Blue Owl Capital Offers Alternative to Private Equity as a Biotech’s Growth Partner

Blue Owl Capital Offers Alternative to Private Equity as a Biotech’s Growth Partner

Scholar Rock, TG Therapeutics, and Caris Life Sciences collectively borrowed roughly $1.9 billion from funds managed by Blue Owl Capital in the first quarter of 2026, all of it structured to avoid diluting existing shareholders.

Add an up to $1.25 billion debt and royalty financing to BridgeBio in January 2024 and a $500 million senior secured loan to Madrigal Pharmaceuticals in July 2025, and Blue Owl’s life sciences dealmaking begins to look like a deliberate, sustained commitment to the sector.

The Capital Crunch

When biotech CFOs need to raise capital for a drug launch, they weigh two constraints simultaneously: their share price and their balance sheet.

Life sciences equity valuations fell sharply after 2021. As Peter Schwartz, a finance partner at Covington & Burling, described it in a CreditSights analysis last April, “When biotech CFOs need to raise a couple hundred million dollars to do a drug launch and they look at the cost of issuing equity, it’s not there at a price that they find attractive.”

Diluting shares at depressed valuations carries a cost that fixed-rate debt does not. The IPO window for life sciences companies was largely shut from 2022 through much of 2024, compounding the shortage of equity financing options during that period. Writing in Nature Biotechnology in August 2024, Melanie Senior documented three consecutive years of declining biopharma IPO activity and compressed venture funding rounds. By mid-2024, she noted, the sector was “slowly returning to health.”

Deal by Deal

The five deals illustrate how different non-dilutive capital looks across different commercial situations.

In TG Therapeutics’ March 2026 refinancing, Blue Owl extended a $750 million five-year senior secured credit facility. TG repaid its prior $250 million debt with Blue Owl and HealthCare Royalty, bringing net new capital to $500 million, with the loan maturing in 2031. TG has a marketed product, BRIUMVI, a B-cell therapy for relapsing multiple sclerosis, and the facility is structured around commercial revenue rather than clinical milestones.

Caris Life Sciences, a molecular diagnostics company, closed an April 2026 facility totaling up to $1.2 billion: a $400 million initial term loan, a $300 million committed delayed draw tranche for acquisitions, and an uncommitted $500 million incremental facility, with Blue Owl and Blackstone Credit as co-lenders.

Scholar Rock, seeking FDA approval for apitegromab in spinal muscular atrophy, received a $550 million six-year credit facility structured in tranches. The first $100 million drew at closing; Scholar Rock may draw additional capital at its discretion within contractually defined time windows. The phased structure provides non-dilutive financing to a company anticipating an FDA approval before the end of the year.

BridgeBio Pharma closed an up to $1.25 billion debt and royalty financing with Blue Owl in January 2024, prior to the FDA approval of its lead product, acoramidis, as a treatment for transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy in November 2024. The combined structure provided capital to support the commercial launch of its ATTR-CM therapy without requiring equity issuance at a moment when the broader biotech market remained depressed. Blue Owl’s underwriting centered on the clinical profile of acoramidis and the commercial opportunity in a disease historically managed with few approved options.

Madrigal Pharmaceuticals secured a $500 million senior secured loan from Blue Owl in July 2025, roughly 16 months after the FDA approved resmetirom — marketed as Rezdiffra — as the first treatment for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis. By the time the loan closed, Madrigal had moved from clinical-stage to commercial, with prescriptions accelerating in a disease affecting a substantial share of the adult population. The facility supported continued commercial scaling without requiring equity issuance.

When Borrowers Have Options

The surest sign that a credit market has matured is when borrowers with options choose it anyway. TG Therapeutics refinanced in March 2026 with a marketed product and established commercial revenue. It chose non-dilutive private credit. The spread was worth paying to preserve shareholder value when equity dilution was expensive, and that calculus held even for a company that could have pursued other paths.

Blue Owl has now structured six life sciences deals across roughly 12 months: a commercial debt-and-royalty structure, a royalty facility, a senior secured commercial refinancing, a pre-revenue credit facility, a phased delayed-draw structure, a diagnostics platform loan, and a launch-stage term loan. No single deal template explains the others. The borrower profiles are different enough that executing across all five required underwriting capacity in scientific risk assessment, royalty stream evaluation, and commercial revenue modeling simultaneously.

That Blue Owl has closed deals across all these areas reflects the firm’s stated intent to build a dedicated life sciences lending platform with the underwriting depth to operate across therapeutic stage, deal structure, and borrower type, and to deploy it at scale.