Special-purpose entities are back. But these are far different animals from the off-balance-sheet monsters that led to the collapse of Enron in 2001. The newly hot instruments are financial lifelines for publicly traded biotech companies that need funds to accelerate drug development, want to offload some risk in the process and want to delay the day they might license their drug candidates to Big Pharma. These on-balance-sheet financing mechanisms have nothing to do with covering up profits and losses.
