Startups

MSK has an outstanding record of supporting entrepreneurship and new company formation.  To date, more than 50 startup companies have been created based upon foundational MSK intellectual property—and a number of these companies have made meaningful progress, with pipeline products advancing in the clinic or achieving regulatory approval. Our portfolio of life sciences and digital health startups includes numerous companies that have successfully achieved IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, and venture capital financing.

We are committed to encouraging new company formation and empowering our startups to achieve their goals through a broad network of MSK support that includes technology transfer and business development expertise, entrepreneurship education, institutional resources, and financing connections.

As a significant component of this support, the MSK Commercialization Ecosystem includes programs aimed at providing critical funding for new companies based on MSK-born innovations as well as earlier-stage internal innovation initiatives with strong commercialization potential.  As a pre-eminent institution for value creation in oncology, our intent is to return more value back to our institution in a manner that is consistent with, and honors, our value and mission of ending cancer for life.

BlueRock Therapeutics was founded in 2016 by Versant Ventures and Bayer AG with an exclusive license to a stem-cell derived technology to treat Parkinson’s disease developed by Dr. Lorenz Studer, MD, Director of MSK’s Center for Stem Cell Biology.  BlueRock was capitalized with what was then one of the largest-ever Series A financings in biotech history by Bayer and Versant Ventures and fully acquired by Bayer in 2019.  It has two clinical trials ongoing. 

Y-mAbs Therapeutics was founded in 2015 with an exclusive license to two lead antibody compounds targeting childhood neuroblastoma from Dr. Nai-Kong Cheung, MD, PhD., who holds the Enid A. Haupt Chair of Pediatric Oncology at MSK.  The company’s broad and advanced product pipeline includes a number of products based upon MSK technologies, including the anti-GD2 therapy DANYELZA® (naxitamab-gqgk), which is the first FDA-approved treatment for patients with relapsed or refractory high-risk neuroblastoma in the bone or bone marrow after a partial response, minor response, or stable disease to prior therapy.  Y-mAbs went public in 2018 and trades on NASDAQ. 

Juno Therapeutics Inc. was an American biopharmaceutical company founded in 2013 with a license to CAR-T cell technologies from the laboratories of Dr. Michel Sadelain and Dr. Renier Brentjens, both then at MSK.  A collaborative venture launched with MSK and two other academic research institutions, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Seattle Children’s Research Institute, Juno raised an initial investment of $120 million, with a plan to develop cancer immunotherapy drugs.  The company raised $300 million through private funding and a further $265 million in an IPO.  In 2018, Juno was acquired for $9B by Celgene, which was later acquired by BMS.