Celtic Pharma

Stephen Evans-Freke and John Mayo are the firm's managing directors. Evans-Freke built his career in healthcare investment banking at PaineWebber and SG Cowen before co-founding Celtic in 2004. Mayo was group finance director of Glaxo Wellcome and later Marconi plc. The two principals jointly approve all asset acquisitions, per the firm's official communications.

Neither. Celtic Pharma is a specialized private equity firm that acquires pharmaceutical royalties and late-stage drug revenue interests. It does not manage family wealth, and it does not operate as a traditional venture capital firm making equity investments in early-stage biotechs. The firm underwrites specific drug assets, structuring transactions as royalty acquisitions or revenue-interest purchases directly from originator companies.

Celtic Pharma does not raise closed-end blind-pool funds and does not invest as a limited partner in other managers. The firm structures transactions on an asset-by-asset basis, matching institutional capital to specific drug-royalty or revenue-interest acquisitions. Investors participate through vehicles established for individual assets rather than through a pooled fund commitment.

The firm targets pharmaceutical products that are already approved or in Phase III clinical trials. Celtic underwrites the regulatory and reimbursement risk on therapies nearing or in commercialization, avoiding early-stage drug discovery and preclinical assets. This late-stage focus is designed to reduce binary clinical-trial risk for institutional allocators.

Stephen Evans-Freke was a co-founder of Royalty Pharma in the 1990s before establishing Celtic Pharma in 2004 as a separate, actively managed platform. The two firms are independent entities, though both operate in the pharmaceutical royalty acquisition space. Celtic is significantly smaller and structures deals on a more bespoke, asset-by-asset basis compared to Royalty Pharma's publicly traded, large-scale aggregation model.