Locust Walk Partners - 2009 Wrap-up

The Locust Walk Partners team is thrilled to have just completed our first year in business.  While it was a turbulent time for the industry, we are proud of this year's accomplishments including:

• Executing nearly 15 client business development, strategic, and commercial advisory engagements, several of which remain in active partnering dialogue
• Building a world-class team of transaction, commercial, clinical and technical advisors
• Celebrating Jay Mohr's professional milestones with Gloucester Pharmaceuticals' FDA approval of Istodax and its recent sale to Celgene for $640M.  Jay was the founding CEO where he in-licensed Istodax from Fujisawa, assembled the initial management team, and raised $32M in venture capital.
• Geoff Meyerson's first venture investment, Algeta, securing an $800M partnership with Bayer leading to a 6x return on investment.
• Participating in several opinion-leading conferences, including FierceBiotech Pharma Partnering Webinar with Ad Rawcliffe (SVP WWBD GSK) and Anna Protopapas (SVP CD Millenium).

As follpw-up to the webinar, enclosed is a two-page overview on the results of our buy-side survey that we presented on what helps get a deal done. Feel free to pass this on to colleagues and let us know if you would like a copy of the full presentation.

All the best for a Happy Holiday and prosperous New Year!

Follow-up from FierceBiotech Webinar

Today we revealed the results of our buy-side BD survey about licensing best practices at the FierceBiotech Webinar titled "Partnering with Pharma: How to Get a Deal".  On the panel with us were Ad Rawcliffe from GSK and Anna Protopapas from Millennium/Takeda.  One major takeaway from Ad and Anna's presentation was the need for a strong relationship between the licensors and pharma/biotech partners.  Clearly this is more important for a partnership than it is for an outlicense or an M&A.  We could not agree more with this sentiment.  The problem is that it's very hard and time consuming to establish a relationship with every partner who expresses an interest.  Something that most biotech companies don't fully appreciate is the need for the entire senior managemet team to get engaged with partnering discussions, not just the CBO/BD team.  While BD at a small company does more than simply facilitate, they need to make sure that they get their team fully engaged to make a deal work.  Ultimately you need a clinician or scientist speaking with the partner's clinical champion to get them excited, not a business bozo.  For more musing or to get a copy of a six slide overview of the presentation that Jay and I shared, please send me an email at geoff@locustwalkpartners.com.