Third Rock Ventures Rolls Its Own

Article preview from Start-Up - June, 2013

Third Rock Ventures has raised $1.3 billion by going all-in on early-stage biotech with a homegrown company strategy that requires that its own people run many of its portfolio companies after launch. It’s hard to say definitively that the strategy is working, but then again, its investors just re-upped for a new half-billion-dollar fund.

Third Rock Ventures Rolls Its Own

Article preview from Start-Up - June, 2013

It was Raiders of the Lost Ark for biotech geeks. The arks were the musty sample cabinets or lonely freezers at the back of dead-end corridors, and the samples inside held microbes particular to patches of dirt in far flung locales. It wasn’t cheap to hunt down the old soil collections that drug companies built across much of the 20th century as potential sources for new drugs. Then again, Third Rock Ventures can afford to do a lot of things most life science VCs wouldn’t dream of these days.

Third Rock’s portfolio company Warp Drive Bio, headed by the firm’s partner Alexis Borisy, needed to collect tens of thousands of samples. They searched academic labs, the Czech cave collection – “wild stuff,” says Borisy – but the majority came from Sanofi, Warp Drive’s Big Pharma partner. "To date they’re our largest source,” he says, with legacy collections from groups within the conglomerate that once were part of independent companies and whose names can trigger a pharma nostalgia trip: Hoechst, Roussel, Marion, Rhone-Poulenc, and so forth. “The old Hoechst collection, the Germans had annotated it, archived it; it was in great form, in pristine order. Then the team showing us the collections in Frankfurt, they said, ‘Now we’re into the French collections.’ They were all over the place, things missing, not labeled. ‘Who did this?’ they said” – and Borisy mimics a burst of German-accented outrage – “‘This will be much more work!’”

Borisy and others at Third Rock aren’t just chasing microbes (and collecting stories) in the name of pharmacognosy, they are chasing a big idea, with time and resources at their disposal: sequence the genomes of tens of thousands of microbes and make them searchable for drug-like properties. It’s what the pharmaceutical industry’s scientists did two, three, or four generations ago, but without today’s computational force and sophistication. Natural products were the source of most medicines. Why can’t they be so again?

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