How to Exit an Oncology Venture

On August 2021, I lead the development of an business article on exiting oncology ventures in Nature Biotechnology when I worked as a full-time investor at the VC firm Aglaia Oncology Funds. The article aims to provide aspiring and established entrepreneurs in the oncology field a roadmap towards the exit of a biotech company. It provides considerations to entrepreneurs when and how to exit, and how to plan venture capital financings and pharma partnerships at every step of the process.

The article makes use of Aglaia's proprietary database (Oncodealigence®) that contains data on 190 full-acquisition deals of oncology therapeutics ventures from 2004 through 2020 for which deal economics were disclosed. Full investor financing information up to exit was retrieved for 134 companies. By combining this information with published data sets on drug development attrition rates and phase-transition durations of 4,414 medicinal products, including 1,628 oncology products, a dataset was created that is informative about pharma’s acquisition interests and the predicted time to exit, risk of failure and capital needs of oncology startups. Furthermore, the article contains an analysis of 1,050 Series A-D venture financing rounds of oncology ventures from 2015 to 2020, to provide insights on the type of investors likely to be interested in investing at a particular development stage.

Stepping to the Exit, Nature Biotechnology 2021

The analysis provides pointers as to the financial requirements required to advance a company through each stage of development, to estimate the right time for an exit and how it can be enabled, and to forecast a company’s chances of moving to the next stage of technical development. As oncology is by far the most important area for mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the life sciences — in 2019 it garnered $67 billion — I believe this dataset also provides useful insights for bioentrepreneurs working in other indications, especially considering that oncology products include the majority of drug modalities found elsewhere in biopharmaceutical discovery and development.

Find the article here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-01007-1.epdf?sharing_token=5A0AS3FBDWCFZNmMB_rj19RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NytR6SI802Kwn_0fhK3m-AmQC84tA5_BJeZigK7J1UJhUzhXVkUgnTf1MNMp7Ws6ZUjE3xGgtEDwNbgDqAwS_o82vcfO8oKQzkUVKbCDPBC-28Mxe_ev0AyE-xjhjNWcQ%3D