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