Best of the Blog: Start-Up June 2008
This article was originally published in Start Up
Executive Summary
Best of the Blog is a monthly column highlighting the best of our free online content at www.windhover.com/blog. In June and early July Windhover's editorial staff posted more than seventy articles to the site, covering biopharma, device and diagnostics R&D, business development, regulatory and commercial news. Highlights included a discussion of biotech exit strategies and a peek at the results of a survey about the worth of advice from investment bankers. Here are a few of our favorite blog posts for stories not covered elsewhere in this month's START-UP.
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Institutional Innovation in Devices
These days, medtech investors need to be much more selective about how they spend their capital. In pursuit of steady streams of early-stage opportunities with a high likelihood of success, VCs are establishing closer ties with entprepreneurs and executives they feel can do it again.
Can Out-Partnering Help Vault Pfizer Over the "Second Cliff"?
The industry's genericization problem will seriously constrain Big Pharma's ability to pay for late-stage development on all its products. One potential solution is being developed by Pfizer, whose top R&D execs see out-partnering as a way to free up resources for key programs and to expand R&D capacity. In this interview with R&D boss Martin Mackay, Mackay reports that Pfizer is building up a war-chest of out-licensing and partnering candidates, pursuing a wide variety of transactions--including project financing, straight out-licensing and spinoffs. But the extent of Pfizer's long-term commitment to out-partnering still isn't clear.
Esperion, Again: Pfizer's First Spin-Out's Familiar Look
This examination of Pfizer's first foray into spin-outs is a sidebar to "Can Out-Partnering Power Pfizer Over the "Second Cliff?"" Pfizer's Esperion spin-out hopes to pick up where it left off five years ago when Pfizer bought its first incarnation: developing HDL-raising therapies for CV disease.