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The Network Effect

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. Only later would they realize how well-matched their ambitions were: Model wanted to work in finance at a biotech firm, and Mathur wanted to become a health care investor.
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 Segard, 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 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. For Agios, the sale was part of a pivot from cancer research to rare-disease research. The final deal included $1.8 billion in cash 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. When he saw the news of the deal, he contacted Model. The royalty payments included were attractive to Sagard. Agios, awash in cash, wasn’t immediately ready to think about a royalty financing deal at that moment, but Model and Mathur stayed in touch. And when the company decided to explore financing options, Model contacted Mathur.
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.
Personal relationships were key, both say. And the deal was a realization of the reason both pursued work in the health care sector. 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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