Biotech and Life Sciences

Biotech is venture's other major industry, and it works almost nothing like software. Value comes from binary scientific and regulatory events. Revenue usually arrives after venture investors exit. The usual buyer is a large pharmaceutical company refilling a pipeline that faces patent expiries and low internal research productivity. The biotech investor takes scientific risk early with cheap capital and sells de-risked assets to buyers with commercial infrastructure and a lower cost of capital.

These all-indication averages come from the BIO, Informa, and QLS study of 2011–2020 programmes. Clinical Development Success Rates 2011–2020, BIO Haematology and biomarker-selected rare-disease programmes run higher; oncology without biomarkers, neurology, and psychiatry lower.