What a biotech firm’s demise says about the industry

IF YOU’VE been following us for long enough, you’d know there’s a typical playbook for startups.

It goes something like this: Define a problem. Solve it with a new product. Build a great team. Quickly expand the product to several markets. And, perhaps most crucially, iterate as you go along.

However, that doesn’t happen often in biotech. In most cases, a product doesn’t even make it to the market. Before Moderna became a money-spinner worth US$196 billion in 2021, it was a startup that guzzled venture capital and big pharma money for years to survive.