Not surprisingly, organizers of the BIO Investor Forum in San Francisco this week expect one of the larger turnouts for a panel that deals with a topic that's front-of-mind to even more specialists and investors in the oncology space lately: prostate cancer.

Raising money through the sales of future royalties isn't just for the desperate anymore, but it remains to be seen whether the ploy will turn out to be good for cash-rich companies that take the increasingly popular route.

At last month's BioPharm America conference in San Francisco, biotech experts brushed aside the once-popular business model of using drug delivery or reformulation to provide incremental improvements to existing drugs.