by In an unmarked laboratory located between the campuses of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a splinter group of scientists is searching for the next billion dollar drug.
The group, bankrolled by $500 million from some of America’s wealthiest business families, has caused a stir in academia by spending seven-figure paydays to lure highly-accredited university professors to a lucrative bounty hunt. His self-described goal: to avoid the obstacles and paperwork that slow down the traditional paths of scientific research in universities and pharmaceutical companies, and to find scores of new drugs (initially, for cancer and brain disease) that can be produced and sold quickly. .
Braggadocio is de rigueur from start-ups, and biotech companies have been started by plenty of ex-academics, hoping to get rich off their one big discovery. This group, proudly called Arena BioWorks, doesn’t have a single idea while borrowing from Teddy Roosevelt’s quote, but it does have a big checkbook.
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“I’m not apologetic about being a capitalist, and that motivation from a team is not a bad thing,” said technology chief Michael Dell, one of the group’s big-money backers. Others include heir to the Subway sandwich fortune and owner of the Boston Celtics.
The reason is that many drug discoveries have not only come from colleges and universities, but have also produced profits that have helped fill their coffers. The University of Pennsylvania, for one, has said it has earned hundreds of millions of dollars for researching mRNA vaccines used against COVID-19.
Under this model, any such speculation would remain private.
Arena has been operating in stealth mode since early fall, before the riots against Israel and Hamas erupted at the colleges on their borders. But the motivation behind it, say researchers who jumped to the new lab, is only getting stronger as the reputation of institutions of higher learning takes hold. They say they are frustrated with the slow pace and administrative bogdowns at their former employers, as well as what one new hire, J. Keith Joung, said was “terrible” pay at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he worked before Arena.
“It was the habit that was considered a failure to go from academia to industry,” said Joung, a pathologist who helped design the CRISPR gene-editing tool. “Now the model has flipped.”
The motivation behind Arena has scientific, financial and even emotional components. Its earliest supporters first pitched the idea at a late 2021 confab at the Mansion in Austin, Texas, where Dell, along with early Facebook investor James W. Breyer and Celtics owner Stephen Pagliuca, dropped their seem to agree about the requests for money from collegiate fundraisers.
Pagliuca had given hundreds of millions of dollars to his alma maters, Duke University and Harvard, which were mostly reserved for science. That earned him seats on four of the institutions’ advisory boards, but it began to dawn on him that he had no concrete idea of what that money had done, except for his name on a few plaques outside various university buildings.
In the months that followed, those early retreaters teamed up with venture capitalists from Boston and a trained medical doctor, Thomas Cahill, to devise a plan. Cahill said he would help get frustrated academics willing to give up their hard-fought university tenure, as well as scientists from companies like Pfizer, in exchange for a big cut of the profits from any drugs that got they out. Arena’s billionaire backers will keep 30%, with the rest flowing to scientists and overhead.
Of course, there is nothing new in the science of profit; the $1.5 trillion pharmaceutical industry provides ample proof. Businessmen like Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into start-ups that try to extend human life, and plenty of pharmaceutical companies have raided universities for talent.
A significant percentage of drugs come from government or university grants, or a combination of both. From 2010 to 2016, all 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration were linked to research funded by the National Institutes of Health, according to the scientific journal PNAS. A 2019 study by former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier said the majority of “new insights” into biology and disease came from academia.
That system has long-standing benefits. Universities have an almost unlimited supply of low-paid research assistants to help scientists with early-stage research. Brand new drugs, including penicillin, were born from this model.
The problem, according to scientists and researchers, is that it is possible to wait many years for the approval of a university institution to proceed with promising research. The process, aimed at screening out unrealistic proposals and protecting safety, may involve writing long essays that can take up more than half of some scientists’ time. When funding comes along, the initial research idea is often already obsolete, which starts a new cycle of grant applications for projects that are sure to be out of date in their own time.
Stuart Schreiber, a longtime Harvard-affiliated researcher who resigned as Arena’s chief scientist, said his other ideas rarely find support. “There came a 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 cachet—he’s a pioneering chemical biologist in fields like DNA testing—helped attract nearly 100 researchers to Arena. Harvard declined to comment on his departure and others he helped lure.
An air of calculated secrecy has surrounded Arena’s operations. Joung, who retired from General Mass last year, said he had not told former colleagues where he was going and that some people asked if he was terminally ill. Cahill said many of the scientists he quickly hired had disabled university email access and received stiff legal threats of retribution if they tried to recruit former colleagues – a common phenomenon in the business world that counts as harassment. brass in academia.
Among the five billionaires who support Arena are Michael Chambers, a titan of manufacturing and the richest man in North Dakota, and Elisabeth DeLuca, widow of the founders of the Subway chain. They have each put in $100 million and hope to double or triple their investment in later rounds.
In confidential materials provided to investors and others, Arena describes itself as a “privately funded, completely independent public interest.”
Arena’s supporters said in interviews that they had no intention of completely cutting what they give to universities. Duke turned down an offer from Pagliuca, an alumnus and board member, to set up part of the lab there. Dell, a major donor to the University of Texas hospital system in his hometown of Austin, leased space for a second Arena lab there.
Schreiber said it would take years — and billions of dollars in additional funding — before the team learned whether their model led to any worthwhile drugs.
“Will it be better or worse?” Schreiber said. “I don’t know, but it’s worth a shot.”
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