James Flynn

Deerfield Management, an investment firm dealing exclusively in health care, maintains a portfolio of over 200 public and private life science investments. The company manages more than $14 billion in assets, and spent 2021 deploying $1 billion-plus in new investment capital. 

Deerfield committed up to $130 million last February to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to accelerate the development of therapeutics and diagnostics for cancer. It committed $65 million to the Empire Discovery Institute in April 2021, and $130 million to the Baylor College of Medicine the following month.

In August, Deerfield launched Deerfield Private Design Fund V, an investment fund with approximately $1.4 billion in committed capital. This February, too, Deerfield announced the formation of the Advancium Health Network, an independent charitable organization targeting medical issues with solutions that may have limited commercial potential.  

The company also continues to operate CURE, its life sciences and health care innovation campus at 345 Park Avenue South, which saw a 40 percent increase in leasing and buildout in 2021.

“We’ve been building a lot of different integrated aspects of it simultaneously,” James Flynn said of the project. “We have a medical technology incubator where we’re advancing novel medical devices, which requires one kind of infrastructure. Advancium Health is creating a full-floor incubator for lab space and innovation in concert with smaller groups. We’re also building something we’re calling The Lab of the Future, which is creating an automated way of building molecules. That’s something New York used to be known for that moved to India and China. If we can create an automated form of that, it will move a lot of [that industry] back to New York.”

In addition, more companies are slated to set up shop in the building in the coming months, including the gene therapy companies Lexeo Therapeutics and Apertura Gene Therapy, and biotech company Helaina.

Flynn sees Deerfield’s efforts as nothing less than a step toward creating a more personalized and effective American health care system.  

“Our goal over the next few years is to have at least half a million people who are participating in this system seeking to advance health care, both on the for-profit and not-for-profit side,” Flynn said. “It’s a weighty ambition, but we have a broad cross section of people that are intimately involved across all of these different disciplines. We think we can create a locus for a lot of common activities here.”