Medical investors once spent a disproportionate amount of their money on diseases affecting the brain, heart and skeleton. Now market pressures and technological advances are driving them to invest across the human body more broadly.
A VentureWire analysis of U.S. venture financings shows how investors have spread their dollars across a widening range of disease treatments in recent years. From 2002 to 2007 the body part that attracted the most capital–nearly always the heart–often represented 5% to 7% or more of the total venture capital deployed into all U.S. companies, according to data from Dow Jones VentureSource.