Generate:Biomedicines has earmarked $300 million of its IPO funds to complete a pair of phase 3 asthma trials for its anti-TSLP antibody GB-0895.\n Generate:Biomedicines is the latest biotech to benefit from a renewed appetite from investors for publicly listed drug developers.The Flagship Pioneering-founded company is selling 25 million shares at $16 apiece, in line with the biotech’s predictions earlier this week. It means Generate is on track for the largest biotech IPO since 2024, overshooting Eikon Therapeutics’ $381 million listing earlier this month or Aktis Oncology’s $318 million offering at the start of the year.Generate—which will list its stock on the Nasdaq this morning under the ticker “GENB”—has the opportunity to bank a further $60 million if underwriters take up their option to buy an additional 3.75 million shares at the same price.The company has already earmarked $300 million of the IPO funds to complete a pair of phase 3 asthma trials for its anti-TSLP antibody GB-0895, which are expected to enroll about 1,600 patients. The antibody has been engineered with the help of artificial intelligence to give it an extended half-life, with the aim of developing a long-acting therapy that only needs to be dosed every six months.Generate CEO Mike Nally told Fierce that the company’s AI-powered platform was a draw for investors.“If you think about this generative AI wave that is fueling the broader economy, one of the things that I think people are starting to recognize is that the greatest impact may actually be in drug discovery and development,” Nally said in an interview this morning.“As a company that’s been kind of at the forefront of that, we’re equally excited by that future,\" the CEO added. “And I think our investors were as well.”After a lull of biotech IPOs in 2025, Generate has joined a growing list of drug developers taking the leap to the public markets. CEOs of companies that had already made the move this year told Fierce they had detected a positive change in sentiment toward biotech IPOs in recent months.Nally agreed that it had been a “pretty dark winter for biotech over the last few years in terms of the IPO market.”He attributed a “really nice rise” in the XBI biotech index in the later months of 2025, combined with a “wave of mergers and acquisitions,” as fueling a renewed interest from investors in the sector.But without a “great degree of certainty on how long the [IPO] window will be open,” Generate didn’t want to waste the opportunity. Nally’s team had “worked feverishly over the Thanksgiving holiday” and throughout the festive period to ready an IPO for February, the CEO explained.Beyond the $300 million needed for its phase 3 studies, Generate has plenty of other ways to spend the IPO proceeds. They include $100 million to complete an ongoing phase 1b study of GB-0895 for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and then to initiate the next phase of clinical development. Generate has also estimated that $75 million will be required to fund platform innovation and carry several programs through development candidate nomination and into investigational-new-drug-enabling activities.Generate’s two other publicly named drugs include GB-4362, a monoclonal antibody designed to neutralize free monomethyl auristatin E (MMAE) as an add-on therapy to antibody-drug conjugates with an MMAE payload. There’s also GB-5267, an armored, MUC16-directed CAR-T developed in partnership with the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center and initially being aimed at platinum-resistant ovarian cancer.The biotech has previously said that $15 million of the proceeds will be needed to take GB-4362 and GB-5267 into the clinic. Founded by Flagship in 2018 as a machine-learning-enabled drug discovery player under the leadership of Merck & Co. veteran Mike Nally, Generate has had no problem attracting either investor interest or Big Pharma backing. In 2022, Amgen inked an agreement worth up to $1.9 billion biobucks to develop five initial programs, leaving room for the potential to nominate up to five more programs later. Amgen has already taken up its option in part, with the pair currently working on six undisclosed programs together.Then, in 2024, Novartis inked a deal potentially worth more than $1 billion to develop protein therapeutics across multiple indications.The biotech brought in $370 million via a series B back in 2021 followed by $273 million in a series C in 2023. At the end of 2025, Generate still had $221.5 million in cash and marketable securities available and a deficit of $676.3 million, according to Monday\'s Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Despite an impressive IPO haul and plenty of cash in the bank, Nally told Fierce that the biotech would continue to be “very efficient with our capital.” That not only means prioritizing its most promising candidates but also maintaining “technology leadership in this generative AI wave of therapeutics.” Editor\'s note: This article was updated at 11 a.m. ET on Feb. 27 to include CEO commentary.
