Indo18 Jul 2021 06:40
Sometimes this board is a cesspit of negativity driven primarily by traders with their own agenda. Here is a positive with no agenda…… Infectious disease specialist Poolbeg Pharma is planning to list on New York’s Nasdaq in the coming months, according to its chairman Cathal Friel.
The company was last week spun out by its parent, pharmaceutical services firm Open Orphan, and it announced to the market that it was preparing for a £25m (€29m) initial public offering (IPO) on London’s AIM index.
Friel, who leads life sciences focused corporate finance house Raglan Capital, which successfully brought Open Orphan to the market two years ago, has since told the Sunday Independent that Poolbeg is planning a dual listing in New York and London.
“We are already well down the road with the paperwork on that,” said Friel.
In previous Raglan-backed IPOs of biopharma firms Amryt and Open Orphan they initially opted for dual listings in Dublin and London. But in the case of Poolbeg, Friel said the firm had decided not to take an Irish listing because it would have to drop either it or the London listing when it finalised its place on Nasdaq, he said.
Poolbeg is developing a drug that tackles severe flu, as well as a tool for predicting severe disease and a vaccine discovery platform.
Friel said he was confident that Poolbeg Pharma could reach a market value of between £1bn and £2bn over the next two to three years because of the size of the opportunity in the infectious diseases market.