Despite remaining a fertile hunting ground for Big Pharmas to snap up biotechs or license new therapies, the U.K. hasn’t produced any new publicly listed drug developers of its own for many years.
In fact, you have to cast your mind all the way back to 2021 to think of the last significant IPO for a British biotech, when Oxford-based artificial-intelligence-powered drug designer Exscientia joined the Nasdaq via an upsized $510 million offering. The following year saw a few more modest listings from the likes of Scottish CAR-T company TC Biopharm and then … nothing.
Fast-forward to 2026, and we’ve already seen a handful of U.S. biotechs line up to squeeze through a gradually reopening IPO window. So, could this be the year their U.K.-based cousins also rediscover the allure of the public markets?
According to Martin Turner, director of policy and external affairs at the U.K. BioIndustry Association (BIA), there are some early signs that the appetite for IPOs is returning.
“I do have hopes, actually,” Turner told Fierce Biotech in an interview. “From what we hear from the law firms in London, there are some drug development companies eyeing the Nasdaq.”
It’s an encouraging sign, although it says a lot about London’s own ailing stock exchange that—despite a worthy push by the U.K. government to encourage more homegrown listings—Turner expects that British biotechs considering going public will be looking across the Atlantic.
“It’s where we see depth of capital markets and the quality investors,” Turner explained. “There’s a lot of management teams of U.K. biotech companies over in America as well, so it’s a well-trodden path.”
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He pointed to the strong growth of the XBI—a performance tracker for U.S. biotech companies—in the second half of 2025 as being one reason for the renewed confidence in IPOs. Turner also echoed Fierce’s own reporting on the upbeat atmosphere at the Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference in London back in November.
“The mood there was super-positive,” said Turner, who added that he’d heard similar reports from the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference earlier this month.
“Things are looking up,” he said. “We’re hearing that from the brokers and the lawyers in London as well.”
One of the law firms dealing with this newfound IPO interest is Baker McKenzie. Adam Farlow, London partner and global head of the firm’s capital markets team, and his colleague Roel Meers, a partner in the corporate finance practice group of Baker McKenzie’s Brussels office, told Fierce that they have “optimism … for many of the excellent U.K.-based biotechs that are approaching the markets, which hasn’t been the case since 2022.”
Farlow and Meers are even expecting some drug developers to take a chance on the London Stock Exchange this year, as well as those heading to the Nasdaq.
“Considering our pipeline [of clients], I would anticipate at least two new London listings for biotechs this year, in addition to those that we are looking to list abroad,” they said over email.
With no clear route to the public markets for British biotechs in recent years, drug developers had been relying on a Big Pharma buyout as the most reliable exit route. Last year was no exception, with the BIA using its annual report this morning to highlight M&A activity as “a clear bright spot for the biotech sector in 2025, delivering several high-value exits despite continued weakness in public markets.”
While the number of undisclosed deal terms make it hard to compile an accurate figure for M&A activity, the biggest deals highlighted by the trade association were Merck & Co.’s $10 billion payment for Verona Pharma for its potential blockbuster chronic obstructive pulmonary disease blockbuster Ohtuvayre as well as Sanofi striking a $1.2 billion deal for respiratory syncytial virus vaccine developer ViceBio.
Turner also suggested that the U.K. biotech scene should take some credit for the sale of obesity company Metsera, which Pfizer acquired for an increased offer of $10 billion after a heated bidding war with Novo Nordisk. While Metsera is based in the U.S., the company’s tech has its origins at Imperial College London, Turner noted.
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The two largest deals of last year, Verona and ViceBio, both centered on companies based in London, rather than the U.K.’s traditional biotech hubs of Oxford and Cambridge. Turner agreed that the capital has been quietly raising its game in recent years.
“London has a great tech scene outside of life sciences, but now that we’re seeing the merging of those two sectors in a greater way, all those computer-literate scientists and programmers want to be in London,” he explained. “They don’t want to necessarily be in science parks on the edge of Oxford and Cambridge.”
The fact that Oxford and Cambridge are both less than an hour from the capital by train means the three cities are really viewed as “one cluster,” he added.
With Amgen kicking off this year picking up Oxford-based Dark Blue Therapeutics for its preclinical blood cancer program, Turner is optimistic that 2026 looks set to be another strong year for M&A.
But, while dealmaking held firm last year, a look at private equity investment over the same period makes for more troubling reading.
U.K. biotechs raised just 1.9 billion pounds sterling ($2.6 billion) in equity financing in 2025, a 49% year-on-year decrease, according to the BIA report. Meanwhile, venture capital investment also slid 13.2% to 1.8 billion pounds ($2.4 billion) alongside a reduction in deal volume.
“Funding was increasingly concentrated into a small number of large rounds, with no recovery in mid-sized scale-up financings,” the BIA said in its report.
Turner agreed that 2025 was a “painful year,” noting that the equity financing figure would be even lower if you strip away the two standout megarounds—AI-focused Isomorphic Labs’ $600 million raise and obesity biotech Verdiva Bio’s $410 million series A.
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Turner partly attributed the slowdown in financing last year to the “Trump effect,” where uncertainty about tariffs and trade deals dampened sentiment in the middle of the year while investors digested the global changes.
However, he pointed to a “significant pick-up” in investments in the fourth quarter as a sign that “we’re going into 2026 in a positive position.”
Baker McKenzie’s Farlow and Meers were similarly upbeat about the funding landscape this year.
“We remain confident that 2026 will be a substantially better funding environment than 2025, especially for later-stage assets with great science and clear timelines for readouts and news-flow,” they said.
Another cause for optimism is fresh funds being raised within the U.K., including a $100 million commitment from the government’s economic development bank to SV Health Investors’ SV8 Biotech fund.
Meanwhile, a concerted government attempt to get British pension funds to finally start investing in homegrown biotechs is beginning to pay off, according to Turner, who pointed to a well-known pension provider investing in VC firm Cambridge Innovation Capital last year.
“Certainly, everyone’s in a very positive mood because of the M&A, because of the IPO window potentially opening up, and some of those positive policy moves in the U.K. from the pensions industry and government,” he explained.
