Pharma

There’s a new twist to early stage drug discovery financing: technology without the team (video)

For-profit biotech accelerator BioMotiv aims to shake up the early stage, drug discovery financing space. The Cleveland, Ohio company wants to invest in early stage drug discovery ideas but doesn’t want to deal with management. It wants to save a promising technology from the investment valley of death, but not the team. It does that […]

By Arundhati Parmar on December 04, 2012

For-profit biotech accelerator BioMotiv aims to shake up the early stage, drug discovery financing space.

The Cleveland, Ohio company wants to invest in early stage drug discovery ideas but doesn’t want to deal with management. It wants to save a promising technology from the investment valley of death, but not the team.

It does that by licensing the technology from research institutions and from industry sources, and then funding and managing the technology’s progress in-house without any partners. CEO Baiju Shah believes the VC model of investment is broken while large pharma companies are not really interested in true, early stage investing. That is the gap BioMotiv wants to bridge.

I caught up with Shah at the Mid America Healthcare Venture Forum Conference in Minneapolis Tuesday. He talked about BioMotiv, the “projects” the accelerator would consider licensing and the new model of early stage biopharma financing.

[Photo Credit: Protecting Investment from Big Stock Photo]