Science, Finance, Biotech Chris Morrison Science, Finance, Biotech Chris Morrison

Raven-built Aliada shuttles its potential best-in-class Alzheimer's treatment to AbbVie

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.

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Science, Biotech, Culture Chris Morrison Science, Biotech, Culture Chris Morrison

How Jnana picked PKU

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.

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Finance, Biotech Peter Kolchinsky Finance, Biotech Peter Kolchinsky

Semper Maior: Reflecting on a quiet 1H24

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.

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Finance, Biotech Peter Kolchinsky Finance, Biotech Peter Kolchinsky

Semper Maior: Time to Reboot Biotech

We’ve suffered a protracted downturn in general interest in biotech. That downturn has been compounded by rising interest rates undercutting equities in general. Now we must determine 1) how much worse this downturn might be and 2) how we’ll do things differently once we reboot. Here, Peter Kolchinsky explains why he believes we’ve emerged from the downturn but must reboot biotech with more honest and efficient processes and better defend our industry’s value proposition to policymakers and the public.

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Finance Chris Morrison Finance Chris Morrison

We shut down our SPAC — here’s why

2020 and 2021 were the heyday for special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs. We got in on the act ourselves – twice! – and we’ve learned a lot about why SPACs can sometimes work for a biotech in very particular circumstances, but also why mostly they don’t. We would also note that in certain market conditions, chasing merger targets with a SPAC can be extremely challenging. So we pulled the plug on our second SPAC. Here’s the story.

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