Building bite-sized exits

Versant Ventures and former employees of Amira Pharmaceuticals Inc. applied lessons learned from Amira when creating Inception Sciences Inc., a drug discovery company that spins off assets into separate entities to make for cleaner acquisitions.

When Amira's board started gearing the company for an exit in 2010, it had four programs in clinical trials. "It became pretty clear that each pharma company they talked with had their favorite program within the portfolio, but no company wanted the whole portfolio," Inception CBO Clare Ozawa told BioCentury. "So they decided to segregate the programs, which led to a very difficult exercise to turn Amira into multiple companies to exit."...