We Build a New
Class of Biotech
Related Sciences (RS) is a data science-driven drug discovery studio. RS uses a proprietary machine learning platform to identify the best new drug discovery opportunities for every disease, organizes them into structured investment portfolios, and then operates them leanly over a specialized R&D platform designed to take full advantage of the last decade's transformational innovations.
Extraordinary Science Deserves a Fresh Model
Scientific entrepreneurs build biotech companies to create better medicines. But what if building a better biotech company could enable those entrepreneurs to succeed more often? We view innovating on biotech's operating, R&D, and business model itself as a critical force-multiplier and accelerator in the quest to bring the next great generation of medicines to patients as quickly as possible. As such, we focus on big questions, like:
What Factors Increase the Chances of Success?
RS spent years quantitatively analyzing all of global biopharma's historical successes and failures in order to elucidate the specific factors that most impact a drug's odds of clinical success, and a company's chances of economic success. What if a new systematic set of principles and strategies based on this could significantly improve success rates? 1, 2, 5
What Models Might Enhance Risk-Reward?
Today ~99.7% of the world’s institutional investors have zero exposure to biotech, with only ~250 firms making 2+ therapeutics investments per year 3. What if new operating and financial models could improve the sector's accessibility and economic appeal, dramatically expanding capital availability for the drugs and companies that truly "deserve to be made"?
Are the Best Discoveries Being Made into Medicines?
Analysis of all current biomedical knowledge on the RS data platform reveals the surprising finding that ~75% of all target-disease opportunities with strong cumulative evidence of links have never been tried: 23,000+ opportunities spanning 3,800+ individual targets for 4,200+ diseases are just waiting to be made into promising new medicines. 4
Revolutionary Biotech Design
The last decade's parallel revolutions in biomedical data, R&D technologies and services, new therapeutic modalities, AI, and remote connectivity, collectively create an important new menu of possibilities to re-envision how biotechs are designed and operated to significantly improve their capital efficiency, scientific quality, and overall odds of success.
Opportunity Selection
Approximately 250 million target-disease pairs collectively represent the current solution space to treat, prevent, and cure all diseases. Choosing among them into which to invest significant research effort and capital is the hard part.
Fortunately, as biomedical data sets continue to grow exponentially, it becomes increasingly possible to quantitatively evaluate key built-in characteristics that shape each opportunity's risk-reward profile. As examples, it has been shown that drug programs with strong human genetics evidence of links to a disease have ~3x+ higher rates of clinical success than those that do not, and, structurally enabled targets with validated assays have a greater chance of efficient, successful drug discovery than those without.
Prioritizing those opportunities with the very best risk-reward characteristics can significantly increase a company's built-in odds of both clinical and economic success.
Portfolio Design
At every step in the R&D funnel, a program's unique attributes matched to the historical success rates of programs with similar attributes, roughly inform its odds of advancing or failing.
Utilizing these inputs, portfolio theory offers a range of valuable levers that can help to mitigate or offset these risks through design and scale. For example, by prospectively building expected attrition into portfolio size, some set number of programs are likely to advance, enabling the winners to pay for the losers on a risk-adjusted basis. Scale diversifies away the risk of the binary outcomes often seen with a single "lead program".
Further, economies of scale apply materially to drug R&D. At scale, both vendor pricing and partnering opportunities often improve, and working on multiple biologically related programs can unlock cost, time, and knowledge synergies such as common assay development or shared scientific advisors.
Optimizing portfolio scale, design, and structure offers important new ways to improve biotech efficiency and risk profiles.
Operating Efficiency
A wide range of new opportunities exist to capture greater efficiencies in the way biotechs are staffed and operate.
First, despite individual biotechs focusing on unique research opportunities, a significant portion of capital -- we estimate as high as 60% of funds raised -- is allocated to rebuilding nearly identical scientific, business, laboratory, advisory, and back office capabilities, over and over again. If companies were designed instead to share investment in, and variabilize use of, both generalist and specialized capabilities needed on an infrequent basis, capital expenditures, staffing time, and operating costs could all be materially reduced, while expanding shared investment into the quality of the capabilities themselves.
Additionally, new virtual team structures and remote collaboration models unlock extraordinary new opportunities to overcome geographic constraints and engage with the very best scientific talent wherever it may be found. Large virtual teams can work together to craft world-class R&D independent of typical "biotech hubs", and fractional advisors and consultants can both deepen and broaden the team's collective expertise, removing blind spots.
R&D Advantages
Over the last decade, as pharma companies shuttered major R&D centers, a flood of talented scientists made their way into contract research organizations, broadening their capabilities. Today this "virtual R&D economy" is flourishing, having matured into a wide range of large scale, fully-integrated, multi-modality, high quality R&D providers and a large ecosystem of smaller technology enabled specialist firms, on offer to biotech companies everywhere.
Against the backdrop of continuous rapid technology innovation, this sector helps to democratize access to the kinds of R&D capabilities that used to be reserved only for Pharma. New drug discovery methods, compound libraries, research tools, AI and analytical capabilities, and a wide range of novel therapeutic modalities, are now available on an on-demand basis.
By treating access to and curation of this global contract research ecosystem as a strategic asset, biotechs can now integrate a much wider range of technology advantages across virtually all aspects of the research, discovery, and development cycle. By architecting firm capabilities around hybrid internal-external, or fully externalized R&D models, biotechs can improve the quality of their science, alongside their cost structures, timelines, and overall breadth of possibilities.

Unique Advantages
Built Into Every RS Company
RS combines 15+ modular innovations across 4 key areas into a singular shared platform that powers each new company RS builds, lowering their R&D costs, providing curated access to a wide range of enabling technologies, specialists, and partners, and minimizing capital investment in overhead.





The Best Opportunities
Every new medicine has a range of important built-in characteristics that ultimately shape its risk-reward profile. How strong and well-validated is the evidence? How hard will it be to make? Is the commercial timing right? RS FacetsTM is a first-of-its-kind data science platform designed to ingest all activities in global biomedicine and systematically predict the best new drug discovery opportunities on an unbiased, quantified, explainable basis.
RS Facets™️
Prioritization Engine




All of Biomedicine in One Dataset
RS curates, cleans, and integrates 50+ public, private, and RS-proprietary data sets covering virtually all activities in global biomedicine, from early basic research through to successful value creation, into a single 20 billion datapoint, time-resolved, relational database.

Quantitative Opportunity Ranking
Leveraging the comprehensive data contained in the Biomedical Atlas, RS then ranks each of 100s of millions of possible drug discovery opportunities across hundreds of quantitative metrics to enable unbiased risk-reward comparisons to be made. By algorithmically recapitulating all of the risk-reward considerations a seasoned pharma drug hunter or biotech VC evaluates when considering a new drug program (but at superhuman scale and speed) RS is uniquely positioned to identify the top 0.001% of all opportunities at any point in time.
Predictive Machine Learning
With the benefit of these two powerful and proprietary data layers, RS is uniquely positioned to build advanced machine learning and statistical inference models that can discover unfolding trends and hidden relationships to make data-driven predictions about the future, which RS can leverage to identify the programs, portfolio designs, and research areas with the greatest odds of clinical success and economic value creation.

Preclinical Discovery
On a risk-adjusted basis, preclinical drug discovery generates the highest expected returns of any stage in drug development.2 To optimally capture this extraordinary risk-reward, RS builds specialized staff and methods, crafts a unique class of large biology-themed investment portfolios, and prioritizes empirical strategies that increase the odds that the 650+ top biopharma acquirers will want to acquire a program early.

Specialist Teams & Processes
Focusing purely on the goal of enabling world-class preclinical discovery at scale, RS is able to build hyper-specialized leadership teams, standing access to key technical advisors, and unique process management strategies that collectively optimize R&D quality, throughput, technology enablement, resource allocation, and end-to-end cost-efficiencies. By looking at successful drug discovery as an interdisciplinary, multi-modality, "assembly line", RS treats process design and vendor curation as an essential form of technology enablement to maximize the chances of discovering the most valuable drugs possible.

Large Structured Preclinical Portfolios
RS creates and invests in a unique class of portfolio-based asset class to achieve a superior risk-reward profile with significantly better exposure to preclinical drug discovery as compared to a traditional small, clinic-focused biotech. Each RS "Constellation” represents an expansive portfolio of 15-25 of the highest-ranking drug discovery opportunities in a hot area of biological research with ascendant trends in commercial interest. By selecting only the best individual programs, and also structuring around portfolio-level risk diversification and R&D synergy objectives, RS creates a new way to invest efficiently, and at scale, in the stage of drug development that generates the very highest risk-adjusted returns.

Early Exit Enablement
Preclinical drugs represent the majority of all asset acquisitions and the highest median risk-adjusted returns on capital invested. RS optimizes all aspects of its model—from initial program selection, to scientific team design, to its R&D package development, to pharma partnering and clinical strategies—to maximize prospective acquisition interest in completed preclinical drugs at attractive returns on capital. Each individual drug program is maintained in its own HoldCo enabling tax-efficient sale of individual drug programs without selling its operations.

Company Architecture
RS combines a novel decentralized team science model, portfolio-based R&D strategies, a fully virtual operating model, and a tax-efficient and asset-centric corporate structure, to reduce its cost structures by 40%+, minimize required overhead and capital expenditures, and enhance their scientific quality, depth, breadth, and flexibility.

Decentralized Team Science
RS assembles field-leading academic scientists and clinicians from around the world into big, collaborative teams tailored to the unique expertise needs of each individual drug program, to work alongside RS and industry drug discovery specialists to craft best-of-breed R&D strategies. This “fractional CSO” model replaces the traditional combination of full-time generalists and passive quarterly “Scientific Advisory Board” members, with a more engaging team science model that yields both superior science and dramatically improved cost efficiencies.

Portfolio-Driven Synergies
By designing RS constellations around a biology theme, clusters of drug programs which share biological similarities and pathways relationships can be advanced jointly and in parallel, generating significant cost and knowledge synergies through shared assays, advisors, and team time. Additionally, RS constellations are designed to generate high risk-adjusted returns inclusive of significant program attrition along the way, freeing RS to rigorously kill underperforming programs early in their development and redirect resources, without having to worry about binary outcomes.
Fully Virtual Operating Model
RS Constellations operate leanly over a shared suite of RS capability platforms that provide access to the specialized interdisciplinary staff, labs, and technologies needed for world-class drug discovery without requiring any incremental overhead investments. By eliminating biotech restaffing requirements, capital-intensive lab build-outs, and geographic constraints, RS can build companies that leverage the best talent and capabilities wherever they may live while dramatically reducing fixed overhead and non-R&D uses of capital.

R&D Advantages
RS continually curates, builds, and centralizes access to the most important new discovery, therapeutic, and translational technologies to maximize its companies' access to the most important new R&D technologies and their odds of efficient, successful, high quality drug discovery.

Curated R&D Partnerships
RS curates and establishes long-term strategic partnerships with the best contract research organizations, discovery platforms, and technology companies in the world to provide its Constellations with access to specialized capabilities, at preferred cost structures, and with uniquely aligned incentives for quality and success. RS works with numerous partners, including drug discovery leader, Evotec SE, which provides RS with access to its global network of cutting-edge laboratories, multi-modality screening capabilities, and 1,000’s of expert drug discovery scientists, under a collaborative risk-and-reward-sharing model.
Discovery Technologies Platform
Drug discovery technologies continually advance as new high throughput screening and robotics systems, compound libraries, in vitro and in vivo models, reagents, assays, and analysis methods, and in silico/AI drug design tools all improve and compound on each others' benefits. RS continually curates and centralizes access to the latest discovery technologies via leading vendors and in-house capabilities, to maximize its companies' end-to-end discovery efficiency, pace, quality, and overall odds of success.
Therapeutic Technologies Platform
RS is modality agnostic; we view each distinct therapeutic modality as a unique tool with certain biological benefits that are ideal for a set of therapeutic objectives, but not others. RS is currently equipped to create more than 10 different types of medicines, combining curated external vendor relationships with expert modality consultants, delivery specialists, manufacturing partners, and in some cases such as RS' mRNA labs in Cambridge, even internal specialized wet lab buildouts. By continually expanding its access based on new advances in each therapeutic technology, RS aims to ensure each drug program to benefit from the broadest possible set of tools to achieve ever-improving efficacy, safety, delivery, and cost profiles.

Clinical Translation Platform
RS leverages its Facets™ data platform to systematically evaluate multiple lines of human and preclinical evidence in order to build “a pipeline” of valuable disease applications into each of its drug products, and prioritize programs with the most transformational prospective clinical benefit. By building a variety of clinical paths into its experimental plans spanning common, rare, and precision disease segments, RS can maximize each program's aggregate potential clinical value and flexibility for potential acquirers. By prioritizing programs with distinctively strong human lines of evidence, and then leveraging next-generation predictive toxicology, human-like in vitro tools, CRISPR screens, and genetically-engineered animal models during translation, RS delivers best-in-class drug packages that can maximize acquirer confidence in each program's expected clinical efficacy and safety profile.
Our Vision
All of biomedicine's stakeholders stand to benefit from improvements in biotech efficiency and success rates:
Patients
A greater number of transformational new medicines for virtually all types of disease are discovered sooner and successfully brought to market more often.
Researchers
Breakthrough research is successfully translated into medicines more often, and our new model enables leading researchers to contribute to biotech R&D without needing to leave academia.
Entrepreneurs
Biotech company failure is significantly reduced, driving significantly lower job turnover and training a deeper bench of capable biotech operators for the next generation of drugs.
Pharma
Supply of high quality, clinic-ready drugs is dramatically increased and made available at acquisition prices that both incentivize biotech and are sustainable for pharma’s own economic models.
Investors
Better biotech risk-reward drives a much greater proportion of investor wins broadening interest among institutional investors to fund future biotech innovations.
Patients
A greater number of transformational new medicines for virtually all types of disease are discovered sooner and successfully brought to market more often.
Researchers
Breakthrough research is successfully translated into medicines more often, and our new model enables leading researchers to contribute to biotech R&D without needing to leave academia.
Entrepreneurs
Biotech company failure is significantly reduced, driving significantly lower job turnover and training a deeper bench of capable biotech operators for the next generation of drugs.
Pharma
Supply of high quality, clinic-ready drugs is dramatically increased and made available at acquisition prices that both incentivize biotech and are sustainable for pharma’s own economic models.
Investors
Better biotech risk-reward drives a much greater proportion of investor wins broadening interest among institutional investors to fund future biotech innovations.
Team
RS is led by a multi-disciplinary team of drug discovery, data science, and venture capital veterans who have founded, built, and led biotech companies worth billions, and is backed by a luminary group of investors.
























Companies
RS builds, launches, and manages one new company every 1-2 years, each of which is comprised of a “constellation” of the top 0.001% of all drug opportunities in an ascendant area of research and commercial interest.