Join the club, Deerfield. The investment management firm raised $840 million for its second healthcare-focused fund, joining Arch Venture Partners, Flagship Pioneering and venBio Partners, all of which announced new funds last week.
The fund, dubbed Deerfield Healthcare Innovations Fund II, comes just shy of five years after its predecessor, which clocked in at $550 million. It will back science and technologies that may result in new treatments or improve the way healthcare is delivered to patients, the company said in a statement on Monday.
“Now more than ever, these unprecedented times underscore the importance of supporting the critical work of our nation’s scientists and healthcare systems,” James Flynn, managing partner of Deerfield, said in the statement. “Our uniquely supportive model allows us to provide leverage to innovative companies and accelerate the benefit to patients.”
Deerfield said it will work with more than 15 academic institutions to seed new scientific research. It could also seed companies out of medtech incubators it set up with two major devicemakers.
The firm has teamed up with various universities, including Columbia University and the University of Illinois in Chicago, to create translational research companies aimed at getting research from the lab to patients. In January, Lab1636, the company it set up with Harvard University, announced the first project it’s taking forward. Lab1636 will advance research from the lab of David Ginty, Ph.D. that could lead to a treatment for the touch hypersensitivity experienced by people with autism spectrum disorders.
The firm will house most of its work at its $635 million life science campus in New York, where early-stage companies can take advantage of wet and dry labs, engineering, computing and shared resource spaces. The 12-story building, slated to open in 2021, will hold more than 300,000 square feet of life sciences space, more than two-thirds of which will be suitable for wet lab use.