Following a record-shattering year, terms were set for the first two biotech IPOs of 2021 in deals that could generate up to $300 million. Cullinan Oncology LLC, of Cambridge, Mass., set terms Jan. 4 for raising about $150 million by pricing 8.3 million shares in the $17 to $19 range.
A new $23 million in funds gives Brainbox Solutions Inc. a head start as it begins enrollment in the pivotal clinical trial of its mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) diagnostic and prognostic test. Bioventures Investors took the lead in the series A financing. The Tauber Foundation, the Virginia Tech Carilion Innovation and Seed Funds, Genoa VC, Pharmakon Holdings LLC, and Astia Angels participated in the fundraising round along with qualified investors including the Cleveland Cavaliers' Kevin Love, a mental health advocate.
Emboline Inc., which is developing technology to reduce the chance of stroke during transcatheter heart procedures, completed a $10 million series C financing. The funds are earmarked to gain initial commercial approval of the company’s Emboliner device and to launch a U.S. pivotal study. The round, which included new and existing investors, follows a $5 million bridge round of financing that closed last January.
Med-tech firms raising money in public or private financings, including: Adapthealth, Canary Medical, Color, Pulse Biosciences, Viewray, Volta Medical.
Immuneering Corp., a bioinformatics specialist that has for years helped big companies like Teva Pharmaceutical Ltd. and Bristol Myers Squibb Co. better understand their own medicines, has landed $62 million in an oversubscribed series B financing that will help it leverage lessons learned in that journey to build out its own pipeline, starting with IMM-1-104, a dual inhibitor of MEK and a related target.
Iconovir Bio Inc., of San Diego, raised $77 million in a series A financing to develop differentiated oncolytic virus candidates the company said it believes could potentially be I.V.-administered, tumor-selective and could broadly infect tumor cells.
DUBLIN – European biopharma, like the rest of the global industry, scaled new heights in 2020 from an investment perspective. European firms collectively raised $12.682 billion from the private and public equity markets, as well as substantial levels of debt and grant funding. It was a bumper year for both venture capital investment and for Europe’s growing cadre of listed companies.
While everyone will be glad to see 2020 in their rearview mirror, the biopharmaceutical sector can count its blessings, as it emerges from a period where it has surprisingly received record public and private financings and enjoyed strong investor support. This is in sharp contrast to most of the global economy, which has been decimated by the ongoing pandemic.