Our next episode is Blueprint Medicines. It'll be out next Tuesday, August 4th.
Blueprint Medicines launched in 2011, with two of the scientists behind Gleevec, aiming to tackle kinase mutations Gleevec couldn't hit. Fast forward to the summer of 2025, and Sanofi acquired the company at roughly $9 billion of total value… for an allergy drug.
Blueprint's flagship program, avapritinib, found its market in indolent systemic mastocytosis — a mast cell disease most physicians briefly learn about in med school and then hardly ever see in a patient.
Beyond the science, Blueprint is a clear example of how biotech venture creation actually works. There was no founder pitching a VC. Instead, Third Rock generated the idea internally — building this company from scratch, deploying its own operators to support and run the company all along the way.
This vertically integrated studio model is historically one of the best-performing strategies in biotech, because it can providethe massive capital and early infrastructure of a big pharma — from lab space to legal templates — to a small biotech; so founders can focus strictly on the science.
But that support dictates an extreme equity split. Because Third Rock fundamentally believes clinical execution matters far more than the initial academic idea, they take the lion’s share of the cap table. That math worked out great for them! They managed to flip a $42 million early investment in the company into several hundred million dollars. On the other hand, the academic advisors and bench scientists who made this precision medicine paradigm at all possible walked away with only a fraction of that exit.
We have a great roster of interviews lined up for this episode: Alexis Borisy, Christoph Lengauer, Erica Evans, Tim Guzi, Charles Sawyers, and Mariana Castells.
Subscribe and it lands straight in your inbox next Tuesday.
