RApport’s most popular pieces of 2023
by RApport
December 19, 2023
In what for ten months was shaping up as a brutal year for biotech, it should come as no surprise that all five of RApport’s most popular pieces speak to the market downturn. Its consequences haven’t spared anyone in our industry, and each of this year’s standout articles provide practical tips for how to function as efficiently as possible today while preserving hope, goodwill, and capital for the future. So whether you’re a biotech employee looking to de-risk your next career move, a CEO wondering how and when to shut down a company, or an investor thinking about next year, grab a mug of peppermint mocha, kick your feet up, and dig in.
5. How to Navigate and De-Risk Your Next Career Move in Biotech: Pros, Cons, and Tips for Every Stage
The prospect of a layoff has haunted nearly every worker in the sector this year, with 56+ companies reducing personnel or shuttering in Massachusetts alone (and that’s just as of October!). If you’ve been sidelined (or if you’re unhappy in your current role), Emily Gransky, VP and Head of Recruiting at RA Ventures, has the guide for you, complete with an exhaustive list of pros and cons of joining a biotech company at every stage. But unfortunately, “as an employee in biotech or pharma,” she writes, “there truly is no risk-free scenario.”
4. A Going Concern Clause Isn’t Always a Concern
We take pride in scrutinizing conventions, and in this popular piece, RA Capital Principal Tess Cameron and Managing Partner Peter Kolchinsky put the “going concern clause” under the microscope. Public biotech companies generally raise money with the expectation of maintaining a year of cash runway beyond key readouts “to avoid getting a going concern clause.” But what if a company were instead deliberate about crossing that one-year threshold? Imagine if well before getting down to a year of cash, management said, “We have the cash we need to reach the value inflection point we intended to hit last time we raised, so we’ll see you all when we have data in hand?” That’s a pretty confident and reasonable position, rooted in first principles. And we argue that it’s a more efficient use of capital.
3. Shutting Down Silverback: A Q&A with Laura Shawver
At Silverback Therapeutics, “we were really going for something transformative for people battling cancer, not something incremental,” says former CEO Laura Shawver. So when the company’s lead program suffered a significant setback, she and her team quickly and efficiently turned Silverback into a shell and evaluated their remaining opportunities for delivering value to shareholders, eventually completing a successful reverse merger. Learn how she made the call to wind the company down at a moment when it’s difficult to be decisive.
2. A Crisis We Don’t Need: How Not to Cause a Bank Run
If only they’d have listened! Peter Kolchinsky, Tess Cameron, and Alex Martinez-Forte play Cassandra at the onset of the Silicon Valley Bank crisis: “At the first signs of panic, the prudent thing for everyone else to have done was quell it. Instead, we heard false rumors upon true rumors until everyone was convinced that everyone else was withdrawing their deposits and all the rumors became true. In a few weeks, we’ll look back and see that this panic was pointless – a rumor-driven distraction from more pressing business.” Long story short, we did.
1. Semper Maior: Time to Reboot Biotech & Semper Maior: RA Capital’s 1H23 Core Biotech Report
Peter Kolchinsky’s first major Core Biotech Report (our most popular and most shared article of the year) categorized all the cash-burning companies in the development-stage public biotech universe by what we called Core (owned by at least one biotech specialist fund) and Peripheral (not owned by any specialists), then further broke them down by whether or not they were in a financing Danger Zone. We’ve used this framework throughout the year to evaluate the status of our industry. Peter’s suggestions for improving the way our industry functions as we re-emerge from the sector’s harshest downturn hold as true as they did back in January.
Our July follow-up piece made the case that development-stage biotech remained on solid ground, though the sector wasn’t out of the woods yet. Still, development-stage biotech as a whole is well positioned to achieve continued positive performance thanks to cash-rich strategics acquiring promising companies to replenish their own pipelines, injecting cash into the ecosystem. Bottom line? There’s too much good here to ignore. And stay tuned for our next Semper Maior update (RApport subscribers will get early access - subscribe here!) coming your way in January.
Happy New Year, and thanks for reading!
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