Release Date:- 2009-03-22
Availability:- In Stock
Kind:- ebook
Introduction Most young life science ventures essentially depend on the infusion of venture capital (VC) (Traore, 2005), because their product development processes are risky and capital-intensive. Biopharmaceuticals, for example, demand on average more than 800 million $US R&D expenditure and a 12-year development process (DiMasi, Hansen and Grabowski, 2003) with only one out of 5000 initial drug candidates reaching market launch (Evans and Varaiya, 2003). Financing these expensive development processes is only possible if VCs are willing to take the risk and invest large amounts of money in the young ventures (Powell et al., 2002; Prevezer, 2001). Despite the high risk for investors, however, the life science industry is a major area of activity for VCs because the ventures have an enormous revenue potential. The most successful life science firms such as Amgen and Genentech earn billions of $US every year and their founders and investors have become very rich. In 2006, VCs invested 3.5 billion $ US in North America (US and Canada) and 1.9 billion $US in European life science ventures (Ernst & Young, 2007).
