Venture capital drives biotech. Early investments power the huge capital needs and sustain the far-longer-than-normal development timelines that drug development requires. Venture capital dollars brought about new treatments like Yescarta, one of the first FDA-approved cell therapies for cancer, and even major biotech companies like Genentech.
It’s easy to imagine those piles of cash are coming from billionaires’ bank vaults or some arcane Wall Street magic. But more often than not, those millions are coming from people with jobs that don’t bring them anywhere near a lab bench.
Some 15,000 firefighters and police officers in Colorado invested in the Boston-based biotech Alnylam — or at least, their pension fund managers did. A Hawaiian charity for children and orphans threw part of its endowment into CRISPR Therapeutics through a venture capital firm. And about 16,000 film and television screenwriters’ retirement benefits may have helped get companies like Sage Therapeutics andor Editas Medicine off the ground, thanks to another fund.
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