How Strategic Collaborations Can Accelerate Innovation And Create Value

By Cameron Pye, Ph.D.

In biotech, partnerships are often viewed as milestones - announcements that validate a technology or provide funding for the next stage of development. For platform companies, however, collaborations should serve a deeper purpose. The right partnerships don’t just advance individual programs; they strengthen the platform, accelerate learning, and create a sustainable engine for innovation.

At Unnatural Products, we approach business development as a deliberate long-term strategy rather than a series of stand-alone transactions. Our recent collaboration with Novartis — which includes up to $100 million in up-front and pre-IND milestone payments and up to $1.7 billion in total potential deal value — reflects this philosophy.

Together, through collaborations with argenx, BridgeBio, and Merck, these partnerships form part of a coordinated effort to expand the reach of our AI-enhanced macrocyclic peptide platform while generating significant non-dilutive capital to support continued innovation and growth.

From this experience, several key insights have emerged about how platform biotech companies can think differently about business development.

Partnerships Should Strengthen The Discovery Engine

For platform companies, the most valuable outcome of a collaboration is not simply advancing one asset; it is improving the system that produces many. Each partnership should generate data, technical insight, and validation that enhance the predictive power, efficiency, and scalability of the platform itself.

Working with multiple partners allows us to apply our macrocycle discovery capabilities across different biological targets and therapeutic contexts. These collaborations create opportunities to test hypotheses, refine design principles, and learn how our platform performs in varied settings. Over time, this iterative process improves how we prioritize targets, engineer molecules, and move candidates toward development.

When partnerships are structured thoughtfully, they create a compounding effect: every collaboration improves the next. Instead of treating each deal as a discrete project, platform companies should view partnerships as opportunities to continuously strengthen their discovery engine. This mindset ensures that external collaborations contribute not only to individual programs, but to the long-term competitiveness of the platform as a whole.

Non-Dilutive Capital Works Best When It Supports Strategic Priorities

Partnerships often provide access to capital, but the real advantage comes when that capital reinforces, rather than redirects, a company’s scientific focus. Non-dilutive funding is most powerful when it enables deeper investment in the platform and pipeline areas where the company can create the greatest differentiation.

Our collaboration with Novartis illustrates this balance. By pairing our discovery platform with Novartis’ global development and commercialization expertise, the partnership enables rapid advancement of promising cardiovascular programs while allowing us to continue investing in our proprietary pipeline and platform capabilities. The financial structure provides meaningful non-dilutive capital while preserving long-term participation in downstream value creation.

This alignment ensures that partnerships accelerate progress without sacrificing future opportunity. When capital is paired with strategic fit, collaborations can extend runway, reduce development risk, and allow companies to remain disciplined in how they allocate internal resources. For platform biotech companies, this approach transforms partnerships from short-term financing tools into catalysts for sustained innovation.

Capability Alignment Matters More Than Deal Size

While headline numbers often dominate attention, the true value of a collaboration lies in how well the partners’ strengths complement one another. The most effective partnerships combine differentiated discovery capabilities with deep clinical development expertise and global commercialization reach.

When each organization contributes something essential, collaboration becomes an amplifier rather than a compromise. Strong capability alignment shortens development timelines, improves decision-making, and increases confidence in program execution. It also reduces the friction that can arise when responsibilities overlap or expectations diverge.

For platform biotech companies, this means selecting partners not only based on financial terms, but on how well their expertise matches the scientific and operational needs of the program. A well-aligned partner can accelerate translation from discovery to clinic, help navigate regulatory pathways, and ultimately expand the reach of therapies to patients worldwide. In this context, the success of a partnership is measured less by its announced value and more by how effectively the organizations work together to deliver results.

Optionality Is A Strategic Asset

Drug discovery rarely follows a straight path. Programs evolve as new biology emerges, clinical data refine hypotheses, or unexpected findings reveal broader therapeutic potential. Partnerships should therefore be designed not just to advance a specific asset, but to preserve the flexibility to respond as the science unfolds.

Maintaining optionality requires intentional deal design. Structures such as staged research commitments, milestone-based expansion decisions, and clearly defined rights around indications, territories, or follow-on programs allow both parties to adapt as knowledge grows. Shared learning frameworks — where data flow quickly between teams and governance supports rapid reassessment — help ensure that programs can pivot efficiently rather than becoming locked into early assumptions.

For platform companies, this flexibility is critical because the full value of a technology often becomes visible only after it has been applied across multiple targets or disease areas. A discovery engine that initially demonstrates promise in one indication may ultimately prove more impactful elsewhere, or generate entirely new classes of molecules that were not anticipated at the outset. Partnerships that preserve room for that evolution enable companies to capture more of the long-term value created by their platform.

Optionality also helps manage risk constructively. Staged collaboration structures allow investment to scale alongside scientific confidence, ensuring that promising opportunities can be pursued quickly when supported by data, while limiting unnecessary exposure when they are not. In this way, optionality supports both disciplined capital deployment and long-term innovation growth.

Successful Partnerships Are Built On Cultural Alignment

Even the most carefully negotiated agreement ultimately succeeds or fails based on how teams work together in practice. Financial terms and governance frameworks matter, but they cannot compensate for misalignment in how organizations operate day to day. Effective collaborations require shared expectations around speed, transparency, scientific rigor, and how decisions are made when uncertainty inevitably arises.

For CEOs, evaluating a potential partner should therefore go beyond strategic fit and technical capability. It should include a candid assessment of how the organizations align culturally and operationally. Do teams approach risk in similar ways? Are they comfortable sharing data early and iterating quickly? Do they prioritize decisive action, or lengthy consensus-building? These factors often determine whether a partnership accelerates progress or introduces friction.

In platform-driven discovery, where collaboration is inherently iterative, cultural alignment becomes even more important. Programs often evolve as new data emerge, requiring rapid adjustments to experimental design, prioritization, and timelines. When partners share a mindset focused on open scientific dialogue and efficient execution, these pivots become opportunities for learning rather than sources of delay.

When communication channels are open, data are shared proactively, and decision-making authority is clear, collaboration becomes an extension of each organization’s capabilities rather than an external process to manage. This alignment builds trust, reduces operational friction, and allows teams to focus on the shared goal of delivering meaningful therapies to patients.

From Individual Deals To A Strategic Ecosystem

Too often, biotech companies think about partnerships as isolated events — one deal to fund a program, another to validate a technology. In our experience, the greatest value comes from viewing collaborations as part of a broader ecosystem.

By building a portfolio of partnerships — including our collaborations with argenx, BridgeBio, Merck, and most recently Novartis — we are intentionally combining external expertise, scientific validation, and non-dilutive capital to strengthen both our platform and our internal pipeline. Each collaboration contributes to a larger strategy designed to scale innovation while preserving long-term enterprise value.

For platform biotech companies, the goal should not simply be to close deals, but to design partnerships that compound value over time. When approached this way, business development becomes more than a funding mechanism — it becomes a central tool for building sustainable innovation and delivering transformative medicines to patients.

About The Author:

Cameron Pye is CEO and cofounder of Unnatural Products, a biotech platform developing macrocyclic peptide therapeutics. He founded the company to make macrocyclic peptide medicinal chemistry scalable and repeatable using parallel chemistry and machine learning. Under his leadership, the company has raised more than $38 million in equity financing and secured partnerships with BridgeBio, Merck, argenx, and Novartis totaling over $3.7 billion in potential deal value. He holds a BA from Whittier College and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from UC Santa Cruz.