Kristina Burow has a well-trained eye. That’s true of her work at ARCH Venture Partners, one of the drug industry’s largest and most active investment firms, and also outside of work — those who know her say Burow is a deadly shot with a pistol.
Burow is a managing director at ARCH, where she has been influential in building bold and well-capitalized startups. Some of her latest are the genetic medicines startup Orbital Therapeutics and Neumora Therapeutics, which is part of a small group of startups hoping to make strides in treating psychiatric diseases. Neumora was one of the few biotechs to go public through an IPO last year. Burow also sits on the boards of several emerging biotech companies, helping to steer how they stress-test their science and what types of therapies to pursue.
Her role behind the scenes in biotech earned her a spot on the third annual STATUS List, which recognizes leaders in health, medicine, and science. STAT 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.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard the story of how you got involved in biotech. Can you tell me?
Going back, I was a chemistry major in college, at UC Berkeley, and worked in the lab of a gentleman by the name of professor Jon Ellman. That was two floors down from Pete Schultz. It was the time when Carolyn Bertozzi was in the lab, and Kevin Judice was in the building. David Liu was up in Schultz’s lab and Matt Gray was there. It was just an absolutely amazing group of people. I fell in love with the field of organic chemists.
I ended up in Karl Barry Sharpless’ lab [at Scripps Research]. Barry had just won his second Nobel Prize. Ultimately, I had this amazing chemistry journey with all these brilliant, brilliant people…. I was like, “This isn’t actually what I want to do. I want to actually do something that’s really going to impact patients, and have a lot of projects that all run simultaneously.” Pete Schultz, who I knew from Berkeley, had just started his institute at the Novartis Institutes down in San Diego, and he was looking to bring in the first class of people. I kind of called up and ended up working there… I had this incredible experience. We spun out companies and created intellectual property, and I thought, “this is awesome. I love this.”
So much of what you just described sounds like, optimally, what biotech and venture capital should be. How has your experience in the industry measured up to that?
What we do at ARCH is really looking long-term and ask the kind of fundamental questions: Okay, this particular space or this particular therapeutic area is broken, or it needs an overhaul. What can we do to change that?… I extrapolate that to true venture capital where, back in the ’70s, you could take this privilege of being at the nexus of capital and talent, merge the two, and be part of building a product or a company or a new drug approach… Frankly, I wish there were more VCs that took a viewpoint that that’s the goal. I wish there were fewer companies that were all focused on the same drug products.
I was thinking about the neuroscience company you started, Neumora Therapeutics. When it launched in 2021, you spoke about how you were angry about the neuroscience field and the lack of options for people with any sort of mental illness. How do you feel now?
I think it’s getting better. Certainly, the drug approvals haven’t happened yet. This is an industry that’s not for the impatient. But if you look at the potential impact of the M4 class that Karuna and Cerevel and Neumora are bringing to the market, I think that will be an extreme game-changer for patients who suffer from schizophrenia, and for their families. To me, once you get one product or two products, you start to see a lot of movement. And I’m hoping that’s the case here, too.
I feel like this ties into what you were saying you’d like to see in the VC world. 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 IRA 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?
We talk about this at ARCH, but all you have to do to think of new areas and to be just a little angry is to come into contact with the health care system. Every time you come in contact with the health care system, there’s some new issue that you need to solve. And then it comes back to that issue I brought up originally, which is, “Do we have the tools to solve it?” Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer’s no. But 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.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about for many years is that there’s room for a women’s health company that is not focused on reproduction. What is different about the biology of women? There was just a major paper about autoimmune disorders and XX chromosomes, and the role that plays, so I think autoimmune is a natural area. But something like cardiovascular risk has gotten zero focus, and women’s cardiovascular risk is very different from men’s, yet we’re all lumped together. There’s been very, very, very little investment made on understanding that type of fundamental difference between male and female biology, and therefore, the drugs are all designed for the standard, which is a man. I don’t think that’s going to be something that I get to focus on in the near-term, but it is an area where I’m looking.