VC’s generally get their money back when a company IPO’s, although lately this has been harder to pull off. Still, most of the companies from whom Big Pharma in-licenses drug candidates are publicly traded, so I think it’s fair to say that Big Pharma is indeed offloading some of the R&D cost of clinical failures onto biotech bagholders.
“The efficient-market hypothesis may be the foremost piece of B.S. ever promulgated in any area of human knowledge!”