Strip away the press releases and a clear pattern emerges across six years of therapeutics dealmaking: the value moved in waves, and each wave left issued grants you can name. The discipline of this desk is to read the deal through the document, so here is the through-line, dated and sourced.
Early in the period, the metabolic wave: tri-agonist and dual-agonist peptide grants, like Sanofi's January 2020 US10538567B2, protected the multi-receptor thesis that now anchors the most valuable franchise in the sector. The lesson then and now is that issued composition-of-matter peptide claims, not platform reputation, are the bankable assets.
Then the editing and delivery waves: foundational CRISPR and method grants from institutions like the Broad and MIT, AAV-capsid platforms, and by 2025 the prime-editing estate exemplified by the Broad's US12281303B2. The recurring deal lesson is that the durable royalty value sits in reusable platform and delivery IP — capsids, formulations, editing methods — whose royalty base compounds across many programs.
The oncology construct waves told the same story in a different idiom: antibody-drug conjugates split their value across antibody, linker, and payload; CAR-T and bispecific constructs split theirs across target-specific binders and reusable formats. In every case, the deal desk question was the same — which layer does this deal actually control, and is it the program-specific layer or the compounding platform layer?
And the mRNA wave made the platform lesson explicit: the lipid nanoparticle, not the message, is the franchise, with formulation and process grants forming the load-bearing IP behind the modality's deals.
The disciplined conclusion, disclosed not promised: over six years, the deals that aged best were written around reusable delivery and platform IP, and the riskiest were priced on single molecules and press-release pipelines. The patent record, read by issue date, is the most honest map of where therapeutics value actually moved — and it agrees with the deal flow.