Alan F. Denenberg

For 30 years, Denenberg has been deeply involved in health care and life sciences corporate work involving capital markets and mergers and acquisitions. He is co-head of Davis Polk’s Northern California office and a leading advisor to many companies and major institutions, including Acutus Medical Inc., BeiGene, ImmunityBio Inc., iRhythm Technologies Inc. and Shockwave Medical Inc.

This year, business is booming. “There’s an incredibly busy run of IPOs lining up,” Denenberg said. “Even though not all have performed all that great, the appetite remains high and next year’s first half looks very busy.”

So far in 2021, he has been lead underwriters’ counsel on Recursion Pharmaceuticals’ $500 million IPO in a deal that symbolizes life science companies’ eagerness to go public quickly even without a product yet in the clinical stage pipeline. “People are betting on great technology and a great team,” Denenberg said.

He also was lead counsel for underwriters on Sight Sciences’ $276 million IPO, for Bolt Biotherapeutics $230 million IPO and for Terns Pharmaceuticals’ $127 million IPO.

That strong showing follows last year’s positive second half, when Denenberg advised on such notable life sciences transactions as Maravai LifeSciences Holdings’ $1.86 billion IPO and GoodRx Holdings’ $1.3 billion IPO.

Even so, Denenberg added, “This is a field driven by more than money,” he said. “I feel really good about how much closer we are getting to solving really difficult problems in the life sciences with tangible benefits that will affect humanity.”

As the pandemic arrived, sectors of the health care industry saw disparate impacts. “It was bad for a set of companies that make medical devices and large cap medical equipment,” Denenberg said. “They had trouble even getting into hospitals to make sales and for some, it cut sales pretty dramatically. Some institutions didn’t let anyone in and others were simply too busy.”

A smaller set of companies thrived. “Most obviously vaccine makers, and diagnostics and testing companies did well, and though that won’t be strong forever, COVID provided a good revenue boost. Overall, individual companies either weren’t affected at all or their sales and trials were hurt.”

The mergers and acquisitions market and the IPO scene both took an early dive when the coronavirus created business uncertainty but came back strongly.

“After the first and second quarters last year there was so much money on the sidelines that there was a huge M&A boom. And these things feed on themselves in the M&A and IPO world. The push is available capital and the pull is the fear you’ll miss the window if this all ends soon.”

--John Roemer