The University of Oxford spinout has filed for an $86.25m initial public offering in the US just three years after being founded.
Initial public offerings have been a rare sight in the university venturing world so far this year. In fact, not much has happened since G1 Therapeutics, an oncology therapy developer spun out from North Carolina University, filed for an $115m IPO back in April.
Nightstarx, a spinout from University of Oxford that is working on retinal gene therapies, filing for an initial public offering worth $86.25m in the US yesterday therefore could already be considered a big deal in and of itself. But the deal is particularly newsworthy even beyond that.
Oxford University Innovation, the institution’s tech transfer office, began working with Robert MacLaren, professor at the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology, in 2009 to protect the technology, before the spinout was formally incorporated in Janaury 2014 with a £12m ($15.5m) commitment from Syncona, a subsidiary of charity Wellcome Trust. Chris Hollowood, chief investment officer at Syncona, joined Nightstarx as chairman…
