The latest issue of GEN summarizes the VC activity in the biotech space for 2017 so far. There were 205 deals through the end of Q2 in which a total of $4.697B was raised. Three genomics companies alone accounted for $1.335B of that total:
- GRAIL = $900M (Q1)
- Guardant Health = $360M (Q2)
- WuXi NextCode = $75M (Q2)
While not listed specifically, Freenome’s $65M raise must be buried in the data somewhere, bringing the genomics total to $1.4B. It’s also notable that three of these are liquid biopsy “pure plays”.
“If we continue to see one or two large deals like we have over the first two quarters, we could be looking at one of our strongest life science years in history,” Greg Vlahos, PwC’s US life-sciences venture capital leader, told GEN. “If you look at the total dollars for just the first two quarters, we’re on pace for an extremely strong 2017 that has been buoyed by some of these megadeals we saw in Q1 and Q2.”
