June 5, 2014 by MassDevice
The time is now for big medical device companies to lift their heads out of their quarterly net earnings reports and start looking seriously at early stage investments in innovation.
By Amy Seigel, S2N Health
To the consternation of many emerging med tech executives and their investors, the big medical device companies are much less active in the early stage deal space than their bio-pharma counterparts. Drug company leadership “gets” that future success depends on robust product pipelines infused with externally sourced innovation at every stage from Discovery clear to Phase III. Case and point: of Goldman Sachs’s 2014 list of “High Potential Drugs that could Transform the Industry”, Forbes noted that 75% of them no longer sit with the originated owner because of acquisitions or in-licensing deals. Contrast this with the med tech sector, where the hurdle to acquisition or meaningful strategic investment is not so much proof of concept but proof of market traction – a very high bar indeed.
