Just as a stock’s value can be debated with dueling sets of NPV model inputs, a drug’s value can be debated with different inputs and different ways of constructing a cost-effectiveness model. Biotech executives and investors should have command of the inputs into cost-effectiveness math, which include but are not limited to healthcare costs, quality of life, survival, caregiver spillover, productivity, time to loss of exclusivity, future generic price, discount rate, and population risk reduction. Here we provide a guide to wielding that math at various stages of development, because showing the world a drug’s value before declaring its price can prevent a breakthrough medicine from being under-appreciated or unfairly maligned.

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.

The technological renaissance in covalent inhibitor technology over the past decade is impressive. Relatively recent advances in structure-based drug design have unlocked the tantalizing opportunity to engineer covalency into small molecules. Now, RA Capital has incubated and seeded Hyku Biosciences to unlock histidines, tyrosines, and lysines for covalent modification to greatly expand the druggable proteome.