[frisco]

I think this is availability bias. Many large (> $100M) deals happen all the time in early stage life sciences but don't get picked up by the tech press or covered as "startups". A few high profile stories flame out spectacularly like this but they are typically already the outsiders to the industry.

To the specific scenario, when N is small all kinds of idiosyncratic bad decision making can happen.

[cixin]

Hmm.. this is significantly more than 100MUSD (630MUSD).

I'd love some examples of good plays in this area (that is, those that resulted not just in acquisition but viable products). This area being life science tools/diagnostics.

From the companies I've been it seems to be biased toward crazy plays that had a stack of money thrown at them. Honestly would like to hear about others, know where to read about others.

[EpicEng]

I've been fortunate enough to work at two so far.

At Aperio I was on the team that designed a digital pathology instrument. At the time this was pretty new tech. We were purchased by Leica a little more than four years ago.

After that I went to epic sciences. We will be releasing our first LDT this year in a partnership with Genomic Health. It's a blood based prostate cancer test with demonstrated clinical utility, the first of its kind in the CTC space as far as I'm aware.