Flying home from JPM 2012 and thought I’d share a few reflections from our early stage venture perspective on what we heard (or didn’t) around the year’s kickoff biotech event. While most of the attendees were focused on Inhibitex and

Happy New Year! Its another January and we’re taking stock of last year and pondering the one before us. Reflecting on the Life Science landscape, there are a number of good reasons to be optimistic about where things are today:

Thinking about the performance of recent biotech IPOs reminds me of the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail: not dead yet.  But even if it’s not dead, its certainly been a very challenging few years for new offerings. In

Today we announced a new strategic alliance with Shire Pharmaceutical’s to identify new opportunities for early stage venture creation aimed at addressing rare genetic diseases.  This collaboration brings unique expertise from Shire’s Human Genetic Therapies group together with our company creation

The sunk cost bias in venture capital is widely derided as a driver of poor returns in the asset class.  It’s the psychological root cause of why good money gets thrown after bad: VCs hoping for an unlikely outcome because they

Biotech’s high risks have led to the conventional wisdom that it’s valuable to construct a diversified portfolio of products at the company level.  Reinforced by the “show me multiple shots on goal” mantra of the capital markets, many product-focused biotech

Cambridge/Boston continues to separate itself from other clusters around the U.S. as an area of significant growth: more Pharma hires are happening here with layoffs elsewhere, significant talent inflows from around the world, more lab space than most markets, and

Last week, late stage biotech Alimera blew up after the FDA sent it a Complete Response Letter (CRL) rejecting its Iluvien product for eye diseases.  The stock is off 80%.  This was supposed to be a derisked, late stage investment

Virtual research-stage biotechs seem to be all the rage these days.  And they do offer interesting investment theses in some settings and with particular assets.  But there are a bunch of myths about going virtual that deserve attention. But before

The sky is falling.  The sky is falling.  Seems like every day there’s another piece of news about the drop in Life Science venture capital (and here), with bouts of flagellation around each new quarterly press release from NVCA/PwC MoneyTree, Dow

Like many technologies that move from hot discoveries on the cover of Nature to the practical ugly sausage-making of drug development, RNA-based therapeutics have been widely derided of late.  It seems everyone from Wall Street to Pharma to venture capital

Malaise and despair seem to have taken over the biotech venture and startup community of late. “Venture’s stress” is the cover story of BioCentury.  Biotech VCs are so distraught they are taking the case to Washington DC to lament the fate