Karan Mathur (left) and Dina Model (Illustration by Gisela Goppel)

Karan Mathur (left) and Dina Model (Illustration by Gisela Goppel)

When Dina Model and Karan Mathur (both MBA 2015) met through mutual friends during their first year at HBS, neither was envisioning a future business deal. “We didn’t realize that we had shared professional interests,” Model recalls, laughing. “It was just a social thing.”

Only after graduation would they realize how well-matched their ambitions were: Model, who had a background in investment banking, wanted to bring those skills to a biotech firm, and Mathur, whose background was in investment banking and health care consulting, wanted to become a health care investor. Both were attracted to the health care sector for the same reason: the ability to make a meaningful difference in the world, without actually being a doctor. (“I realized toward the end of my undergrad years that being a physician might not necessarily be the path I wanted to take into health care,” Mathur says.)

Today, Model is head of financial planning and analysis at Agios Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge-based biotech company focused on rare blood disorders, including pyruvate kinase deficiency, thalassemia, and sickle cell disease. Mathur is a principal at a multi-strategy alternative asset management firm, within the Sagard Healthcare strategy. And the friendship they forged at HBS almost a decade ago recently helped facilitate a $131.8 million non-equity funding deal between the two companies.

In March 2021, Model was a part of the Agios team that finalized the sale of the biotech’s oncology portfolio to international pharmaceutical company Servier. For Agios, the sale was part of a pivot from cancer research to further investment in rare-disease research. The final deal included $1.8 billion in cash, plus a potential future $200 million milestone payment for a clinical-stage drug to treat brain cancer and a 5 percent royalty on the US sales of Tibsovo, a drug used to treat certain types of blood-cell cancer.

Mathur started his job at Sagard about the same time as the Agios sale. When he saw the news, he contacted Model. They’d fallen out of touch during the pandemic, and this seemed like a good reason to reconnect. The royalty payments included in the sale were attractive to Sagard, and Mathur wondered if there was a deal to be done with the non-core asset. Agios, awash in cash, wasn’t immediately ready to think about a royalty financing deal, but Model and Mathur stayed in touch. And when Agios decided that the company wasn’t seeing the value of its royalty deal reflected in the external market cap, it decided to explore financing options. Model contacted Mathur: “Hey, do you want to chat? There might actually be something here.”

For its part, Agios solicited offers from a dozen firms in the health care credit and royalty financing space with which it had preexisting relationships. Thanks to Model and Mathur’s connection, Sagard was among them, and the firm ultimately made the best offer. “Honestly, if Dina and I hadn’t been friends and known each other through HBS, I don’t think both sides would have been as comfortable or we wouldn’t have been as competitive,” notes Mathur. “I think it helped us to differentiate ourselves; but also on our end, we knew we were working with a counterparty that we could trust.”

The deal, finalized in fall of 2022, is a realization of the goals the friends have long shared. The deal will help Agios fund further research on treatments for rare diseases. “Finance can have a really big impact on people’s lives,” Model explains.

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