Today we announced a novel alliance with Monsanto to identify new life science technologies and explore the potential for creating/investing in new seed-stage startups around them.  It’s an exciting collaboration that brings a complementary set of interests, capabilities, and access

Contract Research Organizations (CROs) have historically been sleepy fee-for-service partners for the drug industry, widely disregarded as not innovative, and their scientists certainly not treated with the same professional respect as their counterparts in Pharma R&D. But this is clearly

Several recent stories from WSJ and VentureWire have highlighted the challenging performance of the IPO markets for biotech in 2011.  It has indeed been tough: more shares offered at lower prices = more painful dilution.  From a pricing perspective, the

Tranzyme just got public and will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol TZYM on Monday. Unfortunately the pricing wasn’t an April Fools joke.  They had to sell 53% of the company in the IPO in order to raise under $50M

Jus Singh doesn’t look much like James Bond, but he’s nearly as cool (see pic below). He’s the founder of Avila Therapeutics, a company we’ve backed that is focused on the discovery of targeted covalent inhibitors. When he and Roy

I just met with an entrepreneur who was the founding CEO of a company created around an academic lab’s discoveries. It was fascinating new approach to drugging hot receptor targets.  To protect the innocent I won’t mention the names, but

We’re excited to be presenting the University Research & Entrepreneurship Symposium 2011 (URES) next week – it’s one of the premier seed-stage and academic startup conferences in the country.  As chair of the Life Science track, I thought it would

Lots of folks have been talking about the demise of Pharma R&D spending, especially with the recent cuts at Pfizer, GSK, and others.  But the truth is far from that, as they still spend an enormous sum and dwarf the

Our friends at HBM Partners in Switzerland have just published their 2010 Biotech M&A Survey based on a reasonably large set of deals last year.  A few observations I’ve gleaned from their analysis: Acquisitions of VC-backed biotech companies were up

We’re in an era of consolidation in our country’s biotech clusters.  The few regions with critical mass are accelerating their leadership in terms of both ‘mindshare’ and market share, and appear to be increasing the gap between themselves and the

Bill Gates has just backed one our new startups – Nimbus Discovery LLC – as part of an extension to the seed tranche. Here’s the press release. It might come as a surprise to some, but Bill Gates has been a long-time

Slate’s piece on drug costs has really caused some fun and excitement in the life science community.  For those that haven’t followed, Tufts Center for Study of Drug Development published a widely cited number in 2003 of $800M+ to bring