From the New York Times, January 12:
Arena BioWorks is promising big paydays to nearly 100 researchers from Harvard, M.I.T. and other prestigious institutions.
In an unmarked laboratory stationed between the campuses of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a splinter group of scientists is hunting for the next billion-dollar drug.
The group, bankrolled with $500 million from some of the wealthiest families in American business, has created a stir in the world of academia by dangling seven-figure paydays to lure highly credentialed university professors to a for-profit bounty hunt. Its self-described goal: to avoid the blockages and paperwork that slow down the traditional paths of scientific research at universities and pharmaceutical companies, and discover scores of new drugs (at first, for cancer and brain disease) that can be produced and sold quickly.
Braggadocio from start-ups is de rigueur, and plenty of ex-academics have started biotechnology companies, hoping to strike it rich on their one big discovery. This group, rather boastfully named Arena BioWorks, borrowing from a Teddy Roosevelt quote, doesn’t have one singular idea, but it does have a big checkbook.
“I’m not apologetic about being a capitalist, and that motivation from a team is not a bad thing,” said the technology magnate Michael Dell, one of the group’s big-money backers. Others include an heiress to the Subway sandwich fortune and an owner of the Boston Celtics.
The wrinkle is that for decades, many drug discoveries have not just originated at colleges and universities, but also produced profits that helped fill their endowment coffers. The University of Pennsylvania, for one, has said it earned hundreds of millions of dollars for research into mRNA vaccines used against Covid-19.
Under this model, any such windfall would remain private.
Arena has been operating in stealth mode since early fall, before the turmoil over Israel and Gaza erupted at the colleges it borders. Yet the impulse behind it, say researchers who have jumped to the new lab, is becoming only more acute as the reputations of institutions of higher learning take a hit. They say they are frustrated with the slow pace and administrative bogdowns at their former employers, as well as what one new hire, J. Keith Joung, said was “atrocious” pay at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he worked before Arena.
“It used to be that it was considered a failure to go from academia to industry,” said Dr. Joung, a pathologist who helped design the gene-editing tool CRISPR. “Now the model has flipped.”
The motivation behind Arena has scientific, financial and even emotional components. Its earliest backers first mused about the idea at a late-2021 confab at a mansion in Austin, Texas, where Mr. Dell, along with the early Facebook investor James W. Breyer and an owner of the Celtics, Stephen Pagliuca, vented to one another about the seemingly endless requests for money from collegiate fund-raisers....
....MUCH MORE
Not directly related but potentially very profitable from a portfolio investing perspective:
We Are Going To Hear More And More About Digital Biology (NVDA)
