With CMS set to announce this week the “maximum fair prices” for 2027’s cohort of drugs under the IRA’s “negotiation” program and the recent the three-year anniversary of that law’s passage, it seemed a good time to take stock of just how the law is influencing the biopharma investors’ and innovators’ collective drug development choices. A collection of empirical evidence.

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.

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).

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.

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.

The public has taken a renewed interest in discussing vaccines, with many people asking to be convinced that vaccines are safe and effective enough to be used as widely as modern medicine recommends. In the hope of reaching some more people seeking answers to common questions, we’ve prepared this Q&A document. Medicine is complicated, and the current discourse is noisy, but it’s possible to bridge the gap between experts and patients by breaking down the jargon. We’ll try to do that here. We wrote this with our own friends and families in mind because we believe that everyone should be able to get clear answers to their questions. We hope it is useful to you.

Big pharma once again showed up for the Superbowl, or their ads did at least. But those pricey spots, while didn’t connect the dots to inspire the American public with their role in getting important therapies to the patients that need them. Were they moving? Sure. But will they move the needle where it really counts? Probably not.

Last March, our Planetary Health team convened investors from 25 of Boston's leading climate tech firms for our own version of March Madness, to predict which planetary/climate tech sub-sectors would have the most successful 2024. Well, it's the moment we've all been waiting for. The results are in!

On the occasion of a documentary about living with cystic fibrosis and the drug that turned his life around, Gunnar Esiason reflects on his personal struggle, the roles of patients and their caregivers in drug development, and the scientific struggle we so rarely see publicly depicted.

Last week’s publication in the Forum for Health Economics and Policy of Valuing the Societal Impact of Medicines and Other Health Technologies: A User Guide to Current Best Practices is a watershed moment for the field of health economics and outcomes research. 

Today, AbbVie announced it is acquiring Aliada for $1.4 billion, motivated by the potential for ALIA-1758, Aliada’s lead program, to be the best-in-class for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, and by the potential of the BBB-crossing platform to enhance its discovery and development efforts for other difficult-to-treat neurological diseases. As we congratulate the Aliada team, we wanted to share a bit more of the story behind the second significant acquisition from our Raven incubator this year and the first full-circle acquisition of a company we built with technology spun out from a larger company.

Policies favored by both parties’ leadership – who find it politically easier to battle made-up bogeymen than tackle real issues – threaten to undermine our national health security and eviscerate America’s world-leading innovative drug development industry.

The link between environmental sustainability and health outcomes — now a hallmark of planetary health — builds on a foundation of public health, which brings a systems-level approach to health issues.

A LinkedIn discussion about “crossover” financing rounds deepened my sense that we’re not all saying the same thing when we’re saying the same thing. And that’s a challenge, if not necessarily always a problem, in an industry that’s only becoming more scientifically and financially complex as it matures. Because to understand one another and avoid unnecessary hiccups it helps to have a common language.