An awkward IPO roadshow
It’s not the easiest time to be a biotech company trying to go public. The whole sector has underperformed the market this year. Drug pricing is a daily fixture in national news. And there’s a persistent sense that private firms might not be worth as much as their venture capitalists like to think.
Beam Therapeutics, a genome editing startup pitching a $100 million IPO, already had to deal with all of the above. Then came Monday and the news that its scientific founder just went and launched a rival CRISPR startup.
That means Beam and its bankers are likely to face questions from investors about whether the founder, the Broad Institute’s David Liu, will face scientific and financial conflicts going forward. Then there’s the fact that Liu’s new company is employing an approach to CRISPR that appears more powerful than the one on which Beam was founded, a topic sure to come up in the company’s many investor meetings.
Read more.
Beam Therapeutics, a genome editing startup pitching a $100 million IPO, already had to deal with all of the above. Then came Monday and the news that its scientific founder just went and launched a rival CRISPR startup.
That means Beam and its bankers are likely to face questions from investors about whether the founder, the Broad Institute’s David Liu, will face scientific and financial conflicts going forward. Then there’s the fact that Liu’s new company is employing an approach to CRISPR that appears more powerful than the one on which Beam was founded, a topic sure to come up in the company’s many investor meetings.
Read more.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario