Mirador fundraising raises hopes of revival in US biotech market
The sector is still well off its peak and far behind its Chinese rivals
Mirador Therapeutics has raised $400mn in one of the largest biotech deals this year, increasing hopes of boosting investor confidence in the sector after a woeful first half of 2025.
San Diego-based Mirador raised about $400mn over the summer, according to two investors familiar with the terms.
Launched in 2024, the company is developing autoimmune and anti-inflammatory treatments. It does not have a therapy in clinical trials yet, but still raised an initial $413mn fundraising in 2024. A spokesman for the company declined to comment.
With the US Federal Reserve cutting interest rates and investors’ fears easing over the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, the US biotech market is looking healthy after a brutal first half.
In the three months ending September 30, small biotech companies had their best stock market performance since 2023, according to the S&P biotechnology index. The index is up 17 per cent this year, but still down from recent highs in 2021.
Still, only five US biotechs have listed through October 9, the lowest number in the same period for at least 10 years, according to Renaissance Capital.
“Hope is building that the macro factors could finally be turning in biotech’s favour,” TD Cowen wrote in an October 1 report. Mirador’s roughly $400mn deal would be the fourth-largest private biotech fundraising so far this year, according to HSBC.
But the US bounceback pales in comparison to China’s biotech sector. The Hang Seng Biotech index, where many Chinese biotech companies are listed, has doubled this year. China’s accelerating biotech scene has rattled US competitors and prompted some American companies to delay disclosing fundraisings to avoid attracting attention, according to biotech investors.
“There is no doubt China’s ascent has increased the competitive intensity” for the US biotech sector, said Alexis Borisy, a serial biotech entrepreneur and co-founder of Curie. Bio. The biotech secrecy had been “increasing in intensity this year”, he said.
For biotech companies with a new drug in the works, “traditionally this would have been talked about at scientific conferences, then there would be a paper on it”, Borisy said. “[Now] none of that. Complete silence as long as possible.”
Traditionally, biotech companies need to be public about their work because “you have to sell your story. If you have to be more stealthy, more secretive, those two things cut against each other,” he said.
For years, Chinese companies have been rapidly replicating drugs that are being developed abroad.
But now the Chinese market has been energised by global pharmaceutical companies pouring in a record amount of cash. In the first half of the year, China biotech companies comprised 18 per cent of licensing deals globally for multinational companies, its largest-ever share, according to Jefferies.
In September, Novartis signed a $5.2bn licensing deal with Shanghai-based Argo Biopharmaceutical.
Chinese biotechs were often getting drugs tested in clinical stages and getting useful data faster than US rivals, said Jonathan Norris, a managing director at HSBC.
For some US biotech companies raising cash from venture capital firms, “nobody is hearing about them because they are nervous”, he said. “Why give anybody any information about what these folks are doing?”
“There are a number of people I have talked to about what they are starting and they are not listed on PitchBook, and they don’t have a website,” Norris said. PitchBook provides data about private companies.
But it was unfair to blame secrecy on Chinese innovation, said Echo Hindle-Yang, founder of MSQ Ventures, a New York-based advisory firm specialising in international biotech transactions.
“No matter where their [biotech] assets are from most companies, early- stage companies try to keep secret as long as they can. It doesn’t matter if they are in Shanghai or Boston,” Hindle-Yang said.
“I don’t agree with the statement that it is because of the Chinese that they keep the asset secret.”