Charles S. “Charlie” Kim

Enthusiasm and regard for the pace at which the life sciences are advancing drive Kim, a co-chair of Cooley’s global capital markets practice group. His clients are vast—he worked on Uber Technologies Inc.’s $8.1 billion IPO in 2019—but the convergence of medical technology and health care that fired his recent deals.

Since 2019 alone, Kim was involved in more than 100 successful public company securities offerings.

The pandemic has driven innovation, he said. “Look at online learning and health care. Look at Uber and Zoom. We’ve done some other financing for Uber since the IPO. Uber Eats has become a critical part of my family’s life. When a company’s name becomes a verb, you know they’ve made it.”

Still, health care remains a focus. “I’m at Cooley because health care is fundamental to what we do,” he said. “My mom was a nurse and my dad was a doctor who died too early from cancer. I was in premed but to their great disappointment I became a lawyer instead.” Now he comes at medicine from the legal and finance angles.

In July 2021 he and law partner David G. Peinsipp advised South San Francisco-based Lyell Immunopharma Inc. in its $425 million IPO. The company aims to reprogram T cells to cure patients with solid cancer tumors. “This was not only a marquee deal,” Kim said. “With them, we are now using language like curing cancer. That’s their mission, and it’s potentially game changing. And the MDs in charge of this company are very careful in their language.”

In December 2020, Kim helped Vancouver, British Columbia-based antibody developer AbCellera Biologics Inc. close its $555.5 million IPO after partnering with Eli Lilly & Co. to work on Covid-19 therapies.

“This was a cool IPO,” Kim said. “They are in a real-time race for the cure. That’s part of what drives capital markets now.’

In October 2020, he worked on Kronos Bio Inc.’s $287.5 million IPO to fund cancer studies. Kim noted that Cooley’s former international head of its life sciences practice, Barbara A. Kosacz, left in 2020 to become Kronos’ chief operating officer and general counsel. “She was the best life sciences partner in the country before she went in-house,” Kim said.

“People who lived through the dot-com boom ask if we are now seeing another bubble,” Kim said. “But this is not a fad. These companies are revolutionizing industries.”

--John Roemer