Billionaires spend a fortune to attract scientists – 01/18/2024 – Science

In an unidentified laboratory located between the Harvard and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) campuses, a splinter group of scientists is searching for the next billion-dollar drug.

The group, funded with $500 million from some of the richest families in the US business sphere, has caused a stir in the academic world by offering seven-figure salaries to attract highly qualified university professors for a for-profit hunt.

Their self-declared goal: to avoid the roadblocks and bureaucracy that slow down the traditional paths of scientific research at universities and pharmaceutical companies, and to discover a range of new drugs (initially, for cancer and brain diseases) that can be produced and sold quickly.

Startup braggadocio is customary, and many former academics have founded biotechnology companies, hoping to get rich from their big discovery. This group, called Arena BioWorks, rather proudly borrowing a quote from Teddy Roosevelt, doesn’t have a singular idea, but it does have a big checkbook.

“I’m unapologetic about being a capitalist, and this motivation from a team is not a bad thing,” said technology mogul Michael Dell, one of the group’s main supporters. Others include an heir to the Subway sandwich fortune and a Boston Celtics owner.

The point is that for decades, many drug discoveries not only originated at colleges and universities, but also generated profits that helped fill their coffers. The University of Pennsylvania, for example, claimed to have earned hundreds of millions of dollars from research into mRNA vaccines used against Covid-19.

In this model, any such profit would remain private.

The Arena has been operating in stealth mode since early fall, before turmoil between Israel and Hamas erupted at neighboring universities.

However, the momentum behind it, according to researchers who have migrated to the new lab, is becoming increasingly acute as the reputations of higher education institutions take a hit. They say they are frustrated with the slow pace and administrative hurdles at their old jobs, as well as what a new hire, J. Keith Joung, described as “atrocious” wages at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he worked before Arena.

“It used to be considered a failure to go from academia to industry,” said Joung, a pathologist who helped design the gene-editing tool Crispr. “Now the model has reversed.”

The motivation behind Arena has scientific, financial and even emotional components. His early backers began discussing the idea at a mansion in Austin, Texas, in late 2021, where Dell, along with early Facebook investor James W. Breyer and Celtics owner Stephen Pagliuca, vented about the seemingly endless requests. of money from college fundraisers.

Pagliuca had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to his former universities, Duke University and Harvard, much of it earmarked for science. This earned him seats on four advisory boards at the institutions, but he began to realize that he had no concrete idea of ​​what all that money had produced, except for his name on some plaques outside various university buildings.

Over the next few months, these early supporters teamed up with a Boston venture capitalist and trained doctor, Thomas Cahill, to come up with a plan. Cahill said he would help find frustrated academics willing to give up their hard-earned university tenure, as well as scientists at companies like Pfizer, in exchange for a generous share of the profits from any drugs they discover.

Arena’s billionaire supporters will keep 30%, and the rest will go to scientists and general expenses.

Science for profit, of course, is not new; the $1.5 trillion pharmaceutical industry is proof of this. Entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in startups trying to extend human life, and many pharmaceutical companies have recruited talent from universities.

A considerable portion of medicines originate from government or university grants, or a combination of the two. From 2010 to 2016, each of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was connected to research funded by the NIH (National Institutes of Health), according to the scientific journal PNAS. A 2019 study by a former dean of Harvard Medical School, Jeffrey Flier, claimed that most “new discoveries” about biology and disease came from academia.

This system has long-standing advantages. Universities, often helped by their nonprofit status, have an almost limitless supply of low-paid research assistants to help scientists with early-stage research.

Innovative medicines, including penicillin, were born from this model. The problem, scientists and researchers say, is that there can be years-long waits for university institutional approvals to move forward with promising research.

The process, intended to filter out unrealistic proposals and protect safety, can involve writing long essays that can consume more than half of some scientists’ time. By the time funding is awarded, the initial research idea is often already obsolete, triggering a new cycle of grant applications for projects that will almost certainly be out of date in their own time.

Stuart Schreiber, a longtime Harvard-affiliated researcher who left the university to be Arena’s lead scientist, said his most innovative ideas rarely received support. “It got to the point where I realized the only way to get funding was to apply to study something that had already been done,” Schreiber said.

Schreiber’s prestige — he is a pioneering chemical biologist in areas such as DNA testing — helped attract nearly a hundred researchers to the Arena. Harvard declined to comment on his departure and those of others he helped attract.

An atmosphere of calculated secrecy has swirled around Arena operations.

Joung, who resigned from Mass General last year, said he did not tell former colleagues where he was going and that several asked if he was seriously ill. Cahill said several scientists he hired had their university email access quickly disabled and received severe legal threats of retaliation if they tried to recruit former colleagues — a common phenomenon in the business world but one that counts as brass knuckles in business. academic.

The five billionaires backing Arena include Michael Chambers, an industrial mogul and the richest man in North Dakota, and Elisabeth DeLuca, widow of one of the founders of the Subway chain. They each invested US$100 million and expect to double or triple their investments in later rounds.

In confidential materials provided to investors and others, Arena describes itself as a “completely independent, privately funded public asset.”

Arena supporters have said in interviews that they do not intend to completely stop their donations to universities. Duke turned down an offer from Pagliuca, a former student and board member, to establish part of the laboratory there. Dell, a major donor to the University of Texas hospital system in his hometown of Austin, leased space for a second Arena lab at the site.

Schreiber said it would take years — and billions of dollars in additional funding — before the team discovered whether their model would lead to the production of valuable medicines.

“Will it be better or worse?” Schreiber asks. “I don’t know, but it’s worth a try.”