Hedging against academic risk

Investors in early stage companies must often take a leap of faith that the academic research behind a company's strategy is well validated and can be reproduced by independent hands. But according to Atlas Venturepartner Bruce Booth, most academic studies are not conducted with sufficient rigor to warrant such a leap.

"Validation is a huge challenge to any translational effort," Booth told SciBX. "The problem is not being able to reproduce academic results" outside the original laboratory...