Scion Life Sciences launches with $310M to build new biotechs

2024-02-07

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Scion Life Sciences on Tuesday launched with the closing of its first investment fund, bringing in $310 million to spend on creating and building biotech companies working on clinically transformational or curative new medicines.

The firm will be headed by Aaron Kantoff and Sam Hall, both former Apple Tree investors, along with Tadd Wessel, founder and managing partner of healthcare private equity company Petrichor, of which Scion is an affiliate. Kantoff previously co-founded RayzeBio, which was bought by Bristol Myers Squibb, while Hall has helped start a number of biotechs that have since been acquired, including Chinook Therapeutics and Syntimmune.

Wessel, who was previously a partner at OrbiMed Advisors, said Kantoff and Hall “have established themselves as exceptional investors and company builders and the outlier success of the companies they have previously built together provides impressive validation of their unique approach.”

Scion noted that its investments will be guided by three pillars, including focusing on therapeutic modalities and enabling technologies that are “sufficiently mature” to make an impact in the near term. The firm will also seek to put its money into areas where “deep understanding” of the underlying science makes powerful intervention possible.

"We build companies with the primary objective of creating important new medicines, not exits," Kantoff said, with Scion adding that its structure allows it to support “its most promising portfolio companies through to maturity as late- or commercial-stage biopharmaceutical enterprises.” Kantoff noted that Scion’s “proactive and data-driven” approach will enable it to build “sustainably operating biotechnology companies that are capable of ascending to valuations in the tens of billions.”

Scion said that four company formation efforts are already under way. The firm is well-capitalised to allot at least $60 million to support each portfolio company through to an IPO and beyond.

Scientific support

To support these new companies, the life sciences venture capital firm also created Scion Innovations, which will serve as an incubation hub and provide in-house R&D capabilities and operational resources. In particular, Innovations is intended to create and evaluate biologics, boasting protein engineering capabilities as well as the tools to design, construct, and optimise monoclonal and multi-specific antibodies. The scientific hub also has a platform to characterise in vitro and in vivo the biochemical properties and functions of therapeutic candidates.

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