Cancer Firm Lands One of Europe’s Biggest Biotech Funding Rounds

(Bloomberg) -- The German cancer-treatment researcher BioNTech AG raised $325 million from investors, one of the largest financing rounds ever by a European biotechnology company.

The second-round haul brings closely held BioNTech’s total fundraising to more than $1.4 billion, according to Sean Marett, the company’s chief business officer. The figure is high even by standards in the U.S., where the valuations of early-stage drug companies tend to dwarf those of their European counterparts.

BioNTech is researching how to make personalized cancer therapies, an area of oncology research that has attracted attention from large pharmaceutical companies and investors alike in recent years. Pfizer Inc. and Sanofi, two of the world’s biggest drugmakers, have development deals with BioNTech.

Advances in treatments that use the body’s own immune system to attack tumors have reignited hopes that researchers will be able to create therapies tailored to individual patients.

Mainz-based BioNTech wouldn’t disclose its valuation or when it might seek an initial public offering, which would be a logical next step for a biotechnology company of its size. In February, Bloomberg reported that it was weighing an IPO that would give the company a value of $5 billion.

Around the world, promising biotech companies have raised ever-larger funding rounds and gone public at a frenzied pace not seen since 2000. Seattle-based Adaptive Biotechnologies Corp. saw its shares more than double in value in their first day of trading in late June, making it the most successful debut of any company this year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Rebecca Spalding in Boston at rspalding@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Drew Armstrong at darmstrong17@bloomberg.net, Mark Schoifet, Timothy Annett

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