Consultant: Smart biotech money betting on innovation

Cynthia Robbins-Roth, the founding partner of BioVenture Consultants, crunched the numbers on the first-quarter venture deals for 2010 and found a big shift out of A rounds and into the B Series.

In a quarter that saw a significant overall fall-off from 2009 financing levels, only eight A rounds were completed in the first quarter of this year versus 18 a year ago, she writes in BioWorld. Investors are offering more money for clinical-stage companies while the focus remains concentrated heavily on R&D and early innovation work rather than reformulations. And while almost the same number of Series C deals was completed in the first quarter of this year as in 2009, there was far less money being pumped into third rounds.

"As we went to press, investors were getting hopeful that a small crop of IPOs in various sectors would break the logjam," writes the consultant. "If that happens, and the pent-up collection of late-stage biotechs can make it into the public markets, the whole ecosystem will benefit."

- here's the column from BioWorld

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