TechAtlas: RA Capital’s knowledge engine and data advantage

TechAtlas is RA Capital’s proprietary knowledge engine – staffed with scientifically trained researchers who synthesize scientific and clinical evidence to originate conviction and inform RA Capital’s investment strategies.

Think of TechAtlas as an insights machine that produces:

Competitive landscape mapping: TechAtlas has mapped 130+ disease areas, including technology platforms and in-depth strategic analyses, along with more than 30 planetary health territories. These structured analyses highlight potential breakthroughs in human and planetary health.

Mechanism evaluations: Deep dives into how technologies compare to current and future alternatives and opportunities, assessing whether new approaches offer meaningful advantages.

Decision context: Analysis that informs whether programs are investable based on anticipated impact, development hurdles, and competitive dynamics.

TechAtlas supports both our internal investment decisions and our portfolio companies’ strategies. If you are building a company in a crowded space, having the entire competitive terrain mapped with strategic white spaces identified can be invaluable.

The team tracks a wide variety of molecules, clinical trials and pipelines, and conducts 5,000+ company meetings and calls annually alongside our Investment Teams to stay deeply connected to what’s happening across healthcare, life sciences, and planetary health.

TechAtlas maps include only publicly available information – no confidential data. If a company has disclosed a program on its website, in a publication, at a conference, or in a patent, our team may include it on a map.

We don’t share anything you haven’t already made public. Think of our maps as structured intelligence gathering, not information leakage.

Either (A) we missed it and will add it, or (B) we know about the program but haven’t yet updated our map to include it.

We only show what’s public. If you haven’t publicly disclosed a program, we won’t add it until you do. But if you mention your program (drug name and indication) on your website or in any public forum, we can give it a place on our maps.

Note: Maps are updated periodically, but our internal data stays much more current. Just because you don’t see your program on a map doesn’t mean we aren’t aware and interested.

Our maps are proprietary to RA Capital/​TechAtlas. We only show teasers to stimulate further discussion. We’ve made a few older maps available in full resolution. During Covid, we published our vaccine, treatment, and diagnostic maps in full resolution in real-time as a public service. Let’s hope that’s not going to happen again.

Come to RA Capital’s offices to explore them with us. We have large touchscreen displays that make it easy to navigate the maps. We’re always looking for productive brainstorms with researchers, clinicians, entrepreneurs, drug hunters, small innovative companies, large biotech and pharma, payers, policy makers, and institutions interested in partnering with us.

We have mobile systems and can print maps if needed for off-site discussions. We’re happy to share them with portfolio companies and disease-focused foundations.

We do not sell the maps. We can make them freely available to our portfolio companies and have in the past provided them to disease-focused foundations and the FDA.

We map everything that is of interest to us and our companies. There are plenty of topics that we still want to get to. Sometimes we create new maps when we see a critical mass of new ideas emerge around a common theme (e.g., immuno-oncology). We’ve even structured maps based on the needs of particular portfolio companies so that they can see many of the indications to which their platform technology could be applied.

As new platforms emerge, we will evolve our maps.

Our disease maps are typically mapped from the standpoint of a physician who wants to best treat a patient. Our analyses factor in efficacy, safety, tolerability, convenience, and cost considerations.

Mechanism of action (MOA – in and of itself not important to a patient) is relevant to the extent that it helps predict how new drug candidates are likely to perform. For example, drugs with sufficiently different MOAs are more likely to have non-overlapping toxicities and additive or synergistic efficacy, making them potentially combinable, which is what’s important to a physician.

Our ​“capability” maps (e.g., immuno-oncology, gene therapy, or epigenetics) take the perspective of a drug developer trying to make a useful product with a particular function. The same technology – for example a CAR‑T program targeting multiple myeloma (MM) – may appear both on the MM map in the context of other MM drugs as well as on the immuno-oncology map in juxtaposition to other CAR‑T programs, including those targeting other cancers, as well as PD‑1 antibodies and cancer vaccines.

Nearly all the maps have what we call a Solutions Matrix that shows how well-equipped each competitor is in a given field and which technologies could help fill each player’s gaps. We also create strategy maps that look at the world from the perspective of a particular large pharma so that we can help smaller companies understand what might be important to potential partners/​acquirers.

Our maps highlight compelling trials and drug candidates we consider most likely to improve the standard of care, which we expect may be of interest to patients. The ideal way for us to help patients would be through patient advocacy groups; we do not have a formal mechanism for interacting with patients.

When we have spoken with individuals seeking medical information, we have volunteered a list of recently approved products and advanced clinical trials that we considered credible for them to discuss with their physician.

Yes. Your career is precious capital, and it makes sense to diligence your options as you might an investment opportunity. Our maps can help you understand which therapeutic areas are most active, which technologies are emerging, and where the most compelling opportunities exist.

Time permitting, we’re happy to provide a tour to someone evaluating career decisions. How an individual makes important career choices teaches us something about how we should think about investing our own time and capital – so these conversations are valuable for us, too.