Ikaria Backers Buy INO, Create Model for Self-Funding Discovery

Basic biotech models don’t often change quickly or significantly. Science certainly moves forward, backwards, and sideways, and ideas fall in and out of favor; the platform-to-product continuum gets traversed by entrepreneurs and VCs once every three or four years, for example. But the central dogma of discovery, VC-backing, pharma validation and exit has held relatively firm for two decades; the question has mostly remained about where in that model a company begins corporate life, and less about the model itself.

Only every now and then do these models get a jolt—call it biotech’s version of punctuated equilibrium. And Ikaria Inc., the two-year old start-up focused on the science of metabolic...