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Called Arena BioWorks, the new organization has been in the works for several years. For Schreiber, the seeds were planted in early 2020. He and Thomas Cahill, cofounder and managing director of the investment firm Newpath Partners, had formed a 12-person group called Scientists to Stop COVID-19.

When Schreiber moved on from the pandemic-era project, he took that lesson with him. He had in mind to set up an organization not unlike the Broad Institute, but with a key difference. It would be funded wholly by private financiers—from the research stage to company formation and potential commercialization.

Others quickly came on board. Stephen Pagliuca, a healthcare investor and co-owner of the Boston Celtics who’d previously backed the Pagliuca Life Lab at Harvard University, became “intimately involved” with the planning process, Schreiber says. Pagliuca helped orchestrate a meeting in December 2021 with Jim Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital and an early backer of Facebook, and Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Technologies. Both executives agreed to support the project within 25 min.