Stepping to the Exit - Publication in Nature Biotechnology
August 27, 2021
On August, 27th 2021 an article has been published in Nature Biotechnology by Aglaia that aims to provide aspiring and established entrepreneurs in the oncology field a roadmap towards the exit of a biotech company. It provides considerations to entrepreneurs when and how to exit, and how to plan venture capital financings and pharma partnerships at every step of the process.
Aglaia has built a proprietary database (Oncodealigence®) that contains data on 190 full-acquisition deals of oncology therapeutics ventures from 2004 through 2020 for which deal economics were disclosed. Full investor financing information up to exit was retrieved for 134 companies. By combining this information with published data sets on drug development attrition rates and phase-transition durations of 4,414 medicinal products, including 1,628 oncology products, we have created a dataset that is informative about pharma’s acquisition interests and the predicted time to exit, risk of failure and capital needs of oncology startups. We furthermore analyzed 1,050 Series A-D and beyond, venture financing rounds of oncology ventures from 2015 to 2020, to provide insights on the type of investors likely to be interested in investing at a particular development stage.
Our analysis provides pointers as to the financial requirements required to advance a company through each stage of development, to estimate the right time for an exit and how it can be enabled, and to forecast a company’s chances of moving to the next stage of technical development. As oncology is by far the most important area for mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the life sciences — in 2019 it garnered $67 billion — we believe this dataset also provides useful insights for bioentrepreneurs working in other indications, especially considering that oncology products include the majority of drug modalities found elsewhere in biopharmaceutical discovery and development.
See the article by Aglaia in Nature Biotechnology.
