Healthcare corporate venturing is becoming a game of two parts – having long been totally dominated by investment in life sciences, a new form of health-related information technology investing is emerging. To see our most influential table in the sector, click here.
There is increased concern about how difficult it is to secure a blockbuster drug for pharmaceutical companies, which has traditionally been, and remains by far, the biggest area of investment in corporate venturing by healthcare companies. Jens Eckstein, chief executive of SR One, the corporate venturing unit of GlaxoSmithKline, said in a keynote speech at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium last month: “I think healthcare is a moon-shot these days, because if you want to have successful drugs and you want to really change something dramatically you have to shoot very high, and you have to set the hurdle very high.”
Eckstein added in the speech transcribed overleaf, this meant there was a need for significant reform of the practise of life sciences. “If you think about disease and health as the earth, then you have to figure out a way to reach the moon. You can try it in an incremental way, and use a ladder and make progress in reaching the moon, but that is not really what we are looking for. The biggest thing if you try this ladder approach, it is very, very hard to be reimbursed. So you have to build rockets. That is really the challenge in healthcare these days. But rocket ships – as everybody knows – are pretty complex and expensive. If you look at the attrition rate right now in clinical trials, the number is around 3% success.”
Yet there is also increased excitement about the convergence of IT and healthcare. Martin Kelly, chief executive of HealthXL, a strategic partnership linking corporates to start ups, which he helped to set up while part of IBM Venture Capital, said: “Traditionally venture arms were more on the life sciences side. Yet digital health is just exploding in terms of investment and you will start to see healthcare corporations become more and more important in this.”
The biggest corporate venturing player in this non-traditional healthcare sector is Merck, which has a $500m fund. Merck Global Health Innovation Fund’s head William Taranto said, in a fireside chat at our symposium: “If you look at the continuum of healthcare, from pre-diagnosis to death, the question for Merck was how do we participate in that continuum where the pill or the vaccine makes up only one piece of healthcare. There is a great deal of stuff beyond what we do as a core business that happens in healthcare, and can we actually have an impact broadly around healthcare where, again, the pill only supplies one piece of it?”
Healthcare is moving beyond the pill, and while many pharmaceutical corporations still focus solely on life sciences investing, it seems likely this will change quickly.
Healthcare venturing in depth
Funds
During the past year, healthcare companies have put sig-nificant weight behind new incubators and accelerators. These non-traditional collaborative projects blend financial support, availability of facilities, mentoring and technical expertise to varying degrees, often in partnership with government funds, to promote geographically focused health ventures.
Early this year, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) launched a biotech incubator in Israel, also supported by Takeda Pharmaceutical, in a public-private collaboration. J&J also expect to open a fourth innovation centre in Shanghai this year.
Pharmaceutical companies Celgene and Eli Lilly have supported a new $100m biotech fund in New York City, alongside General Electric’s venturing unit, GE Ventures, to aid local life sciences start-ups. Celgene has also formed a collaboration with Blueline Bioscience incubator, launched last year by Versant Ventures, to support biotech start-ups in Toronto. The Celgene collaboration will focus on areas such as oncology and inflammation, which are of joint strategic interest.
Merck’s Global Health Innovation fund has partnered Tigerlabs entrepreneurship campus, helping to select and support health entrepreneurs in the New Jersey area.
Bayer and Roche have pledged support for California medical technology and therapy start-ups over the next three years, through agreements with the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences and venture capital (VC) firm Mission Bay Capital.
Two Japanese corporate venturing units, from pharmaceutical group Daiichi Sankyo and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, have joined Japan’s Organisation for Small and Medium Enterprises and Regional Innovation to seed local university pharma spin-outs.
Bayer joined several non-health corporates to partner German government-backed early-stage venture fund High-Tech Gründerfonds, which will support efforts to develop active ingredients in therapeutic areas. Berlin-based healthcare apps start-up incubator Grants4Apps, has also been backed by Bayer.
The European drugs industry is also set for a lift from a new crowdsourcing and open innovation platform supported by seven corporates – Bayer, J&J, AstraZeneca, Lundbeck, Merck, Sanofi and UCB Pharma – along with 23 other partners.
Launched in early 2013, the European Lead Factory was open for proposals by December, and there are hopes the €200m ($270m) programme will boost the supply of potential drug candidates for European pharmaceutical compa-nies by making more than 300,000 compounds available to academics and researchers in small businesses, for testing at two former Merck research sites.
US-based medical practice Mayo Clinic and Irish government agency Enterprise Ireland have begun a $16m collaboration to commercialise up to 20 medical devices and treatment innovations from Mayo Clinic, through Irish university spin-offs.
Mayo Clinic has also been active in China. Alongside Novartis, it backed Chinese private equity firm BVCF’s $200m third fund, which will focus on life sciences investments with a view to commercialising medical technology in China. Mayo Clinic has also invested in the $500m Chinese Qiming Venture Partners fund.
US orphan-drug accelerator Cydan has gained a $10m boost, led by Lundbeckfond Ventures, an evergreen life sciences venture fund owned by Denmark-based healthcare holding company Lundbeck Foundation, joining Pfizer Venture Investments in a project that will focus on creating companies to combat rare disease.
Illumina, a US biotech company, has launched the Illumina Accelerator Programme, which it describes as the world’s first genomics incubator, aiming to aid entrepre–neurs innovating in the area of next-generation sequencing.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has contributed €17.5m to the €44m Kurma Biofund II, which will invest in innovations targeting rare diseases. Also last year, GSK went on to establish Action Potential Venture Capital, a $50m fund to invest in four to six new pioneers of bioelectronic medicine over the next five years.
People
Earlier this year, Mike Chuisano, a veteran of J&J’s medical device and diagnostic and pharmaceuticals group companies, has moved to the group’s venture capital subsidiary, Johnson & Johnson Development Corp (JJDC), as vice-president of venture investments and chief operating officer. Last year Joel Krikston left the same unit to become president of RedLine Advisors for a short stint, before joining Merck Global Health Innovation as managing director.
Martin Kelly has left IBM Venture Capital to be chief executive of HealthXL, an Ireland-based strategic partnership platform that links corporations with start-ups.
Gary Fingerhut, a former entrepreneur, last year took over from Chris Coburn as executive director at Cleveland Clinic Innovations, the commercialisation arm of Cleveland Clinic founded by Coburn, who has moved to Partners Healthcare as vice-president of research ventures and licensing.
Martin Heidecker has founded, and now heads, a US office for Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, the corporate venture affiliate of German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, which plans to invest $130m in life sciences start-ups in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and beyond. Heidecker has worked in the business analysis and investment sectors of Boehringer Ingelheim since 2007.
Healthcare accelerator Healthbox, backed by BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, the venturing unit of the US healthcare firm, plus Ascension Health and Bayer, has appointed Mairi Johnson as executive director, leading the Healthbox Europe accelerator program and European strategy. Johnson previously worked at Circle, a clinician-led secondary care provider and was formerly a technology analyst at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers.
Portfolio company board appointments from healthcare venturing units include JJDC’s vice-president, venture investments Asish Xavier, who joins as a director of Protagonist Therapeutics, a US-based pharma spin-out from Queensland University.
Rajeev Dadoo, a partner at GSK’s corporate venturing unit SR One, now sits on the board of both iPierian and its antibody therapies spin-out True North, following $30m of SR One co-led financing last year.
Following an investment and licensing agreement with Eli Lilly earlier this year, Shaun Hawkins, vice-president of Lilly New Ventures joined the advisory board of Audion Therapeutics, a Dutch company developing treatment for sensorineural hearing loss.
Yuji Iizawa, senior investment director at Takeda Ventures, joined Austrian vaccine biotech Hookipa as an observer. Hookipa’s supervisory board is also joined by Frank Kalkbrenner from the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund.
Deals
The biggest exit was made by the Indian healthcare group Piramal Enterprises, which made a 52% profit from the sale of its 11% stake in Vodafone’s Indian business, by selling back to Vodafone for $1.48bn. The proceeds will be redeployed in financial services, healthcare and information management, according to Piramal Group chairman Ajay Piramal.
Further sales include the Canadian bioanalytical solytions company DVS Sciences, backed by Roche and Pfizer, which has been sold for $207.5m to US microfluidic systems maker Fluidigm in a deal designed to expand Fluidigm’s single-cell analysis market share and technical capabilities.
Ascension Health-backed maker of wearable monitors BodyMedia has been acquired by Jawbone, a US-based manufacturer of audio devices and wearable technology.
Swiss drugs company Novartis has purchased immune-oncology company CoStim Pharma from backers including J&J. The CoStim deal is also the first exit for Partners Innovation Fund, the corporate venturing arm of Partners Health-Care Systems, a US-based hospital and physicians group, which has made more than 30 investments since 2010.
Novartis is also set to acquire Sideris Pharmaceuticals, a Florida University spin-out focusing on transfusional iron overload, in a deal totalling up to $300m.
Meanwhile Okairos, a Swiss biopharma spin-out from Merck’s IRBM Science Park, previously backed by Novartis, has been acquired by GSK for $325m.
Merck’s Global Health Innovation Fund has acquired a controlling interest in its online clinical resource investee, Physicians Interactive, from merchant bank and private equity fund management company Perseus.
Ipsen has expanded its 10% stake in Syntaxin, a UK-based specialist in botulinum toxin engineering, to buy out the company in a deal that could exceed €130m, aiming to expand Ipsen’s neurology research and development capabilities.
Celgene has signed an option to acquire Acetylon Pharmaceuticals, supporting the development of histone deacetylase inhibitors for cancer therapy. Celgene has paid $100m upfront and could pay over $500m for the acquisition.
The biggest investment rounds with healthcare company participation over the past 12 months were SR One’s reinvestment in an oversubscribed $60m series C round for Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, before its $103.5m initial public offering (IPO), and the $62.5m series F round raised by Proteus Digital Health, a maker of ingestible sensors, formerly known as Vivomems, with backing from Novartis, Otsuka Pharmaceutical and Sino Portfolio, understood to be connected to China-based Dong Ying Pharma.
Baxter Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the pharmaceutical company, has added $50.7m as an extension to a previous funding round for Covagen, a biophar-maceutical company tackling inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis.
Several significant funding rounds in healthcare start-ups have been led by corporates, including the Merck-led $27m series C round for PatientSafe solutions, a US-based developer of mobile communications systems for caregivers, and the $21m series B round for molecular testing platform developer NeuMoDx Molecular, led by Pfizer.
J&J led as a new investor in a $14m series B round for US drug company Protagonist Therapeutics, and also co-led a $29.6m round for CVRx, a US company trialling implantable medical devices for combatting high blood pressure and heart failure.
Novo A/S, an asset management holding company within the Novo Group of Danish healthcare companies, has similarly led on two significant pharmaceutical deals in the past year – the $55m series D round for ZSPharma, which is innovating treatments for kidney, cardiovascular and liver disorders, and the $23.5m series B round for UK drug company Acacia Pharmaceuticals, which is trialling drugs for cancer supportive care.
AstraZeneca subsidiary MedImmune Ventures led the $12.5m series A funding for small-molecule drug developer G1 Therapeutics, while US medical device maker Boston Scientific led in a $9.7 series B for medical technology company Channel Medsystems.
Over the past year, healthcare companies were involved in several big deals in the field of ocular therapeutics. The largest was a $125m investment in Novo Ventures in exchange for royalties in Ophthotech, as well as participation in a $50m funding round for the company, which is developing a drug to combat age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Rival AMD treatment developer Pan Optica has also gained funding from Novo Ventures as part of a $45m round. J&J has invested in a $55m round for ReVision Optics, and has also reinvested in PowerVision. Both companies are developing optical implants that could reduce reliance on glasses.
Glaucoma relief is receiving close attention from Ivantis, Transcend and Inotek Pharmaceuticals, after these companies secured funding rounds from investors including MemorialCare Innovation Fund, an investment company of the MemorialCare Health System, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, the venturing unit of care consortium Kaiser Permanente, and MedImmune respectively.
Baxter Ventures has acquired a minority stake in ophthalmic therapeutics company Ocular Therapeutix and, alongside Ascension Health Ventures, has supported its latest $8.5m funding round.
Another biopharma focusing on eye disorders, Iconic Therapeutics, has raised $20m from backers including Lundbeckfond Ventures, an investment unit of Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck.
Keynote address: corporate venturers and life sciences
Jens Eckstein, chief executive, SR One
The overall ambition of SR One is innovation. The slogan we have is that we try to “change the way healthcare is done for the better”. We are looking only for game-changers and disruptions. So we are not trying to seek out incremental changes because that has become a very difficult proposition. We have a very broad scope – it is not only therapeutics, but we are also looking at diagnostics, devices, instruments, materials, electronics and IT.
We are not strategic but financially-driven. The idea is that we are looking for real disruption and breakthrough technologies, and if they work out I think they will become strategic because they will change healthcare. We have really decoupled from GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK’s) pharma strategy and do not try to synchronise what we are looking for with pharma, so in that respect we have a lot of freedom.
We seem to have hit a theme at the symposium with rockets and moon-shots. Healthcare is also a moon-shot these days, because if you want to have successful drugs and you want to really change something dramatically, you have to shoot very high, and you have to set the hurdle very high.
If you think about disease and health as the earth then you have to figure out a way to reach the moon. You can try it in an incremental way, and use a ladder and make progress in reaching the moon, but that is not really what we are looking for. The biggest thing is that if you try this ladder approach it is very, very hard to be reimbursed. So you have to build rockets.
That is really the challenge in healthcare these days. But rocket ships – as everybody knows – are pretty complex and expensive. If you look at the attrition rate right now in clinical trials, the number is around 3% success. So you are starting out with a project with new ideas, you have great science, and you work for around 10 years, then the chance is around 3% that you get it to a patient. That is a pretty daunting number.
The other number that comes with a 3% success rate involves the attrition-adjusted cost of a new drug approval (NDA), now somewhere around $1.5bn. So that is the money you somehow have to figure out how to find to bring new medicines to mankind.
That has been the big problem in our industry, and this is still one of the biggest problems for pharma. If pharma does not find a solution for this then we will not get new drugs.
There are other factors that make this a very difficult business. One of the dirty secrets among investors in life sciences is that about 50% to 80% of published academic research is not reproducible. So if you use those experimental data as your starting point, you are confounding all the clinical risk you have with reproducibility risk. That is a huge issue – and nobody likes to talk about this – but there are dozens and dozens of companies that die after two years because the science was just not sound.
So we have to encourage killer experiments. We have to kill things as quickly as we possibly can, because that is the only way in which we can manage that risk.
Given all these difficulties, accidents happen. You think you are getting to the moon – and then you crash. That happens all the time. You do not get medicines to man. What you do then is to decide to try it again, or you start another company and do it again, and you pretty much reinvent the wheel.
Given all these difficulties, accidents happen. You think you are getting to the moon – and then you crash. That happens all the time. You do not get medicines to man. What you do then is to decide to try it again, or you start another company and do it again, and you pretty much reinvent the wheel.
The problem is that there really is no sharing of failed experiments and failed clinical trials in our industry. That is one of the biggest impediments to jump-starting something. You are always reinventing the wheel.
Biotech companies are a little bit like these guys, they are all reinventing wheels again and again and again and again, and that is one of the reasons I believe that attrition stays where it is and the cost does not really come down in clinical trials.
Pharma is changing altogether. It is not about the pill any more. Today it is really pill plus. You are not really selling pills, you are trying to manage the whole patient. You have to understand the whole patient, because the only way to really make impactful medicines is to understand exactly what is happening to patients. It is not only selling your pill and then going away, you have to understand how the drug interacts with other drugs, whether it works on a specific patient. Has that patient taken anything before? How long does it take? All these kinds of things are very, very important, so you have to start to break down the silos.
It is not only pharma and research and development any more, and then the clinic and the physicians. It is really one continuum and you have to understand this whole continuum if you want to come up with breakthrough drugs.
At the centre more and more now is the consumer-driven patient, and the physician-patient relationship, because that is the only way you can get very important information to do things differently.
We are looking indeed at a brave new world, and pharma is in a very dicey situation. You have heard a lot about how the market is changing and how difficult it has become to come up with blockbuster drugs. I think this is apropos in the UK now with the whole Pfizer-Astra Zeneca discussion. But that dynamic has been going on for the past 10 years where we saw a lot of consolidation.
It means you have to move out of your comfort zone – you cannot stick to stuff that you have done over the past 50 years. You have to start to interface with completely new partners and stake holders, and you have to open up innovation and you have to start sharing data in a very different way.
GSK has actually been one of the pioneers by declaring they are opening their clinical trial database. So failed trials sponsored by GSK will be published – I think this is huge progress in our world.
Those pharma companies are trying all sorts of different things. You see tons of direct pharma-academia collaborations, you have investor relationships – Glaxo has invested in other venture funds like Index and Avalon. You see tons of incubators like Janssen and Pfizer.
Grant funding is everybody’s word because they all think: “Well, there is no money and life sciences is so difficult and we cannot get money from the venture capitalists (VCs).” I disagree. I think if you really have a good idea, there will be money. Crowdfunding has become a hot item but I fear to find the crowd for a process that takes 10 years is a very, very high bar because that is how long it will take to develop a new drug.
Of course we have the past 18 months, and SR One was one of the lucky ones. We had five companies listed on Nasdaq in the first quarter of 2014, and it really has been a fantastic year. A little bit of optimism is building again, but we do not know how long that effect will continue with the limited partners [investors], and it is very geographical as well. I believe the US is in a very different situation than Europe, where it is much, much harder.
We have talked about corporate ventures and traditional ventures, and very often we look at a curve like this. Corporate venture investing is somewhere around 10% of total venture investments. In life sciences it is different. If you look, for example, at 2006 through to 2010, there is a much more even ratio. The corporate venture funds, especially the handful who have been around for some time, have been very active for quite some time. So this is not really a new effect, and we are very much used to having a side-by-side investment with corporates and traditional funds.
Just a snapshot on SR One, one of the grand-daddies – the only fund I believe is older than us is Johnson & Johnson Development Corp. SR One has been investing since 1986. We have four offices in London, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco and we invest globally. We have 10 investing partners. Currently the portfolio is 30 private companies and, as of this quarter, five public companies.
We are an independent trust, and we are very much fire walled, so there is no confidential information exchanged between us and GSK. On top of that there are never strings attached, so in any of our investments GSK does not have any preferential rights. We are really acting like a traditional VC in that sense.
Usually the cheque size for the initial investment goes up to $10m, but we can be very patient and can put a lot of money to work, say $20m or $25m into one company, if we want to.
Over the past two years we have been extremely active. We lead or co-lead 70% of our deals, and in the past two years we have usually invested in around 10 new companies per year, and we had 20-something follow-up investments. For a group of 10 people, we have had around 30 transactions per year – that keeps us pretty busy.
The good thing is that over the whole lifetime since 1986, the realised multiple is around 1.5-times. If you take the realised and unrealised, I am shooting for a lifetime multiple of two-times, so we have never cost GSK any money, and I think that really gives us a lot of freedom and makes it much, much easier.
I will now give you a few titbits of what we are trying to do today to address the difficulties in healthcare, and what is the 2014 version of SR One. Ten-to-ten means I can write a $10,000 cheque or a $10m cheque. We are extremely flexible in the way we finance companies, and we have a very streamlined process. It is pretty much the partners’ decision, and partners agree on an investment. My investment committee is very small – three people. We can turn around a new investment in four weeks if we have to, which is very good for a corporate venture fund.
We need a one-time improvement, and usually that is the initial investment. After that we manage follow-up investments on our own. Again, that makes life very, very easy. It also makes it much, much more predictable for our co-investors.
On killer experiments, this is something that really comes out of the problem of reproducibility. We have now decided to allocate $1m of playing money that we invest even before we incorporate any companies, where we go to a certain piece of science and we repeat it. We pay for it, we own the data, we do it with an independent third party. If we cannot repeat the science we will not continue investing, we will not start a company, we will not involve lawyers, and we do it as simply as possible. We do not pre-negotiate anything, it is a simple material transfer agreement.
This is a vehicle that has become more popular now on the academic side, because – believe it or not – some of the principal investigators actually want to know whether their post-doctoral or PhD students did some really good work, and whether it is reproducible.
One thing that is very dear to my heart, being a Kauffman Fellow, is trying to find good entrepreneurs. Where do we find new entrepreneurs? Given the difficult environment in healthcare, and how difficult it is to be successful, there are not many young people any longer who think it
We started last year here in Europe and it was really successful. We had around 200 applications from 10 countries in Europe, and the company that won is venture-funded now and a successful small company with 20-something-year-old entrepreneurs, and it is fantastic to see that. We have now started the Americas edition as well. The final in the UK was just last week, and we have a new winner here, a fantastic new company.
This is something that really makes a difference to those young people The biggest component besides the package is mentoring. We are organising it so that every one of those teams will have two mentors, either venture investors or pharma people, and they have full access to them for three months. That is a unique model, and I think that is important, and that is the way you can foster innovation and entrepreneurship.
Research from Harvard Business School has clearly shown from almost 20 years of corporate venturing that companies funded by at least one corporate venture fund have fared better in their overall outcome, on the stock market and in returns, so that should make us feel good. That really has to do with the institutional knowledge in these big corporations. We can leverage that knowledge and make some better decisions.
This is an edited transcript of Eckstein’s keynote address to our symposium.
Fireside chat: An independent approach to venturing
An edited transcript of editor-in-chief James Mawson’s fireside chat with Bill Taranto, president of the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund
Taranto: I joined Merck approximately four years ago from Johnson & Johnson (J&J) to start the venture fund. The question that I am always asked is: why at that time was Merck interested in venture capital and what is the goal?
At that time, we were transitioning to a new chief executive, Ken Frazier, and if you ever hear him speak, he has a vision of Merck being a broad-based healthcare company, so in the context of what I do for a living, if you look at the continuum of healthcare from pre-diagnosis to death, the question for Merck was: how do we participate in that continuum where the pill or the vaccine makes up only one piece of healthcare? There is a great deal of stuff beyond what we do as a core business that happens in healthcare, and can we actually have an impact broadly around healthcare where, again, the pill supplies only one piece of it?
We then decided that venture capital was the best way for Merck to do that. It allows them to look at the future of healthcare, take bets on a number of different areas and then, if it fits strategically and financially, it becomes an option for them to acquire those companies.
The idea would be, perhaps 10 years from now, you might see Merck owning 10 or 12 companies that serve health-care, but one interesting, unique thing about our fund is that I am what is called a non-core investor, so I do not invest in pills, vaccines or molecules. I understand everything outside the traditional business, and what is nice about that is we can operate without interference from Merck.
The purpose of the fund is to put Merck into brand new businesses that serve healthcare. If the core takes advantage of that as a client in the future, that is fantastic, but not a requirement. We are really trying to establish new businesses for Merck, and that makes us a unique corporate venture firm because, with all our strategy and investment thesis, as a team we actually do not take any direction concerning where we invest and how we invest with regard to the way we look at healthcare.
Today we are a $500m evergreen fund. We have committed about $300m in the fund. We have probably spent about $220m of it. We have 25 or 26 portfolio companies. We have actually had four exits to date – two to Merck and two outside to healthcare where we built a very valuable healthcare company where perhaps Merck was not the rightful owner and we were able to exit much more broadly. One of the other things we did in March last year was start a sister firm, also a growth equity fund, which allows us to do bigger and better deals and extend our optionality around assets that we like, but perhaps we need some partners to help us grow in a more efficient way, or Merck is perhaps not ready to acquire them because of consolidation issues, or just we like them but we are not sure what we want to do about the property yet, but we want to grow them into billion-dollar businesses. That in a nutshell is what we are doing at Merck.
Mawson: You started pretty much at the beginning of this so-called Golden Age in 2010. Part of what we have been talking about was change, and how corporate venturing units adapt. Can you talk a little bit about what is changing in the corporate venturing system at the moment?
Taranto: What is really interesting from my time from J&J to where we are today, in just four years, I have seen three really broad trends. The first, and you have actually heard it from both Intel and Silicon Valley Bank, is that what you are starting to see is corporates taking a much keener eye towards financials. So we are both a strategic investor and a financial investor, and the reason we are doing that is for a number of different things.
One is it aligns us better to our traditional venture capital firms and how we invest, and the other is that Merck may not buy anything out of our portfolio, and there is absolutely no reason we cannot exit for a profit and reinvest that money into future businesses, but you are also starting to see corporates take a closer look not only at how they are measuring themselves but also how they structure deals, whether it is through use of terms around warrants or preferences or participation. There are a number of different mechanisms we can use that we may not have traditionally used in the past.
So the idea for us is we want to build a really good healthcare company. Hopefully it fits us strategically, but if it does not, we want to make sure we create a good solid financial company that we, along with the other investors, get to exit.
The second big thing I am starting to see, and it did not occur until recently, is that corporates are coming together as a syndicate. What you are beginning to find is that we have a great deal of commonality even though we might have a different reason for investing. An example would be our recent investment with United Healthcare in a company called GenomeDX. We had different reasons for investing, but collectively what we were trying to accomplish was very synergistic.
The last piece that I am seeing, which is really interesting, is taking a more portfolio approach to the investment instead of a one-off where our strategy is all around ecosystem investment – how do we create different ecosystems and interconnect companies? And instead of managing investments as single one-offs, what do we do with them? It is actually how do we build something that is valuable to healthcare in a bundled package? It is an ever increasing trend where you are starting to see companies really start taking more of a portfolio mentality.
I heard Intel say the same thing, that they think about the whole continuum, and that is the way we think about it, about how these companies connect. They do not have to be in our portfolio. It is how our companies connect to your portfolio companies, and then we can offer something up to healthcare that ultimately reduces costs and creates efficiencies, or creates a new treatment paradigm that we do not have today.
Mawson: You mentioned the evergreen model. How does that fit with the balance between financial and strategic returns for you personally if you have been involved with it over the past few years? Taranto: For Merck, obviously we set up the fund for strategic reasons but, again, they certainly did not hire me to lose money either, so we have taken a keen eye, as I said, to the financials. The way we have looked at it is not only through structure and making sure we can exit for a profit and reinvest with that money, but the fund itself, which is fascinating, has been fully investing for only three years. Our expectation is we will be fully evergreen by summer of next year. We will have paid Merck back, but that will all be reinvested again.The other way we are taking a financial viewpoint is how we are extending the optionality for Merck and, as I mentioned, we started a private equity function. The whole idea of that was we have many assets but we probably have only certain competencies and ability to help grow a firm, to turn that asset it into a multibillion-dollar company, but companies that have different capabilities and competencies can help us grow a multibillion-dollar company.
The idea for Merck is that it is actually better for Merck to own 50% of a multibillion-dollar company than 100% of something that will Merck-ise, and you probably do not know what I mean by that, but you will never see it again. It is somehow falls into the core, disappears, and goes into the ether world of nowhere.
So what we are trying to say is by using more financial components or the financial markets, partnering private equity firms, partnering larger strategic corporate firms to extend what we are trying to build in a much broader way, helps us to become evergreen. So, again, it is mixture of both driving that strategic component with partners, but also making sure that we are good stewards of the money.
Mawson: You mentioned Merck-ise, so how do you fit with the rest of Merck’s innovation tools like mergers and acquisitions or partnering and joint ventures, because, again, you are adjacent but you have to be connected?
Taranto: The good news for us at least is we have two funds in Merck. We have one called the </