One fun thing about being a biotech journalist is talking to scientific entrepreneurs in the early days. They are often exhilarated with possibilities, and terrified of failure, all at once.
If you talk with these people after they’ve raised their first $20 million, $50 million, or whatever, you can learn a lot. Usually, by this point, a serious biotech entrepreneur at least has a clear plan of attack against an unsolved medical problem. Privately held companies at this stage are almost invisible, but their dreams can reveal a lot about the state of medicine, where it’s going, and where the weaknesses are.
This year at Forbes, I wrote a variety of stories, but here are some of the startup stories that stood out for me. Odds are most will fail and never be heard from again. But if any succeed, they could become acquisition candidates by Big Pharma, or newsmakers for years to come.
Here are nine startup stories from me, along with another good recent one covered by Forbes healthcare editor Matthew Herper. I look forward to telling more stories like this in the year ahead.
Merck Joins mRNA Frenzy, Betting $100M on Moderna Therapeutics
GlaxoSmithKline, Searching For Hit Drugs, Pours $95M into Dark Matter of the Genome
Merck, New England Patriots Boss Bet $30M on Antibiotics Startup Spero
Cancer Vaccines Make a Comeback, as Third Rock Pumps $55M into Neon Therapeutics
Fighting Cancer With Microbes, Flagship Bets on a $35M Startup
Former Biogen Chief Resurfaces at $80M Startup Pursuing Cancer, Alzheimer’s
Merck Joins $55m Wager on RaNA Therapeutics, Pushing Frontier With RNA Medicines
Stealthy 10X Genomics Raises $55.5M to Beef Up DNA Sequencing
Pardon Me? Third Rock Pumps $52M into Hearing Loss Startup
Thinking With Your Gut? A Merck Vet Aims to Turn That Idea Into New Medicines (By Matthew Herper)
