Outsourced R&D shapes biotech investment
Pharma’s adaptations accompany and drive wider changes across the biopharma investment landscape. What pharma sells, and what it wants to buy, shapes the contours of biotech and biotech investment – particularly these days, given the long absence of IPO exits.
Pharma spinouts have always attracted investors seeking pre-cooked programs with experienced teams that may progress quickly to exit. Plenty feature in neuroscience’s recent resurgence: Bain Capital teamed up with Pfizer to create Cerevel in 2018 around de-prioritized neuroscience assets; Rapport Therapeutics emerged from Janssen in 2023 backed by blue-chip investors Arch Venture Partners and Third Rock. (See Evaluating Neurology) Rapport became one of just a handful of biotechs to list on Nasdaq in 2024, the same year that AbbVie bought Cerevel for $8.7 billion.
In September 2025, Novartis paid $1.4 billion to buy Tourmaline Bio, whose IL-6 targeted antibody pacibekitug, for atherosclerotic heart disease, was licensed from Pfizer.
Some spin-outs return to where they came from – true out-sourced R&D. In July 2025, Novartis paid $925 million for Anthos Therapeutics, a single-asset company it had co-founded six years earlier with Blackstone Life Sciences. Anthos’ team put Factor XI inhibitor abelacimab through Phase 2 and into Phase 3 studies for prevention of stroke and embolism in patients with atrial fibrillation, taking it off Novartis’ R&D ledger. BMS may, similarly, buy back the immunology assets it spun off in July. Even if not, a 20% stake in the newco means the pharma firm may still benefit if anyone else buys the programs.
This pharma out-sourcing has attracted new kinds of investors to biopharma. Private equity players like Bain Capital and other large asset managers play a more prominent role than a decade ago (some drawn to life sciences’ strategic role, magnified during the pandemic). Several of these investors have acquired or taken stakes in specialist biotech VCs – Blackstone Life Sciences resulted from the 2018 acquisition of Clarus Ventures; 2022 saw Carlyle buy Abingworth, EQT buy Life Sciences Partners and Apollo take a minority stake in Sofinnova. These asset managers have larger sums of capital to put to work and tend to prefer later-stage, lower-risk projects like some of those available from pharma.
Hence the “clinical co-development” investment strategy at Carlyle-owned Abingworth has thrived. By taking on clinical development of specific R&D programs (usually from pharma), the approach offers investors a lower-risk and less-resource hungry option than building a de-novo biotech, and allows pharma to outsource non-priority R&D.
This lean, asset-focused approach – which first emerged at VC firm Medicxi more than a decade ago – is particularly attractive during bear markets, when capital is scarcer and M&A the only exit option. The modus operandi of some newer VCs is to select clinic-ready programs and tailor them to fill Big Pharma pipeline gaps. “We license assets that we think Big Pharma will want five years hence,” says Jo Jimenez, co-founder of five-year-old Aditum Bio, which closed its third fund in January 2025.
