With lots of venture investors fleeing early stage biotech over the past few years, many have questioned where the next vintage of great startup companies will come from.  This theme was touched on a few weeks ago in my post

Corporate venture capital’s rise to prominence in biotech over the past few years is now a well worn subject.  It was yet again debated this week at the Windhover PSA meeting, in part triggered by the recent widely-covered launch of

Amidst talk of the need for renewed economic stimulus and the desire for America to invest in innovative industries, I thought I’d highlight two practical tax policy ideas for how to accelerate biotech sector growth: enabling NOL tradability and creating

The sustainability of the biopharma sector depends on a continual flow of new startups to both feed Big Pharma’s pipelines and to create the next generation of emerging mid-cap companies.  At the BioPharma America conference this week, several panelists asserted

Earlier this week the Startup Genome project released a report on the DNA of internet startups.  Essentially what attributes lead to success or failure.  One of the things they found was that 74% of startups failed because of “premature scaling”.

Not a day goes by that pundits aren’t bemoaning the struggles of the drug industry: R&D productivity declines, FDA uncertainties, restructurings and downsizings, payor and reimbursement dynamics, pricing pressures, generics and patent cliffs, etc…   Many critics worry about  slowing growth

Our friends at HBM Partners just published their quarterly Biotech/Pharma M&A report.  Its got some good nuggets of data in it about 1H2011. Although its hard to think about in the midst of the Great August Rollercoaster in the markets,

A few weeks ago I wrote a pair of blogs comparing Tech vs Life Science venture capital backed investments: one was on returns in the 2000’s where LS beat out Tech investing (highlighting a Nature Biotech article Bijan Salehizadeh of Highland Capital

The FDA approved 20 new molecular entity NDAs in the first half of 2011, which is an impressive count.  Of the 20, eighteen are new therapeutics (two were diagnostic reagents).  This number of approvals is exciting, especially since in 2011

Most of Big Pharma have been trying to reinvent themselves as nimble Biotechs, at least in the eyes of Wall Street, in order to be perceived as being innovative R&D-driven companies.    Despite the restructurings, Big Pharma is struggling with that

Note to Readers: This blog post was co-written by Bruce Booth and Bijan Salehizadeh, who co-authored an article in the July 2011 issue of Nature Biotechnology, detailing the differences in returns between Life Sciences and Tech investing. Most venture capitalists think that

Compensation in startups is a subject where vague notions of the right comparable benchmarks (“the market rate”) and organizational inertia (“that’s what we’ve done before…”) come together to prevent useful transparency. Mountains of data are thrown at comp committees to