Derek Lowe

Here’s a useful article that looks at the fate of university-licensed startup (ULS) life sciencecompanies over the last few years. There are more and more such companies (a greater than tenfold increase in their number since 1990), but a comprehensive look at success rates (and how such rates vary according to the universities involved) has been harder to come by. A lot of work went into this overview, and I’m glad the authors were able to assemble it. They spent a lot of time digging through tech-transfer records and contacting universities to make sure that they’d covered everything, checking venture capital announcements and state corporate registrations, and searching through press releases, LinkedIn pages, and more. The data that they have produced look like the best we have on the subject.