There will always be exciting, new innovations that large pharma will pay upfront for.
True; however, there probably won’t be many non-product biotech deals that have substantial amounts of up-front money. E.g. we probably won’t see a reprise of the 1990’s deal in which SmithKline Beecham (now GSK) acquired the rights to HGSI’s genomics-based targets or of the more recent deals ALNY inked with Roche and NVS for RNAi-based targets.