’s Recent Biotech IPOs: CLVS, MACK, & TSRO
June 28, 2012

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

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Biotech M&A: Quietly delivering returns in 2012
June 19, 2012

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

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Cancer Drug Targets: The March of the Lemmings
June 7, 2012

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

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Contrarian Opportunities in Biotech Venture
June 2, 2012

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

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Want Better Odds? Get a Pharma Corporate VC to Invest
May 22, 2012

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

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Not-so-Breaking News: The VC Model Needs Retooling
May 15, 2012

“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

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Biotech Past, Biotech Present: Reflections on the IPO Window of 1991-1994
May 2, 2012

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

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