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.

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.

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.

As we break for the holidays and begin to look forward to 2025, we're also taking a beat to look back on what most drew our readers' attention in 2024. 

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.

Thanks to the relentless efforts of scientists at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, there will likely soon be a novel non-opioid pain medicine. How insurance plans, including Medicare, decide to cover this drug will make a world of difference to whether we get even better non-opioid options down the road — and whether this progress makes a dent in the ongoing opioid misuse crisis.

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.

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.

Starting with a blank slate is exciting – the ability to create a platform, a pipeline, a team from scratch is a big reason why one comes to biotech – but it requires a fearless and innovative team and bold investors and partners. The story of how PKU became the first killer app for Jnana’s SLC discovery platform -- a key pivot point in demonstrating the platform's value -- is emblematic of the calculated risk taking that we embrace in biotech.

Rechargeable batteries are ubiquitous and power our lives in myriad ways, but to “electrify everything” we will need dramatically more of them, and that in turn means we will need cheaper and more environmentally friendly ways of manufacturing them.

Motors drive a lot more than cars. They are a ubiquitous and established technology that currently consume roughly ¼ of all energy produced on Earth. So you might think the motors surrounding us would be maximally efficient, right? Not so fast.

Whether you enjoy air travel or not, it’s increasingly common and persistently bad for the environment. Almost three million passengers fly in and out of US airports each day and global demand for air travel is expected to double by 2050. In addition to emitting pollutants that lower air quality, aviation is recognized as a hard-to-decarbonize sector and accounts for ~3% of global CO2 emissions. Airlines have recently announced commitments to switch to "green" fuels, but as of today 95% of jet fuel is produced from fossil fuels. Why is that? 

There is a real and urgent need for better flu prophylaxis and therapeutics. RA Managing Director Laura Tadvalkar writes about why RA is excited to lead a transformative transaction that returns a long-acting antiviral for flu to its original developer Cidara, and RA’s new initiative to help make outlicensing from pharma companies faster and more efficient.

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.

Our year-end wrap of the site’s most popular articles of 2022 reflects a challenging year for the biotech sector, featuring tumultuous markets and the shifting drug pricing policy landscape. But those pieces also reflect the ingenuity, hopefulness, and opportunity that is inherent in drug discovery and development.

In today’s FutureCast discussion, RA Capital Principal Zach Scheiner, Senior Associate Becca Silberman, and Managing Partner Peter Kolchinsky talk about the past, present and future of depression therapies and why we’re confident that new uses and forms of old molecules, including psychedelics, will, in the next decade, bring relief to many of those among us who suffer from untreatable depression. Hop in the DeLorean with us at 88 miles per hour as we go 'Back to the Future'.