Mariana’s acquisition:

RAVen, radiopharmaceuticals, and reflections on company-building

By Josh Resnick & Laura Tadvalkar

FINANCE | BIOTECH

May 2, 2024

We are happy to announce that Novartis has acquired our portfolio company Mariana Oncology for $1B upfront and $750M in downstream milestones. Novartis has deep clinical and commercial experience with oncology and radiopharmaceuticals, and is well positioned to work with the Mariana team on advancing Mariana’s portfolio of radiopharmaceuticals into the clinic to improve outcomes for cancer patients. We look forward to the R&D we worked to seed bearing fruit for patients and society someday. 

This is the first acquisition of a fully-baked, ​“home-grown” company from RA Capital’s RAVen incubator, which builds companies that our venture team funds and helps govern, so we wanted to mark the occasion by sharing a bit more about how we got here. 

Our TechAtlas team has long followed the radiopharmaceutical field and noticed that these drugs are typically used in just neuroendocrine and prostate tumors (consider Endocyte and Point Therapeutics, two of RA Capital’s former portfolio companies since acquired by Novartis & Eli Lilly, respectively). We wondered about all the other applications of this technology, especially after seeing that potent alpha-emitting, actinium-based agents might offer a better therapeutic index than traditional beta-emitters. To fill the radiopharmaceutical white space on the maps of other cancer types, we launched what we called ​“Project Activate” (activate…actinium…get it?), which eventually became Mariana Oncology.

To get there, we built a cross-functional team of RAVen Venture Partners (Alonso Ricardo, Neil Buckley, Risa Stack, Nadim Shohdy, Michael Rosenzweig) and hatched a plan to build a premier radiopharmaceutical company with a comprehensive set of capabilities that existing players hadn’t fully assembled. We carefully sketched out a bundle of services spanning exceptional CMC operations, target identification capabilities, and drug discovery know-how. We even considered acquiring a radioisotope supplier and starting our own manufacturing company to achieve complete vertical integration (but our Risk Mitigation/​Compliance team pointed out that LPs might not appreciate the liabilities involved in transporting radioactive isotopes from far flung corners of the globe). 

After a few months, we learned that our friends at Atlas & Access were working on a similar concept, fortuitously led by Alonso’s former Ra Pharma colleague, Simon Read, who we also knew well. We quickly recognized the merits of joining forces to build the best fully integrated radiopharma company, with in-house R&D and CMC capabilities and a tried and tested management team that had worked well together in the past. With a solid plan in place, RA Capital, Atlas, and Access founded the company via a three-handed $75M Series A. Alonso joined as co-founder and full time CSO and Simon joined as co-founder and full time CEO. We recruited Bernard Lambert (CTO) from Telix to level up our CMC and later recruited Linda Bain (COO/CFO) from RA Capital’s CFO network to bring seriousness and professionalism to our ops and finance organization. 

After investing in Mariana, we continued to support the company and help it with everything from recruiting to target prioritization. We aim to bring companies the right kind of help at the right time. For example, a 200-person public company probably doesn’t need our assistance with HR & recruiting, but we’ve found that helping get the first few scientific hires into a brand new company can make a big difference. In 2021, we also leveraged our TechAtlas Oncology team to analyze a long list of potential targets – weighing things like market opportunity, biology risk, and technical tractability – and prioritized those we found most compelling. All of Mariana’s lead targets (undisclosed, sorry!) emerged from our TechAtlas group’s analysis.

As Mariana moved towards raising a Series B, RA Capital’s late-stage team helped keep everyone’s eyes on the ultimate prize: a compelling data package. Despite some trepidation around the size of our planned raise in a tough market, we retained conviction that the ambitious goal we set was the right size to get to undeniable value-creation milestones and trusted the quality of the company and the offering would support the raise. Our confidence paid off with an oversubscribed $175M Series B led by Deep Track & Forbion last September, amid the depths of the biotech downturn. This was an undeniably tough time in the market and the financing’s size and quality was a testament to the company’s strong team and the compelling data it had generated – sentiments that Novartis clearly shared! Congratulations to the Mariana team and to Novartis – we are excited to see how Mariana’s radiopharmaceuticals can improve patients’ lives with support from the company that brought Pluvicto to market.

Reflections on building a company builder

Most company creation firms are actually loose affiliations of solo practitioners, each with their own resources and networks. Those teams’ successes and failures accrue to the track record of each individual. But when we built the machine that has become our venture team and RAVen incubator, we aimed to build a high-quality industrial process – a factory where the raw materials are knowledge and intelligence. The factory floor is RA Capital (all parts of it working together) and the outputs are companies and exits. 

What makes this factory possible – above all – is a culture of transparency, generosity, and collaboration. Here at RA Capital, when we build companies, builders don’t guard ​“their” contacts, knowledge, or time.

This model has helped us attract Venture Partners and Entrepreneurs in Residence who share our values and are eager to join a collaborative team. New hires are often surprised by how flat and inclusive the organization really is. (That’s the idea, at least!)

To date we’ve shown our factory can operate smoothly and turn out companies regularly and efficiently. We’ve shown that our quality control mechanisms generally work and take pride in quickly reaching go/no-go inflection points to save time and money. We’ve shown through executive recruiting, private syndicated financings, and IPOs that other investors and experts generally like and appreciate the quality of our output, which certainly feels like a vote of confidence. 

All of that is important, but with Mariana’s acquisition today we’ve now shown that buyers also value our companies and are willing to pay a premium for them. That is the final step in our fully-integrated factory process, and we are thrilled to celebrate this milestone. This is certainly not the end of the road, though – much more to come!