Since its inception, RA Capital has fostered a supportive and team-oriented culture. We empower all team members to contribute to the decision making process as we believe that inclusive teams with diverse perspectives make the best decisions. We believe that embracing diversity helps foster a culture with greater cross-pollination of ideas and sharing of lessons learned, improving our ability to innovate and fulfill our social mission, and ultimately improving business outcomes both within our firm and in our portfolio companies.

With regard to contributing to the broader biomedical ecosystem, we have long shared our own insights in the form of publications, talks, and by teaching courses on the business of biotech. We consider ourselves to be students and always aspire to learn more. Along the way, we give back many of the lessons that we’ve been fortunate enough to learn, reaching industry members all over the world as well as many who are peripherally involved or merely interested in biomedical innovation.

To advocate for patients not being able to afford the medicines they need, we launched a non-profit called No Patient Left Behind. We help patients get access to their medicines and advocate for reforms that preserve innovation in the drug development enterprise. This organization largely emerged from the pages of the book The Great American Drug Deal written by Managing Partner Peter Kolchinsky.

Our daily work at RA Capital reminds us of the miracles of biology and the importance of the environment to our health and well-being. To minimize our adverse impact on the environment, we regularly look to refine our recycling and product sourcing and to look for new ways to reduce waste and energy use. RA Capital’s offices are powered entirely by renewable energy sources. Our building is also certified with a Gold LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. However, we are still left with residual negative environmental impacts of running our firm. These include our colleagues’ commutes, heating/AC, data center management etc., all of which result in harmful net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. After exploring various GHG offset opportunities, we concluded that the technologies just don’t exist to credibly offset the carbon we generate.

Team Members Exploring the Maine Timberland, Spring 2021

We purchased timberland in Maine and contributed it to the Nature Conservancy. It’s good for the creatures there (since even cutting a road through a forest can disrupt an ecosystem) and it has symbolic value to our team, inspiring us to think about how we can do more for the environment. Quantifying the degree to which even this much land offsets our carbon emissions (likely very little) is inexact, complex, and ultimately not our main goal.

We hope that our colleagues and others hiking these lands will consider how to actively preserve the best of what our world has to offer for our children and grandchildren and beyond. We invest in new medicines knowing that they will upgrade not just our health but the health of all future generations; similarly, we must invest in technologies and adopt new ways of living that allow us to sustain our lovely home with all of its diverse life.

Orbeton Stream, Winter 2021

Boston and its surrounding towns are home to most of our colleagues and their families. Ensuring that our communities remain vibrant and great places for people from diverse backgrounds to live and learn is important to us.  We encourage our colleagues to engage in numerous service activities on an individual and firm level, and support a number of local non-profits, such as the Boston Food Bank, Community Servings and Inner-City Weightlifting.  While we have long bought locally, we have made extra efforts in the COVID era to increase our support of local business.