To this end, many pharmas are using in-house venture groups to support early-stage companies, and as Atlas VC Bruce Booth reports, life-science financing these days (especially early-stage) increasingly involves at least one corporate VC.

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So these new data from Burrill are entirely all consistent with pharma corporate VC playing an important role in the ecosystem, and that they seem to get involved in good companies that possess better than average probabilities of success.

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The sad reality is we build our adjacencies, VC and corporate ventures out of failures and that has got to change.

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