Welcome to "Building Bridges: Insights into Business Development and Partnerships in Biopharma." In this article, we feature Ravneesh Sachdev, a seasoned leader in the biopharma industry and currently a Partner and Head of Business Development at Apple Tree Partners (ATP), a venture capital firm focused on life sciences investment.
With a career spanning over 20 years, Ravneesh has played a pivotal role in shaping business development strategies at various biopharma companies. Most recently, Ravneesh was Senior Vice President and Head of Business Development at Acceleron Pharma, a commercial-stage biopharma company focused on therapeutics treating rare hematologic and pulmonary diseases, where he established Acceleron’s partnering strategy before eventually leading the company’s sale to Merck for $11.5 billion. Prior to Acceleron, Ravneesh was at Sage Therapeutics in a similar leadership role that culminated in a $3.2 billion strategic collaboration with Biogen. Over his career, he has both led and contributed to the execution of more than 30 transactions at Pfizer, Onyx Pharmaceuticals (including the company sale to Amgen for $10.4 billion), UCB Pharma, Acorda Therapeutics, and Bioverativ (including the company sale to Sanofi for $11.6 billion).
Ravneesh shares his journey, the challenges and opportunities in the industry, and his vision for the future. Join us as we explore his insights on building successful partnerships and driving innovation in biopharma.
1. Career Path
Question: Could you share your journey to becoming a Head of Business Development at Apple Tree Partners? What key experiences shaped your career?
I started my career in life sciences in pipeline business analytics and competitive intelligence over 20 years ago at Daiichi Pharmaceuticals. Based in New Jersey. This was before the Sankyo acquisition, so Daiichi at that time was a much smaller Japanese company trying to build its US presence. I was one of the earlier people to join the US team. After the acquisition by Sankyo, which brought about significant organizational changes, I left Daiichi and joined Pfizer first in Connecticut and eventually in New York City. At Pfizer, I worked in a similar role for the neuroscience and pain therapeutic areas, but this time focusing on business development opportunities. This role was my first exposure to business development.
I eventually spent most of my time working in business development, embedding myself in the team and working on various deals. It was fascinating to work on diverse external projects beyond our own pipeline.
However, I found that large pharma companies were quite intentionally specific in their roles. As a nascent business development professional, I wanted to also be involved in the entire deal value chain, including negotiating and closing deals. At a very large company, being involved in the latter processes required more patience than I was willing to accept, so I decided to seek an environment where I could own my own deals from start to finish. This led me to Onyx Pharmaceuticals in the Bay Area, where the business development organization was set up such that every professional contributed to the entire deal value chain – search, evaluation, negotiations and transactions. This role allowed me to understand the complete process of business development and was a significant value inflection point in my career. I also had the opportunity to help set up Onyx’s first ex-US operations in Switzerland as their head of international business development.
Onyx was acquired by Amgen for $10.4 billion five years after I joined. After that, I moved from Switzerland to UCB Pharma in the UK, where I helped build a pipeline behind their Phase III product as the head of a new business unit for business development. My role at UCB and subsequent positions at Acorda Therapeutics, Bioverativ, Sage Therapeutics, and Acceleron Pharma involved leading significant deals, further shaping my comprehensive understanding of business development.
At Acorda Therapeutics, I was involved in a couple of M&A deals to build their pipeline. The company eventually went through significant commercial and IP challenges, leading to multiple RIFs, which also impacted me. I then moved to Boston to join Bioverativ, a newly spun-out commercial stage company from Biogen focused on rare blood diseases. Bioverativ was shortly acquired by Sanofi for $11.6 billion, and I stayed for a year to complete ongoing deals.
I then joined Sage Therapeutics as the Head of Business Development, where I led a major $3.2 billion sell-side deal with Biogen. Following this, I moved to Acceleron Pharma, also as head of business development, eventually leading the company’s sale to Merck for $11.5 billion.
Since then and for the past 2+ years, I have been a partner and head of business development at Apple Tree Partners (ATP), a venture capital fund which has focused on founding and building new life science companies in areas of emerging science with enormous translational promise. At ATP we have a “hub and spokes” model in which the firm brings in people with depth and breadth of experience in a discipline within biopharma – business development, in my case – and we all provide strategic guidance to the companies across the ATP portfolio. It’s a very hands-on approach that grows companies from early stage to the clinic and beyond. In that regard, ATP is a new yet familiar environment that provides me with the exciting opportunity to work with many startups at once. Right now, I am working with 15 companies created by ATP, making it 15 times more interesting to lend my experiences and capabilities to creating value for these companies.
2. Industry Changes
Question: How have you seen the biopharma industry evolve over the past decade, particularly in the areas of business development and strategic partnerships?
The fundamental dynamic between pharma and biotech has remained the same—they work well together in a complementary ecosystem. Pharma can't do everything themselves and are better at development and sales, while biotech brings innovation and technology. Over time, the focus areas have changed.
When I first started out, primary care was a very big thing for pharma. This was in the early 2000s, and then it shifted to rare diseases and precision oncology in the 2010s. Now, we're starting to see a return to larger indications such as cardio-metabolic diseases and neurological disorders.
In the early 2000s, we saw the beginning stages of the Human Genome Project, which took about a decade to figure out what that data meant. This led to the rise of precision medicine in the 2010s, where we could target very specific deficits in patients. This shift allowed the industry to move from broad-spectrum treatments to more targeted therapies, improving efficacy and patient outcomes.
The pricing dynamics in the industry also evolved in the 2010s. The markets became smaller and smaller, and pricing for each drug went higher and higher because development costs generally remained the same, whether you're working on a small drug or a big drug. So you have to be able to justify the return on investment, and the way you do that is by pricing.
Looking ahead, I see trends returning to larger indications, driven by innovations such as AI. We're hopefully starting to learn to glean how quickly we can generate good molecules using AI technology, and not just in terms of speed but also in terms of hopefully increasing the probability of success for any molecule that comes out of a discovery shop that uses AI.
3. Challenges and Solutions
Question: What are the biggest challenges currently facing business development in biopharma, and how is your company addressing these challenges?
For private biotech companies, challenges often revolve around financing and resource limitations. You're always thinking about the next value inflection point and the next round of financing. Partnering creatively to extend the runway is crucial. The challenge lies in making platforms and programs attractive to pharma companies and maintaining open dialogues. Representing ATP portfolio companies at and between partnering conferences and establishing and maintaining strong relationships with pharma companies are key strategies. This helps ensure that our programs and platforms align with market interests and partner expectations.
4. Emerging Markets
Question: Are there emerging markets or sectors that you believe are poised for significant growth?
Many therapeutic areas have already been targets of most companies’ focus. For example, in oncology, we've developed all types of therapeutics from blunt instruments like cytotoxics and I/O to targeted therapeutics like kinase inhibitors and synthetic lethality programsprograms.
Neuroscience was a big area of focus for many companies before the 2010s until we ran out of ideas because we didn’t understand enough about the genetics behind CNS pathology despite all the progress we made with the Human Genome Project. We've focused a lot of our resources on oncology and many rare diseases because they tend to be majorbe major killers, and survival is the primary concern. However, in neuroscience, survival is not the immediate concern. Now, we have put resources into a greater understanding of precision neuroscience, leading to several major deals, including by Pharmas having exited the space now returning to it.
Is there a way for us to treat schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, or Parkinson's in a precision kind of way? I think that would be something great to achieve. It doesn't have to always be a blunt hammer, and these blunt approaches don't work in all patients. That's why these drugs don't tend to last very long or have the same suboptimal impact across all patients. Better precision medicine is needed, and I hope that's going to be the trend or something we should focus on more going forward.
5. Partnership Dynamics
Question: What do you look for in a strategic partner, and how do you assess fit beyond the financials?
Financials are obviously very important, but you want to make sure that your partner is like-minded. They need to have the same level of excitement about what you're developing as you do. They should want to truly work with you as a partner to maximize the returns on what you're working on together, which ultimately means getting a drug out to patients.
Another important aspect is cultural fit. You have to be able to work well together; otherwise, nothing will get done. Oftentimes, you get a feel for it when you first start your conversations with the other side. I always believe that negotiations start from the first meeting. It's not just when you actually get into term sheets and contracts. Negotiations are already happening as you start thinking about how you can work together. Every meeting you have between your two companies involves some form of negotiation because you're not always going to be on the same page about how to develop a drug together. You need to come in with the mindset that, even though you might have differing ideas, you want to ensure the best ideas are put on the table to achieve the best outcome possible for the drug you're working on together. Those aspects are equally important as the financials.
6. Board Engagement
Question: What does effective board engagement look like in the context of business development strategy and deal execution? What challenges have you faced in ensuring productive involvement from the board, and how has their input influenced key deals?
Every deal our portfolio companies work on has to go to their board for approval. We discuss the strategy behind the deal, what it will do for the company in terms of value creation, who the partners are, and whether they are a good cultural fit for us. We consider if we will be more successful together than we would be on our own. All of these aspects are discussed with the board before moving forward.
The challenges are like those you face in any typical biopharma when discussing deals with the board because they represent our investors. We have to make sure that what we're doing for our companies will create value, as ultimately, we want to drive exits for them and deliver returns to our investors.
There are two primary ways to achieve exits: IPOs and M&A. Both are viable for us. When entering into partnerships, we need to ensure we retain significant value for the company instead of giving it all away. If most of the value is given away, it might as well be an M&A deal. Otherwise, the company's value is impaired for a true exit opportunity. Potential acquirers or public investors will look at how much value has already been given away and question the remaining value. This consideration is crucial in how we approach deals.
7. Personal Insights
Question: What is the best piece of advice you've received in your career that you would pass on to someone aspiring to reach your position?
As a business development professional, you're really the jack of all trades and sort of a master of none. You're working across a lot of different functions, facilitating, and herding a lot of cats. You're trying to gather inputs from various functions to put together a viable business case for a deal. You have to be okay with a lot of uncertainty and be flexible because deals don't always go the way you think and oftentimes may not even happen.
You need to develop flexibility and resilience because most deals fail. Just like drug development, most drugs fail, and most deals fail too. You have to be able to pick yourself back up, and try to make the deal work in a different way. That flexibility and resilience are essential for success as a business development professional. It's a rewarding field because you get to see the big picture and create value in a meaningful way.
The smaller the company, the bigger the impact you can make. Depending on the seniority of your role, you can have a significant impact in a larger company too, but it generally takes time. I'm an impatient person, so I prefer being in smaller companies where I can make a big impact quickly. Every person is different, so you need to decide if you want to be part of a larger or smaller company, as your experiences will vary.
8. Legacy and Impact
Question: Looking forward, what impact do you hope to have on your company and the industry at large?
I've been very fortunate that most of the companies I've worked with have successfully brought drugs to patients. Whether my companies are still around or not, the impact of the deals I've done or the companies I've sold has made a difference for patients. I hope to continue doing the same here at ATP, although it's a much longer runway since these are early startups and the failure rates are higher.
However, I take comfort knowing that I get to contribute to interesting science and push the envelope in ways I haven't done before. I'm still here and enjoying myself, and I hope to continue creating value for as long as ATP will have me.