Over a year and a half since its inception, JP Morgan’s life sciences investment arm has closed its first biotech venture capital fund with over $500 million.
JP Morgan Life Sciences Private Capital said Thursday that it will invest in early-stage companies, including those in the industry’s highest-profile categories like obesity, cancer and autoimmune and genetic diseases. The group is led by Stephen Squinto, a longtime executive who helped build biotech powerhouses like Alexion and Regeneron.
Endpoints News talked with Squinto on Thursday to discuss his vision for the inaugural fund and how he’s thinking about JP Morgan’s future biotech investments. Here are five key takeaways from that conversation:
The early-stage fund is just a start: JP Morgan is looking to make a total of 20 to 25 investments, primarily in early-stage biotech companies, Squinto said. “We’re not writing $100 million checks,” he said. “We’re probably writing $10 [million] to $30 million checks. And for that, I also wanted to build a relatively strong organization but a modestly sized organization to start.”
Down the road, JP Morgan plans to invest in other areas of life sciences as well, Squinto said. But he chose early-stage biotech as “step one along that journey of eventually investing in all areas of life sciences,” he said. “Because, frankly, that is what I’ve been doing for my 30-, 40-year career: building early-stage biotech companies.”
Expect a hands-on investor: When the fund makes an investment, Squinto said it’s looking for a board seat or board observer role at “the bare minimum.” Typically, JP Morgan wants to be the lead investor on the rounds it’s participating in. In the fund’s first disclosed investment, JP Morgan led Enlaza Therapeutics’ $100 million raise, and Squinto joined the company’s board.
“We’d like to believe that we have a lot to offer these companies,” he said. “We’ve all gone through the struggles of what it takes to build a biotech company and develop products. This is a tough business.
“We want to be involved. We want them to feel comfortable picking up the phone and calling and saying, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about this issue. How would you think about this?’ And I can pick up the phone, and I can call Jeff Leiden and say, ‘Hey, from your experience, how did you solve this?’” Squinto said.
Leiden, the former CEO and current executive chair of Vertex, serves as a strategic advisor to JP Morgan’s life science group.
There’s still space for more players in the obesity field: “The idea that the world will be centered around two, and only two, large pharmas tackling what is likely to be the largest pharma business ever created, I think, would be naïve at best,” Squinto said. “Every pharma company out there is thinking about how they’re going to get into this game, because when you look at Lilly and Novo, the GLP-1 products they have are great products. They are absolutely great products — people lose weight. There’s no doubt about that. But they’re not the perfect product.”
Like others in the industry, Squinto’s obesity medicine wishlist includes getting around the need for cold storage with injectables (such as a pill), preserving lean muscle mass, and focusing on new targets beyond GLP-1.
Alzheimer’s therapies are now flying under the radar: “In all of the press about Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy, we haven’t really heard a lot about the products approved last year for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease that are somewhat slowing progression. They’re not curative products,” Squinto said. “But we’ll build off of that information to have better products in neurodegenerative disease.”
News about a new gene editing company is coming soon: JP Morgan has invested in a gene editing company, though Squinto declined to disclose its name and the technology. “We’re looking at prime editing companies, of course, but this one’s not prime editing,” he said.
“You’ll be hearing more about that in the weeks to come,” he said.