February 28, 2022 -- Total funding from all sources for cell and gene therapy companies totaled $70.8 billion last year, according to the recent “Cell and Gene Therapy Deals: Financings, Partnering, M&A, Technology Transfers, IPOs, and Other Developments” report published by Kalorama Information, a sister company of ScienceBoard.
The growth in money being injected into cell and gene therapy companies continues to grow in 2022, according to the firm’s report. The market research publisher totaled hundreds of deals that have been tracked in its newsletter, Cell and Gene Therapy Business Outlook. The report is a compendium of deal made in the last year and the first month of this year.
When analyzed by type of financing deal, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) dominated the funding. The Kalorama report breaks out all deals by type: M&A, initial public offering (IPO) and special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), venture capital (VC) and private, strategic investments, among others.
A lot of attention is being given to the areas related to cell and gene therapy recently. While the concepts of gene therapy and cell therapy have been investigated for decades, there were major challenges in the early years. Through incremental progress, and the gradual introduction of enabling tools such as CRISPR and next-generation sequencing (NGS), cell and gene therapy has emerged into a highly active area. There are now many approved therapies with proven track records. As the tools have lowered the barriers to entry for the industry, over a thousand companies have been created or become involved. In concert with the technologies progressing and the proven benefits, cell and gene therapy-related companies have received growing amounts of funding—and it appears likely that the trend will continue.
Evidence of this growth in investment continues into the current year. In January 2022 alone, Kalorama reported that there was a total of $7.1 billion in disclosed funding, putting the quarter and year on track to potentially see another increase.
In addition, the report tracks the hundreds of deals of many types have occurred, including:
Bruce Carlson is the publisher of Kalorama Information, part of Science and Medicine Group.
Disclosure: Kalorama Information is a sister company of ScienceBoard.