Across the whole sector, the return on investment in biotech (broadly defined to encompass diagnostic and medical device companies, as well as therapeutic developers) is poor, whether you look at publically traded stocks or private investments through venture capital funds.  So poor, in fact, that no ‘generalist’ investor would touch biotech as an asset class.

This, according to Stuart Duty of Piper Jaffrey, is the reason why the IPO window closed for biotech companies, and will likely remain closed for the foreseeable future.   This inability to attract ‘generalist’ capital to buy our companies at the end of the life cycle blocks up the whole biotech company pipeline.  And there is only one solution: improve the return on investment of the sector so that it becomes competitive with other asset classes.

That much is obvious.  Less obvious is how this is to be done.  DrugBaron’s prescription is to kill more projects before they consume ultimately non-productive capital.  The key is to recognize just how high the barrier has become for commercial success, and that even “above average” projects are unlikely to ever achieve profitability.  This prescription is easy to swallow in theory, but difficult to implement in practice.  Killing companies (crystallizing losses) is difficult to do when they are obviously failing – so doing it when they are apparently succeeding (just not succeeding enough) requires a special kind of insight… and no small measure of bravery.More

RxCelerate Ltd is an outsourced drug development platform based near Cambridge, UK. We specialize in delivering an entire road map of drug development services from discovery and medicinal chemistry through to formal preclinical development and clinical up to Phase IIa. In the last five years, we have witnessed dramatic changes in the drug development …