Last year, Ugur Sahin flew to New York to woo investors for his company’s initial public offering. The chief executive officer of German biotech firm BioNTech SE impressed investors with his plans to use a new technology to develop cancer vaccines and treatments.
Then the investors dug into the data. BioNTech was founded in 2008 but had little to show for its work, some investors concluded. At that point, just 250 patients had been treated with the company’s vaccines. Others doubted BioNTech was any better than Moderna Inc., a rival using similar technology, whose stock was limping along. Ultimately, the investors decided BioNTech couldn’t justify the high value it was placing on its shares.
“They had a great pedigree, great investors and great scientific founders,” said Jeffrey Jay, co-founder of Great Point Partners, a Greenwich, Conn., health-care private-equity and hedge-fund firm that passed on the IPO. “But I like to see more data.”
After debating whether to scrap the offering, Dr. Sahin and BioNTech cut the price and the size of the deal, raising $150 million, just over half what they had hoped for. Even with that, shares landed with a thud on their first day of trading on Oct. 10, 2019, falling more than 5% to $14.24.
It hasn’t mattered. After the coronavirus hit, the company began focusing on developing a vaccine with Pfizer Inc., its partner since 2018 on an influenza vaccine. On Monday, investors learned that early data showed their vaccine was more than 90% effective.
