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Third Rock Ventures Rolls Its Own

 
• By Alex Lash

Third Rock Ventures has raised $1.3 billion by going all-in on early-stage biotech with a homegrown company strategy that requires that its own people run many of its portfolio companies after launch. It’s hard to say definitively that the strategy is working, but then again, its investors just re-upped for a new half-billion-dollar fund.

It was Raiders of the Lost Ark for biotech geeks. The arks were the musty sample cabinets or lonely freezers at the back of dead-end corridors, and the samples inside held microbes particular to patches of dirt in far flung locales. It wasn’t cheap to hunt down the old soil collections that drug companies built across much of the 20th century as potential sources for new drugs. Then again, Third Rock Ventures can afford to do a lot of things most life science VCs wouldn’t dream of these days.

Third Rock’s portfolio company Warp Drive Bio Inc., headed by the firm’s partner Alexis Borisy, needed to collect tens...

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