News

Throughout my 25+ years in industry, whether I am advising startups or mentoring individuals interested in career transitions to business development, I am often asked about my approach to deal making.  Here I share some best practices for biotechs looking to partner an asset with pharma.  I still use this approach to make better decisions under pressure and to set realistic goals for deals, most recently as Chief Business Officer at Good Therapeutics from 2021 – 2022, where I co-led the successful completion of Good’s sale to Roche for $250 million plus deal-comparable milestones – one of the largest deals of 2022 for a preclinical asset.

I joined Good Therapeutics (now Bonum Therapeutics) in the summer of 2021. This was a marvelous opportunity to develop a new class of regulated cytokine therapeutics for cancer and autoimmune diseases. My prime directive was to build a team focused on protein production and characterization, with an aim to select stable “manufacturable” leads to move into clinical development.

Four years ago, I joined Bonum Therapeutics’ predecessor, Good Therapeutics, fascinated by the mechanistic concept developed by Founder and CEO John Mulligan. He envisioned an antibody-cytokine fusion protein, or immunocytokine, wherein the cytokine was selectively active when the antibody portion was bound to its target. This idea was appealing, as it would potentially allow the creation of cytokine therapeutics with conditional activity on specific cell types and populations. Immune agonists, including cytokines, have held particular interest for me throughout my career in cancer immunotherapy, and I’ve come to appreciate the unique challenges associated with their utilization.

Startup and privately held biotechnology companies with a broadly applicable technology face a market that awards higher valuations to assets than to platforms for drug discovery. Platform companies, therefore, face a fundamental problem — how to return money to investors in a reasonable time frame and simultaneously realize the appropriate value for their platform. In this article, we describe an approach that allowed Good Therapeutics to provide a tax-efficient return to investors while retaining ownership of the platform technology and a series of other potentially high-value programs. The corporate and deal structure is reproducible and can be used in a variety of settings when assets are more highly valued than the platform used for their creation.

In my two previous articles, I’ve discussed the need to think about the big picture in drug research and development, as well as considerations that can improve one’s chances for success at the bench level. Overall, however, science is a team effort. And while people don’t always think about the choreography of good scientific teamwork, there are factors that should be considered and skills that can be developed to increase a drug discovery team’s overall effectiveness and chance of success.