Dutch biotech investor Forbion has raised two new funds to put into biotech companies, just 18 months after its last major raise and following a series of successful exits in its portfolio.
The new funds include a €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) growth fund and a €890 million ($970 million) venture fund, Forbion announced Tuesday. Both funds are each expected to put the money to work across about 15 different companies.
That includes startups working on cardiometabolic drugs, immunology and inflammation treatments, precision oncology and gene therapy, Forbion co-founder Sander Slootweg told Endpoints News in an interview.
Slootweg said he’s keen to avoid some of the metabolic targets that have become crowded and potentially overpriced. “What everyone is going after will become expensive, and that’s what we’ve seen,” he said of the weight loss space. “We’ll go after new targets and new modalities, and there is still a lot of upside.”
In gene therapy, Forbion will most likely look at in vivo approaches. It was an early investor in bluebird bio. Lyfgenia, the company’s ex vivo sickle cell disease gene therapy, is a scientific breakthrough but a commercial challenge.
Sander Slootweg“Complexity equals cost,” Slootweg said. “If you can avoid ex vivo approaches, you should try to.”
But he said the company had recently looked at such a treatment for a rare disease, and there are cases where manipulating cells outside the body might still be the only option.
Forbion has been one of biotech’s most reliable fundraisers in an otherwise difficult capital environment. The two new funds come 18 months after the investor raised €1.35 billion for a growth fund and a venture fund.
It’s been returning money to its investors through distributions as well. Its portfolio has had six exits in roughly the last year, largely through the sale of companies to large drugmakers. That includes Yellow Jersey Therapeutics, sold to Johnson & Johnson for $1.25 billion; a $1 billion upfront deal from Novartis for Mariana Oncology; and another $1 billion deal in which GSK acquired Aiolos Bio.
In a volatile environment for biotechs, getting cash back to investors has made it much easier to raise new money, Slootweg said.
“From an annual budgeting perspective, they expect an amount of distributions, and then there’s a limit to new allocations,” he said, talking about how fund investors are deploying capital to firms like his. Money back matters more than paper gains, Slootweg added: “People want to see distributed returns.”
He took the recent run of biotech IPOs as a good sign for the industry, even though there have been none of the larger acquisitions by big pharma companies that marked the end of 2023 and the start of 2024.
“We are enthused about the recent IPOs. I’m speaking to bankers who are saying this [is] the beginning. Maybe we’ll see a pause around the election,” Slootweg said. “After the JP Morgan conference, we’ll see a flurry of exits.”
Kyle LaHucik contributed to this report.