Initial public offerings in the US have been remarkable in 2020 with 70 biopharmaceutical company IPOs so far this year compared with the full-year 2019 total of 50 first-time offerings. However, while the average return for drug developers that went public during the first three quarters of this year generated an average return well into the double digits, only two out of six firms that went public since 13 October have generated a positive return for IPO investors.
It remains to be seen whether this recent micro trend in biopharma IPO performance is a sign that investors are beginning to lose interest in new offering from the industry or if the four companies trading in the red were hit by general stock market turmoil – the Nasdaq is down 2.4% over the past week and the S&P 500 is down 2.9%. A week earlier, Kronos Bio, Inc., Spruce Biosciences, Inc. and Shattuck Labs, Inc. went public during a week when the Nasdaq and S&P 500 closed up 4.3% and 3