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.

On RA Capital's Gateway, Peter Kolchinsky, Managing Partner at RA Capital Management, and Travis Wilson, Partner at Gurnet Point Capital, delve into how biotech companies can achieve more with lean, strategically staffed teams. Small, agile teams of versatile professionals who leverage external expertise when needed lets companies maintain operational efficiency and financial discipline.

Unlike our healthcare spending that goes to services and should be considered an expense, the mere 8% we spend on novel medicines doesn’t just pay for the same things year over year – it’s an investment in progress. Surprised it’s such a small fraction? Most people are.

Hear from our cast of biotech executives and board members on Gateway as they discuss how they utilize the investors on their boards.

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. 

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.

In the high-stakes world of corporate governance, conflicts among board members and executives are almost inevitable. But how can these tensions be turned into constructive conversations that drive organizations forward?

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.

Discover the keys to outstanding board leadership in this Gateway video featuring top industry experts. This engaging discussion explores what truly defines a great board chair, bringing together insights from:

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.

The many fees and expenses associated with running any company are more than just a headache. Particularly for R&D-intensive biotech companies, failing to stay on top of them can significantly saddle a company with unnecessary cash burn. A new video resource at RA Capital's free Gateway platform for boards and biotech leadership features industry leaders sharing their experiences navigating these pesky financial challenges.

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.

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.

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.

Our usual top-down biotech sector metrics showed that 1H24 was… pretty boring (though for us bottom-up folks, individual companies offer plenty of excitement). After the last few years, boring ain’t bad. With expectations of Fed easing interest rates due to waning inflation, the excitement level for the second half of the year has already picked up, but that’s not reflected in the metrics here.

The bottom line is that when it comes to global revenues for innovative medicines, US revenues for “winners” (the top selling drugs) matter most, since these come at the highest profit margin and launch more quickly, and serve as the primary incentive for biomedical innovation.

All else being equal, people care more about outcomes that happen in the near future than about outcomes that happen later. The discount rate represents how much timing matters. We sit down with Josh Cohen, Deputy Director of the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health (CEVR) at the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center, and Research Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, to learn about how changes to the discount rate can alter how we value medicines.

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.