Pfizer’s biotech experiment is going public

Two years ago, Pfizer made a surprising statement: Despite its roughly 100,000 employees and billions in R&D funding, there remained promising would-be drugs it simply didn’t have the resources to develop. So it did the fashionable thing and launched a startup that would find such waylaid gems in pharma pipelines and advance them on its own.

Now that startup, SpringWorks Therapeutics, has filed for a $115 million IPO. SpringWorks’ SEC documents are light on financial details, but they do provide something of a progress report on how Pfizer’s biotech progenitor is doing.

Back in 2017, the company got started with four Pfizer-invented drugs: a pair of cancer treatments, a rare disease therapy, and a drug for post-traumatic stress disorder. Cut to 2019 and the cancer treatments have advanced, and the company has licensed a third. But there’s no mention of the other two drugs on any of the 200-plus pages of SpringWorks’ prospectus. And Lara Sullivan, the former Pfizer vice president who served as SpringWorks’ founding CEO, has since been “terminated.”