Standish M. Fleming of Forward Ventures specializes in venture capital investing, mainly in biopharmaceuticals. He invests in early clinical-stage assets and he has founded a number of companies. Generally, he invests in early venture rounds but in fairly mature technologies that are already in clinical testing and in the case of medical devices often in marketed products.  He does have some concerns;

“What is probably the biggest long-term threat to the sustainability of the bio-venture market is an ongoing and permanent dislocation between pricing and underlying values, whether the values are too high or too low. That creates an environment in which we cannot reliably invest in and build these companies over the extended period of time that we need to bring a new pharmaceutical to market.”

Going forward he also has some concerns

“It takes a cost of $2.1 billion to bring a new molecule to market today. That price continues to grow at a geometric rate. If people cannot reasonably expect to recoup that kind of investment, they are simply not going to make it. Innovation is going to be the first thing to die in the pharmaceutical world. We can lose generations of potential new drugs here and destroy an infrastructure that we may never be able to rebuild.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 6:09 pm and is filed under General Investing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.