We Build a New
Class of Biotech

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.

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.
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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.

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.