The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a lot of drag on clinical trials for life science companies, but those companies have also broadened their horizons when it comes to financing their R&D efforts. Jeffrey Ellis and Dennis Howell, of Deloitte, told BioWorld that while these alternative sources of funding are attractive to drug and device makers with a lot of ongoing R&D projects, federal regulators are keeping a close eye on the associated financial reporting, creating a novel regulatory risk for the unwary drug or device maker.
Following a brisk quarter of healthy biopharma dealmaking driven in part by New York-based Blackstone Group Inc., the global investment giant has revealed that its Life Sciences Fund V has closed with $4.6 billion of capital commitments, making it what the firm said is the largest life sciences private fund raised to date.
A $2 billion deal with Blackstone Group Inc. is setting Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. up so that it doesn’t have worry about future equity financing and instead can concentrate on RNAi R&D.