Rediscovering discovery

The bursting of the genomics bubble is now sufficiently far in the past that the shock has worn off, but it is not so distant that the lessons have been forgotten. Thus a surprising number of companies have reentered the toolkit space typified by companies of that era, including bioinformatics, sequencing, biomarkers and predictive toxicology. Some of these companies are bootstrapping without VCs while others have raised significant venture funds. But what they all have in common is a level of pragmatism that was absent in their forebears.

"Tools of the past were intended to cure global problems of biology and chemistry," said venture investor Shehan Dissanayake of the Tavistock Group. "In contrast, the tools of today are intended to solve discrete problems of biology and chemistry."...