Pharma & Life Sciences
Royalty Pharma
As Chairman and founder of Royalty Pharma, Rory Riggs helped create the pharmaceutical royalty asset class — building the company from a $60 million start in 1996 to the world’s largest acquirer of pharmaceutical royalties, $26 billion at 2026, with partial royalty rights on seven of the top thirty drugs sold in the United States.
Biotechnology
Cibus is the leading precision gene editing company in biotechnology, applying the same production-system discipline used in pharmaceutical development to plant biology through the Rapid Trait Development System®. Where conventional plant breeding relies on years of trial and selection, RTDS® treats trait development as a coordinate problem — the same functional logic documented on the Coordinate System page, applied to a production pipeline instead of a financial classification.
Cibus was named Fast Company’s #2 Most Innovative Agriculture Company of 2024. “Gene Editing to Lead a New Agricultural Revolution” (Future Farming) sets out the biotechnology dimension of the argument in full. See Courses for the related reading and keynote strand.
A portfolio of life-sciences foundings
Riggs was a founder or early-stage investor in SUGEN, BioMatrix, FibroGen, and Intra-Cellular Therapies, and served as a director of each — the same pattern applied across a thirty-year career: identify a domain where the right system does not yet exist, then build it.
See the Coordinate System for the underlying framework, or About for Riggs’s full board and governance record.
