A one-time pop singer with mega-money star connections hatches a $100M plan to invest in ‘contrarian’ biotech ideas
26 Oct 2022
Antibody
Even back in the day as the singer for Chester French, a two-man indie pop group that sporadically flared into public sight with songs like “She Loves Everybody,” DA Wallach had a rep as someone who knew people. Or could get to know them.
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Source: Endpts
Bioregnum Opinion Column by John Carroll
People like billionaire Ron Burkle, who created a tech fund with Wallach called Inevitable Ventures. Or Sean “Diddy” Combs, who connected the budding entrepreneur with Burkle as Wallach became an early investor in and “singer-in-residence” for Spotify.
Burkle had — and still has — a high opinion of Wallach, telling Forbes a few years back that he was a “visionary young investor with an instinct for novel solutions to important problems.”
Now Wallach’s going to give it a go in biotech. And he’s expanded on his network of movers and shakers to go in with him.
This morning Wallach put out word that he’s joined forces with longtime biopharma research vet Tim Wright, who completed a lengthy stint inside Novartis. And the two have $100 million for a new fund dubbed Time BioVentures.
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Source: Endpts
Tim Wright
That’s not a whole lot of money in today’s biotech world, but what they lack in cold hard cash, they make up for with world-class connections and a boast as “contrarian” investors.
It starts with Burkle, who’s listed as a backer and still a believer. Chris Sacca, another billionaire, is on board after earning a gold-edged rep for investments in Uber and Twitter.
Sean Parker, another billionaire (Facebook) who turned prolific biotech investor and scientific enthusiast at the eponymous Parker Institute, is listed as an advisor to the fund. So is Nobel laureate Jim Allison and his wife, the renowned MD Anderson scientist Padmanee Sharma.
Wallach — who majored in African-American studies at Harvard — is not shy of predicting big things. Naturally, that means mentioning a few names along the way.
“This is perhaps the largest addressable market in the global economy, and we believe that the Mark Zuckerbergs and Larry Pages of healthcare are out there and will build generationally important companies that will transform medicine for decades to come,” says the musician-turned-biotech maven Wallach in a prepared statement.
So far that would qualify yet another billionaire, world’s-richest-man Elon Musk, for an early investment in his biotech outfit Neuralink, which is working on connecting the human brain with computers, and an oddly low-profile Amsterdam biotech named Kling Biotherapeutics, which is developing antibodies for cancer and infectious diseases.
If you hadn’t guessed already, the fund is based in Southern California.
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