While biotech investors and entrepreneurs turned to rare diseases - and the potential for selling drugs targeting those diseases at a high cost - novel treatments in a number of more-prevalent disease areas went wanting. What's more, according to a recent report by the Biotechnology Industry Organization , while biotech drugs now snag half of the total venture funding for all therapeutics, the number of first-time Series A financings in 2013 was off by nearly a third from its 2006 peak.