Biotech startups may no longer need to get funded over their IP.
It's difficult to call it a trend yet, but a significant part of the VC deal flow in this sector might be soon with startups letting go of public research tech transfer and/or patents. In the pharmaceutical field notably, platform startups rely on large-scale molecule screening to discover drug candidates. The name of the game is speed!
The acronyms you want to use from now are the trendy DTE (Defensibility Through Execution) vs. the old-school PDD (Patent-Driven Defensibility).
And the paradigm shift here is that the #biopharma field has always been reserved to specialized VC firms acting solely on this vertical. But in a game where speed and time to market can become the new black, most VC firms could place their bet, as they do with digital technology.
The fantastic article from Pablo Lubroth and Xinchen Wang that gets into the weed on this is right here:
Pablo Lubroth
