I learned in Cuba that the CDC’s strength is not in politics but in its people and their integrity. That lesson is as urgent today as it was in 1993. If we drain its strength, the price will be paid not in headlines, but in actual lives.

In an effort to encourage continued discussion between and within our biopharmaceutical community and the regulatory bodies we collaborate with, RA Capital Management has submitted several recommendations to the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration to help the agencies as they continue to modernize their processes to benefit the American public.

In Washington, senators and representatives usually fight for their states’ economic interests. Why then, when it comes to the biopharmaceutical industry that is so important to Massachusetts, are we such an outlier? This article examines the origins of this Massachusetts Paradox, what kinds of biopharma-related policies the state’s voters and politicians should logically support, and proposes a new approach to rallying our neighbors to support those policies. This campaign is rooted in a kind of engaging storytelling that all of us in the biopharma ecosystem, from startup to pharma and from investor to banker, can and should contribute to.

This article is one in a series seeking to give a face to some of the folks at RA Capital Management toiling away tirelessly and passionately to bring the next generation of medicines to patients. 

RA Capital is incredibly proud to have a number of women in senior positions and a deep bench of female biotech and investment leaders. In this piece, Sarah Reed, RA Capital’s general counsel, spoke with just three of the many phenomenal women here who have been involved in some of our recent high-profile exits.

GCEA shows us how to value a medicine not in terms of what you’d pay for the stock but what society should be willing to pay for the product itself. In this article, we perform GCEA for Cidara’s CD388, an anti-flu drug candidate.

When Capstan Therapeutics agreed to be acquired by AbbVie for a record-breaking price of $2.1B upfront, it had just started its Phase 1 study in healthy volunteers, was well-capitalized, and was on a mission to put a range of autoimmune diseases into deep remission and maybe even cure them. Some people will wonder about the significance of this deal and what lessons it may have for their own ventures. We can share our insights. We’ve been on the Capstan journey since the beginning and are incredibly proud of the team and its work. This is a story worth hearing.

Is AI coming for my job? It’s not uncommon to wonder these days. 

What if AI could just read a press release and appreciate the value of a stock at least as well as I think I can? Might not be a big jump from there to AI opening up its own biotech fund. 

But before I ceded my job to ChatGPT, I figured I would at least take it for a test drive by having it analyze a press release from a company I knew well.

A New York Times article gives our economist Richard Xie an excuse to reflect on the nuances of family and community spillover of the benefits of certain medicines, and our industry’s inability or reluctance to try to measure them.

We believe the FDA’s new COVID vaccine guidelines are too narrow, leaving young children vulnerable. If it were up to us and we were deciding on how to best use boosters, we would have approved and recommended them for healthy children under 5 years of age and to pregnant women (which protects infants under 6 months who are ineligible for vaccination due to their immature immune systems).

Despite our best efforts, clinical trial execution remains stubbornly unpredictable, with delays and budget overruns threatening even the most promising programs. But biotech leaders can now access a proven framework for tackling this universal challenge through RA Capital's Gateway platform and RA Capital’s website.

Methane is a greenhouse gas (GHG) that is 20x more potent than carbon dioxide. Let's take a closer look at the links between agriculture and methane emissions.

Fertilizers increase plant productivity but also degrade the environment. Let's take a closer look at different impacts of excess fertilizer and connections with agriculture.

Agriculture is so large and so interconnected with everything we do that changes to our diets can have massive planetary impacts. Let's explore some of the links between dietary changes and agricultural impacts.

Agriculture has dramatically changed the way humans have lived over thousands of years, and even today remains the backbone of our global economy. At the same time, it is an unrivaled resource hog and driver of pollution, including biological, chemical, and particulate pollutants.

President Trump’s recent “most-favored nation” proposal seeks to compel companies to charge the same prices in the US as they do elsewhere. But the price controls sought by MFN override market negotiation and threaten to backfire by drastically reducing spending on R&D that drives tomorrow’s treatments and cures. That would undermine the return on investment America has been getting – financially and in terms of better health. Instead of price-controlling in the US, we must convince other countries to pay their fair share for novel medicines. This is an intractable trade puzzle that the US should begin trying to solve. And to end other countries’ freeriding, first we need to examine the extent of it.

To truly appreciate the advances offered by GCEA, there's nothing as illustrative as getting in there and running the numbers yourself. However, building a de-novo cost-effectiveness model can be a daunting task. 

Well, not to worry! Just in time for the ISPOR Annual Meeting 2025, we've released an easy-to-use GCEA calculator that allows you to explore and appreciate the societal value of innovative medicines, and underpin the key value drivers without building a full-on model. The GCEA calculator offers an interactive user interface that lets you customize your own GCEA. 

Stylus, a Raven company that emerged from stealth this week with funding from RA Capital and others, is positioned to overcome the existing limitations of genetic medicines with its suite of engineered recombinases that are designed to recognize a safe harbor site in the human genome and introduce a therapeutic payload with high specificity and integrity.

Understanding how investors use NPV to value drugs at various stages of drug development explains what CBO's and other analyses miss.

By optimizing mineral extraction from both brine waste and natural brines through technological innovation and improved management, we can address critical mineral demand while also mitigating the environmental damage from conventional brine disposal.