As startup folks we are great at keeping our heads down and looking ahead; this blog post was a good excuse to take a look back while digesting Thanksgiving leftovers. I’m a bit early for the end of the year analyses; however, in thinking about all of the triumphs and setbacks we’ve encountered in 2014, it occurred to me that much is made of these actual events, but very little is said about how teams handle them.

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Building a performance based corporate culture is a key aspect of the biotech innovation business.  It can be easy to overlook this facet of company building as one focuses on determining the robustness of the new technology, refining your business model, assessing the intellectual property landscape, rifling through contacts to find great talent and scrambling to attract investors. Read more.

The cost of making a new drug has grown to nearly $2.6B, according to the latest and greatest from Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (here).  That’s a big and almost unfathomable number.  Critics immediately pounced on it, calling anyone who believed it a flatlander (here), and suggesting that the cost, with failures, was closer to $150M.  Tufts’ number appears incredulous, but the critics paltry number even more so. Read more.

Intellia Therapeutics, a new company formed to develop therapeutic products using CRISPR-Cas9 technology for gene editing and repair, announced today that it has closed a Series A investment round with $15 million in financing led by Atlas Venture and Novartis. Read more.

As one of big drivers behind the recent IPO window, cross-over investing into private biotech companies by both mutual fund and hedge fund investors has become increasingly commonplace over the past couple years. Read more.