Earnout deals are back in the news with an interesting report from Shareholder Representative Services, or SRS, a firm who specializes in working for the selling party’s shareholders to follow up post-acquisition to ensure that escrows are paid, diligence is

Almost every biotech has a Scientific Advisory Board, but few use them particularly well.   Although SABs can be hugely valuable in helping shape a program or portfolio, or raising the visibility of a startup, they can also be a colossal

“Raise all the money you can whenever you can, and then raise some more”.  “The more a company raises, the more successful it is”.  Resumes boasting about how much an executive has raised in their prior companies.  These sentiments are

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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