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Bringing up baby

Nature Biotechnology volume 36, pages 393–401 (2018)Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 06 August 2018

This article has been updated

More investors are building companies from scratch, with more money than any time in biotech's history.

But what the industry lacked was the bold, early-stage investing that had helped their former company rise to prominence. Instead, venture capitalists (VC) and big pharma corporate arms were favoring single-asset companies and those with products near approval, which were offering only incremental advances to the standard of care. To Starr, Tepper and Levin, it seemed that innovation was being choked out of the industry.

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Figure 1: Global amount and number of financings raised through VC funds, 2006–2017.
Figure 2: Venture capital investment for biotech therapeutics venture-backed companies, by region (2006–2017).
Figure 3: Average amount venture capital raised per round in the United States, Europe and China (2013–2017).
Figure 4: Private biotech company exits.
Figure 5: Average size and number of Series A rounds from 1999 to the present.

Change history

  • 26 June 2018

    In the version of this article initially published, on p. 395, right-hand column, Celgene was said to have bought Delinia four months after founding, rather than four months after series A. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

  • 18 July 2018

    In the version of this article initially published, on p. 395, right-hand column, Plan les Ouates was mislocated in France; it is in Switzerland. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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  1. Brady Huggett is Business Editor at Nature Biotechnology.,

    Brady Huggett

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  1. Brady Huggett
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Huggett, B. Bringing up baby. Nat Biotechnol 36, 393–401 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4135

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