Kristina Burow

Spotlight

ARCH Venture Partners is one of the biggest and highest-performing biotech VC firms out there — thanks in no small part to the efforts of Kristina Burow. She helped lead the creation of Neumora, one of the few biotechs to go public in 2023 and among the biggest efforts in neuroscience in the last several years, with plans to develop treatments for diseases and disorders including Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and bipolar depression. 2023 also saw the RNA startup Orbital, which Burow co-founded, announce $270 million in Series A funding to help it develop a range of RNA-based medicines. Orbital laid off some staff last year, but still holds big ambitions. As Burow told STAT: “With any new tech, you’ve got to be able to pivot.”

STAT’s Allison DeAngelis spoke with Burow about what’s getting her fired up in the health care industry and how she’d change the dynamics between the drug companies and government:

If you could make one of ARCH’s big bets, and change something about how the venture capital system operates, what would you do?

It’s interesting, in preparing for [the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference] this year, I was reflecting on the fact that the government has been somewhat antagonistic towards pharma. I unfortunately predicted this after the Covid vaccines and all of the excitement about biotech saving the day. Between the [Inflation Reduction Act] and now the march-in extension rights, it just feels a little bit like we just keep getting punched. Why is it that everything that is coming from the government seems to be stick, not carrot? 

We want to have more [treatment] options, and we understand as an industry that things are going to become more precision-based. When you do that, as you see in oncology, you fragment, and it turns out that you have fewer patients. What if there’s an incentive to be first, a smaller incentive to be second, and everyone after that is in the same boat? Something like a patent extension — you get an extra year if you’re first, an extra six months if you’re second. I think something like that could start to change behaviors. 

What big bets would you like to make next?

I do think there’s a real opportunity in precision immunology. I’m fairly convinced that a lot of the diseases that we currently lump together are far more fragmented, whether it’s Alzheimer’s disease or lupus. I think that as we understand more and more of the fundamental biology, we’re going to discover that there’s a lot more nuance behind different types of diseases and different types of symptoms.

Read the full conversation.