VC Playbook

VC Playbook: The fundamentals do not change in life sciences investing – good science, unmet need and social responsibility.

VC Playbook: Pfizer Ventures senior managing partner Barbara Dalton shares insights into how the corporate venture group balances a dual mandate, the trade-offs needed and what success looks like for a CVC.

In this installment of our VC Playbook series, In Vivo sits down with Isabelle de Cremoux, CEO of Seventure. The company has been a pioneer investor in the microbiome space, which Cremoux believes has now reached a turning point.

In this latest installment of the VC Playbook series, In Vivo sits down with SV Health Investors’s Houman Ashrafian. The managing partner outlines the group’s investment philosophy, today’s skill set for VC success, and expectations for the future of Britain’s biotech industry post-Brexit and post-pandemic.

In this latest installment of VC playbook, In Vivo speaks to Naveed Siddiqi, senior partner at Novo Ventures. He discusses the group’s strategy, the European investment outlook for life sciences and how COVID-19 has permanently shifted perceptions of the biopharma industry.

Venture capital funds in Latin America have overlooked biotech, leaving an untapped opportunity for local capital markets and US and European investors alike. Chilean entrepreneur Cristian Hernandez, founder of newly launched boutique VC Zentynel Frontier Investments, explains how business – and society – can benefit from launching biotech start-ups able to serve a global market at lower cost.

Asia continues to gain attention for its healthtech innovation and adoption activity, and VC investors have seen the merits of a maintaining a focus on this newly emerging regional innovation hotspot, regardless of the pandemic.

In this installment of VC Playbook, profiling venture capital strategies in biopharma and medtech, In Vivo talks to Sofinnova Partners' Graziano Seghezzi about market access trends, Italy’s growing biotech offering and the perils of “health nationalism” to business partnering in the aftermath of COVID-19.

In the latest instalment of VC Playbook, In Vivo gets to know Arix Bioscience, a relatively young venture capital firm that went public in 2016. Arix has “has many similarities yet some key differences from a typical venture capital firm,” says the management team.

Innovation has come of age in Asia, throwing up investment opportunities in China, Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries that Novo Holdings plans to tap into, says CEO Kasim Kutay. The firm's Asia head, Amit Kakar, also outlines therapeutic areas of interest for the company, which is managing $65bn worth of assets.

In this latest installment of VC Playbook, Chris Buyse – former chief financial officer of ThromboGenics – talks to In Vivo about the lessons he has learned from a career as a financial executive in the life sciences and his current venture, Fund+, a Belgian-based investment group focused on innovative companies primarily active in therapeutics R&D.

In the latest instalment of our VC playbook series, In Vivo sits down with Roel Bulthuis, managing partner at INKEF Capital, to discuss the group’s approach to health care investing in Europe, the importance of funding a team not just a project and how life sciences venture capital is evolving with the emergence of health tech.