Aradigm aims high, shoots for bringing payers, providers, patients and manufacturers together to solve cell and gene therapy access, financial risk problems

Will Shrank, M.D., doesn’t use the “one-stop-shop” cliche to describe his company services, but others might be tempted to do so.

“The whole idea here,” says Shrank, CEO and co-founder of Aradigm, “is not just to a single point solution within this complex ecosystem problem but to try to really bring all the key players together, pooling risk across employers — you create collective action across those employers — engaging providers in a more collaborative way, engaging manufacturers in a more collaborative way, making sure that we’re constantly assessing the evidence and updating our interpretation of that evidence to establish our clinical policies, and being really thoughtful about how we support patients through the process.”

Shrank, a longtime member of the Managed Healthcare Executive (MHE), spoke about his new venture with MHE during a recent interview. Aradigm, which announced in December 2025 that it was leaving stealth mode, is organized as a public benefit corporation. According to Shrank, it is backed by $25 million in investment from Frist Cressey Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Morgan Health, a division of JPMorgan Chase.

ln this segment of his extended interview with MHE, Shrank outlines Aradigm’s ambitioius business model, which includes pooling risk, cost-plus administrative fees, partnerships with providers, value-based contracts with manufacturers, and provision of care management services for patients.

Aradigm’s customers are self-insured employers or payers — “folks that are bearing the risk for the cost of these therapies,” says Shrank.

“Our approach is to create a platform that allows us to pull risk across many customers and leverage that risk to both cap and to protect against financial calamity and to do so in a way that’s very transparent. It’s a cost-plus model, and we pass back savings. We engage everybody across the ecosystem to try to create deeper alignment of incentives to drive better care for patients,” Shrank says.

Aradigm is charging a per-member, per-month, risk-adjusted premium and taking on full risk for managing the cost of the therapy and associated medical care for cell and gene therapy, he explains.

“We pool the risk across our customers, so we have a big risk pool that allows us to have much more stability and predictability. We cap the risk with a reinsurance syndicate as a backstop,” he continues. “We just take a very modest preset admin fee, and we pay out all the claims over the course of the year. At the end of the year, any dollars that we haven’t spent, we return in their entirety to the purchasers, pro rata, based on their participation in the pool. So it’s a cost-plus model, totally transparent. With the strength of that pool, there are a number of ways to really engage everyone across the ecosystem to try to create both higher quality, higher value, better care and better experience.”

Shrank also spoke about putting together a national network of preferred providers. “They’re enthusiastic about participating because we can drive more volume to them, so that’s more predictable but also addresses some of the complexities around the current payment system,” he says. And Aradigm is contracting directly with manufacturers. “If you’re paying $3 million for a cure, and that cure doesn’t work, some of those dollars should be returned back to the purchaser. We, as a third party, can track patients, even if they change employer or insurer, and see if those prespecified outcomes are met. If they’re not, we claw dollars back to the pool and then ultimately back to the purchaser,” he says.

For patients, Aradigm has a care management partner to “really give patients a bear hug through this process because it can be complicated. It often requires travel and logistics and lodging, and for not just a patient but their family members. For most patients, this is the most important care they’ll get in their lives, and being able to really support them through that is important.”

“Our goal is not to stop the growth in this category. Just the opposite,” Shrank concludes. “Our goal is to figure out a way to bend this cost curve and create a more predictable path so that we can support this innovation over time.”