Centessa Pharmaceuticals launches with $250 million

Centessa Pharmaceuticals is the latest firm to explore whether an asset-centered model can make the process of bringing drugs to market cheaper and faster. Founded by the life sciences investment firm Medicxi, Centessa launches with $250 million in funding from a venture syndicate and a diverse collection of drug programs.

An asset-centered model of drug development centralizes management and resources such as manufacturing and regulatory support around sometimes disparate programs. The hope is that experienced managers can guide programs with efficiency. At Centessa, managers include former Big Pharma executives like its CEO, Saurabh Saha, and chief scientific officer, Moncef Slaoui, who led R&D at Bristol Myers Squibb and GlaxoSmithKline, respectively.

Centessa brings together 10 private biotech firms—each focused on a single asset or biological pathway—under its management umbrella. The end result is a pipeline encompassing a range of diseases and featuring four clinical-stage drug candidates.

Centessa is not the first firm to house a collection of drug discovery programs under one management roof. Other examples of the approach include PureTech Health and BridgeBio Pharma.

PureTech founder and CEO Daphne Zohar argues that the model offers advantages over the conventional biotech setup, including efficiency with capital; flexibility in how assets are developed, whether alone, through partnerships, or spun out into their own entities; and the freedom to make decisions more objectively. “Unlike a biotech where everything rides on one or two programs and there’s a built-in bias to push programs forward, we have set up incentives to kill programs early so we can move resources to the successful ones,” Zohar says.