Instead of viewing other T-cell engager companies as direct competitors, Kevin Pojasek refers to them as "peer companies." This collaborative mindset recognizes that in a nascent field, multiple players help validate the therapeutic approach for investors and pharma, ultimately growing the entire market. They compete on specific targets, not by tearing each other down.

Voyager CEO Al Sandrock views partnerships as more than just revenue. He emphasizes that strong scientific collaborations are invaluable because direct interaction between partner scientists accelerates learning and overall progress for both organizations. This intellectual cross-pollination is a key, often overlooked, benefit of partnering out platform technology.

BridgeBio's unique structure creates dedicated subsidiaries for each program. This empowers small, focused teams closest to the science to make key decisions—"play calling on the field"—without layers of bureaucracy. This model dramatically accelerates development, leading to unprecedented output of new drugs.

The founding premise of Enara Bio was a forward-looking belief. As the T-cell engager field matured, they predicted a critical shortage of viable targets would emerge. By creating a platform to discover novel "dark antigens" from the non-coding genome, they positioned themselves to solve a problem before it became mainstream.

While large pharmaceutical companies are filled with a wide breadth of smart people, smaller biotech firms offer a different kind of intellectual environment. They feature the same degree of brilliance, but it's concentrated in a much more focused organization, creating a unique depth of talent.

CZI's Biohub model hinges on a simple principle: physically seating biologists and engineers from different institutions (Stanford, UCSF, Berkeley) together. This direct proximity fosters collaboration and creates hybrid experts, overcoming the institutional silos often reinforced by traditional grant-based funding.

In a highly technical field like radiopharmaceuticals, success requires combining distinct capabilities. Crown Bioscience's partnership with Medicine Discovery Catapult merges preclinical modeling expertise with radiolabeling know-how, creating a comprehensive service offering that would be difficult for one organization to build alone.

Resolution Therapeutics' CEO builds his team with leaders from varied backgrounds across different diseases and drug modalities. He believes this diversity creates more robust problem-solving, as challenges that are novel in one area may have been solved in another, enabling faster and more informed decisions.

To avoid the pitfalls of scale in R&D, Eli Lilly operates small, focused labs of 300-400 people. These 'internal biotechs' have mission focus and autonomy, while leveraging the parent company's scale for clinical trials and distribution.