Data on the Economics of Investing in Early-Stage Life Science Opportunities

The value of biotech companies can best be described as a discontinuous growth function with moderate value gains during early discovery research and significant value jumps during clinical development. Therefore, there is considerable interest to invest in clinical-stage biotech assets, and many funds avoid early-stage opportunities (seed, series A). However, when return is considered relative to investment risk, recent findings suggest that investment strategies that focus on early-stage investment opportunities may outperform late-stage investments when analyzing return/risk ratios. The panelists, all senior executives managing funds that specialize in early-stage investments, will discuss economic advantages as well as challenges of investing in young biotech projects from global and regional (US, Europe, Asia) perspectives. They will explore economic, financial as well as scientific aspects and define criteria for successfully reaching value inflection points in preclinical research and obtain the required funds to support further development.