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Public biotech 2012—the numbers

Nature Biotechnology volume 31, pages 697–703 (2013)Cite this article

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An Erratum to this article was published on 01 December 2013

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Initial public offerings are back. And big biotech is getting bigger: another year of profitability, increasing drug sales and bustling partnering activity.

For publicly listed biotech companies, 2012 was a year to remember. Follow-on offerings were historically impressive; the initial public offering (IPO) market warmed; stocks rose nearly the entire year; partnering activity, though more frugal, was robust; and sales of biotech's best-selling drugs increased yet again. Above all, last year the public sector (as measured by our criteria; Box 1 and Supplementary Table 1) achieved its fifth straight year of profitability. This success was powered, as usual, by large-cap companies, which recorded $75.7 billion in revenue. Overall, our contingent of public biotechs brought in more than $103 billion in revenue, spent more than $25 billion on R&D, and reported a collective profit of more than $7.7 billion.

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Figure 1: NASDAQ biotech index over time.
Figure 2: Global biotech industry financing.
Figure 3
Figure 4: Public biotech barometers.
Figure 5: Public biotech companies by geographical location.

Change history

  • 10 September 2013

    In the version of this article initially published, the name of the company BDO should have been given as BDO USA (Chicago) and not BDO (Brussels). The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

  • 01 December 2013

    Nat. Biotechnol. 31, 697–703 (2013); doi:10.1038/nbt.2653; published online 8 August 2013; corrected after print 10 September 2013 In the version of this article initially published, the name of the company BDO should have been given as BDO USA (Chicago) and not BDO (Brussels). The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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  1. Brady Huggett is Business Editor at Nature Biotechnology.,

    Brady Huggett

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Supplementary Table 1 (XLS 141 kb)

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Huggett, B. Public biotech 2012—the numbers. Nat Biotechnol 31, 697–703 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2653

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