What’s the lesson of Rova-T?

Yesterday, AbbVie made official what long seemed inevitable: The company ended all research in Rova-T, a cancer treatment for which it paid no fewer than $5.8 billion in 2016.

This news, like all recent Rova-T news, was met with tut-tutting tweets from biotech types. That’s because Stemcentrx, the company AbbVie bought to obtain Rova-T, was not a typical biotech startup. It had an out-of-vogue approach to treating cancer, and its investors were not usual biotech suspects but rather Silicon Valley software VCs, including Peter Thiel and his Founders Fund. “Our theory was that it was a biotech company that looked a little more like a software company,” Thiel said in 2015, a sentence that seemed diamond-cut to irk drug developers.

And thus each Rova-T bruise on the way to this final resting place got spun as a vindication of proper biotech VCs and a sign that the tech barbarians at the gate simply couldn’t cut it when it came to the business of biology.

But is that entirely fair? Biotech companies fail all the time, regardless of the names embroidered on their investors’ fleeces. And, in strict terms, Stemcentrx’s backers succeeded the second AbbVie’s check cleared. Rova-T’s fate was someone else’s problem.