AmBAR Success Story

Sanofi-Aventis (Paris) announced on April 15, 2008 an acquisition of BiPar Sciences, a California based company, for $500 million in a staged cash transaction, which has been the largest biotech M&A deal this year.
 
BiPar has developed a drug (BSI-201, a poly-ADP-ribose  polymerase (PARP) inhibitor) that shows efficacy in the most difficult to treat forms of cancers, notably, so called triple negative breast cancer. The molecule is also in clinical trials for ovarian cancer and other malignancies.  The drug has a potential to save millions of lives in the very near future.
 
Dr. Evgeny Zaytsev, partner at Asset Management Company and a BiPar investor said: “Many industry analysts declared that the biotech venture capital model is broken. The BiPar-Sanofi deal is a piece of evidence against that assertion. In fact, it is a great example of the viability of the early-stage investing concept, particularly in turbulent times like this. Our fund was one of the first institutional investors in BiPar Sciences (together with Vulcan and Canaan among others), and made the initial investment at $5 million pre-finance valuation. We expect more than 7.3x multiple on invested capital resulting in about 84% IRR.  Interestingly, I sourced this deal from my fellow AmBAR member Dr. Valeria Ossovskaya, who later became the principal scientist at the company and made an invaluable contribution into the development of the BiPar’s oncology platform”.