Generate:Biomedicines (NASDAQ: GENB), the drug developer focused on creating immunology and inflammation (I&I) and oncology treatments through its own artificial intelligence (AI)-based platform, has launched the year’s largest biotech initial public offering (IPO) to date, raising $400 million in gross proceeds toward clinical trials, as well as platform and pipeline R&D efforts.

Generate finished its first day of trading at $12.65, slumping 21% from its IPO price of $16 a share, the midpoint of its $15 to $17 share price range disclosed by the company in its S-1/A amended registration statement.

At the $16 per share midpoint, Generate projected its oversubscribed IPO offering of 25 million shares would garner approximately $368.8 million in net proceeds—a figure that would rise to $424.9 million if the IPO underwriters exercise in full their 30-day option to purchase up to 3.75 million additional shares of common stock at the public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions, boosting gross proceeds by $60 million.  

The IPO was designed to raise between $375 million and $425 million in gross proceeds. Generate’s gross proceeds so far match the $400 million estimate offered earlier this month by Renaissance Capital, which tracks the IPO market.

The closing price was down 17% from Generate’s high price for the day of $15.32 a share, reached at 12:51 p.m. ET. The company’s market capitalization—the product of the share price and the number of outstanding shares—finished the first day of trading at $1.612 billion. Generate trades its shares on the Nasdaq Global Market under the symbol GENB.

Generate’s performance came on a day in which the broader financial markets plummeted on news of a higher-than-expected increase during January in the “core” producer price index (PPI) which excludes food and energy prices—a seasonally adjusted jump of 0.8%, compared with an 0.6% increase in December and the 0.3% rise predicted by a Dow Jones consensus of market watchers.

Long-term perspective 

“We don’t run the company on a day-to-day basis. We run the company for the long term,” Michael Nally, Generate:Biomedicines’ CEO, told GEN Edge. “The nice thing about having the capital that we’ve been able to raise and the capital we already have on our balance sheet is that we can put our heads down, recognizing that making a drug is a long lead-time endeavor. Building a technology platform is not something that happens overnight. So, we know the stock will be up, then we know the stock will be down on certain days.” 

Nally acknowledged having a whirlwind of emotions, from enormous pride in the company’s team to a deep appreciation for the company’s investors.

“For us, it is a special day in the fact that we’re working on some programs and technologies that we think are going to make a big difference in this world,” Nally said. “This gives us the capital to not only advance our late-stage clinical assets and our earlier clinical assets, but also the next generation of technologies we think will be really impactful for the world.”

Generate “was named for the belief that we could program biology and generate molecules that could change the way all drugs will be discovered,” Generate CFO Jason Silvers, MD, JD told GEN Edge. “What has made us successful over the past few years is reproducibly showing the ability to translate from our machines into clinical assets.”

Observing Generate’s IPO, Najat Khan, PhD, president and CEO of Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), reiterated that we’re at an inflection point for the AI-enabled medicines sector. AI is no longer viewed as a parallel technology experiment, but as an integrated driver of how medicines are discovered and advanced across programs. 

“For several years, capital flowed toward the promise of what AI could enable,” Khan told GEN Edge. “What we’re beginning to see now, with companies like Generate entering the public markets, is investor focus shifting toward translation: converting computational insight into reproducible biological and clinical progress.”

Generate is the highest of six IPOs for biotech companies carried out so far this year. Among the next two highest biotech IPOs, late-stage oncology and neuroscience drug developer Eikon Therapeutics (NASDAQ: EIKN) raised $381 million gross proceeds priced on February 4, while radiopharma drug developer Aktis Oncology (NASDAQ: AKTS) racked up $318 million in gross proceeds priced on January 8.

However, Eikon’s price has skidded 23% since its IPO, closing Friday at $13.78. The biotech IPO whose stock price has jumped the most so far in 2026 is Veradermics (NYSE: MANE). The developer of treatments for dermatology and aesthetic conditions closed Friday at $45.85, up more than double (170%) from its IPO price of $17 a share.

Biopharma IPOs have raised a combined $1.4 billion so far this year, a 53% increase from the $915 million raised by such companies this time in 2025, according to Bloomberg News.

Reservoir of cash 

Generate’s IPO proceeds plus its existing cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities—which stood at $221.498 million as of December 31, 2025—would create a more than $590 million reservoir of cash through which the company said it intended to fund five priorities.   

The costliest of these priorities, projected at approximately $300 million, is advancing its lead pipeline candidate, the anti-TSLP monoclonal antibody GB-0895, through the completion of its two 52-week Phase III trials in severe asthma, SOLAIRIA‑1 (NCT07276724) and SOLAIRIA‑2 (NCT07359846). The two trials will evaluate patients with severe asthma across 350 sites in more than 40 countries in North America, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region. The trials’ primary endpoint is reduction in annualized asthma exacerbation rate, with additional assessments of lung function, symptom control, and quality of life. Data is expected to emerge from both trials in late 2028 or early 2029.

“Patients have been dosed, so we’re on our way,” Nally said. “We ultimately will do the trials in about 1,600 subjects.” 

Generate also anticipates spending approximately $100 million of its IPO proceeds to complete its ongoing Phase Ib clinical trial (NCT07116889) of GB-0895 for the treatment of COPD and launch the next phase of clinical development (pending results from the Phase Ib trial plus regulatory alignment). 

“We dosed the last patient in our Phase Ib study in September, so we expect the six-month data in the first half of this year,” Nally said. “Once we have that data, we’ll have an opportunity to meet with regulators to discuss what is the best pathway for further evaluation of the therapeutic.” 

Generate hopes to have that meeting with the FDA around mid-year, ideally launching later-stage trials before the end of this year. 

In addition to GB-0895, Generate’s pipeline includes two oncology candidates set to begin Phase I trials this year: GB-4362, an antibody targeting free monomethyl auristatin E (MMAE) that is being developed for various unspecified cancer indications with MMAE antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs); and GB-5267, an armored CAR T candidate designed to treat metastatic ovarian cancer by targeting MUC-16, and being co-developed with Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

Pre-AlphaFold 

Founded in 2018 as a Flagship Pioneering company, Generate unveiled from stealth operations during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, announcing that it had built a portfolio of therapeutic candidates for neutralizing SARS-CoV‑2, including antibodies and peptides targeting multiple epitopes on the spike protein peptide, in less than 17 days. 

The biologics developer was an early comer applying AI-based approaches to rationally design sequence, structure, and function for protein therapeutics. The company’s launch notably pre-dates AlphaFold’s 2021 Nature publication, which solved the protein structure prediction problem and marked an inflection point for AI-based drug discovery. 

Nally argues that AI-driven technologies could compress a drug campaign that typically takes 10 to 15 years, from discovery to approval, to roughly eight years. Generate’s platform enables the simultaneous optimization of multiple drug-like properties, such as binding affinity, potency, and developability, rather than addressing them sequentially. By exploring protein space more comprehensively, the approach promises meaningful improvements in speed and reductions in cost. 

These dry lab capabilities are complemented with an integrated wet lab, including a 70,000 square foot cryogenic electron microscopy (CryoEM) laboratory, which produces large experimental protein structure datasets to fuel the company’s in-house machine learning models. 

This AI mission has piqued investor interest. Generate raised nearly $700 million in total equity financing by 2024, including a $273 million Series C financing completed in 2023 that attracted investors Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) and NVentures, the venture capital arm of Nvidia (NNASDAQ: NVDA). 

Lagging AI indicator 

Generate’s AI platform includes an optimization stack guided by existing molecules, and a second layer that designs proteins from scratch or de novo. For biologics, such as antibodies, where the drug market value is expected to reach $445 billion in the next five years, AI-guided de novo design that bypasses the need for labor-intensive and time-consuming experimental screens is suggested to be a holy grail for protein therapeutics. 

Chroma, Generate’s de novo protein design diffusion model published in Nature in 2023, was shown to predict structures from scratch with diverse protein geometries that could be experimentally validated. At the time, the model joined a budding ecosystem of de novo protein design tools, including RFdiffusion developed by University of Washington researchers led by Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, David Baker, PhD, which was published in Nature four months prior. 

The de novo landscape has since become increasingly crowded. In 2025, two privately held AI drug developers, Nabla Bio and Chai Discovery, made waves with the announcement of AI models, JAM-2 and Chai-2, respectively, that design de novo antibodies with double-digit hit rates and drug-like properties. In recent months, both companies have landed collaborations—Nabla with Takeda Pharmaceutical (Tokyo Stock Exchange: 4502) and Chai with Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) to deploy their AI platforms to the biologics pipeline of big pharma. 

Despite rapid progress, de novo antibodies have yet to hit the clinic. 

For Nally, biology is “extraordinarily humbling,” where you fail more than you succeed. To navigate that reality, Generate has focused its early programs on proven targets to reduce biological risk while allowing its AI-driven technology to be tested and validated in the clinic. 

While skeptics have noted that the company’s current slate of clinical candidates is based on engineered variants of existing proteins and falls short of AI’s de novo promise, protein design experts counter that the priority is to deliver better therapies to patients. All available tools, including insights from known biology, should be leveraged alongside AI-driven innovation. 

Drug making revolution 

Gevorg Grigoryan, PhD, co-founder and CTO at Generate, highlights that molecular targeting in the research lab has drastically improved in precision over the years. Yet, building better molecules does not immediately equate to better drugs.  

“We founded Generate because we believe there is a revolution about how drugs are even made,” Grigoryan told GEN Edge. “The candidates reaching the clinic now are the beginning of that journey.” 

Khan weighed in that while clinical outcomes remain the North Star, they are inherently lagging indicators. The true measure of AI’s impact, she said, lies in its ability to enhance decision-making across the drug development value chain, from target validation through development strategy, to improve speed, precision, and capital efficiency. 

“The companies that consistently turn computational advances into durable biological and translational outcomes will define the next chapter of this field,” she added. 

Looking ahead, Nally said underlying computational approaches have become increasingly sophisticated since the inception of Generate’s first-generation molecules. The company will be pushed toward more novel drug targets as AI technology continues to evolve.

“Our anti-TSLP candidate was made on the equivalent of the original ChatGPT,” he said. “If we can already show that these first-generation therapeutics can make a big difference for patients, that breeds a lot of excitement for what the future holds.” 

Generate finished 2025 with a net loss of $222.965 million, following a net loss of $181.384 million a year earlier. 

Generate’s other priorities for its IPO proceeds include:   

• Approximately $75 million to fund platform and technology innovation and engineer multiple programs and product candidates through development candidate nomination and into IND-enabling activities. 

• Approximately $15 million to advance GB-4362 and GB-5267 through topline Phase I data. 

• The remaining roughly $100 million is for additional R&D efforts for new programs and product candidates, as well as for working capital and other general corporate purposes. 

Nally is also CEO-Partner with Flagship Pioneering, the venture capital giant that launched Generate in 2018 as “Flagship VL56.” Flagship’s founder and CEO Noubar B. Afeyan, PhD, who is also chair of Generate’s board, is Generate’s largest shareholder with a 48.78% stake in the company, owning 58,010,304 shares, which at Friday’s closing price were worth more than $733.830 million. 

Afeyan’s shares consist of 57,985,617 shares held in the name of entities affiliated with Flagship funds, plus 24,687 shares of common stock subject to options exercisable within 60 days of January 15. Afeyan’s stake shrank from 56.61% before the IPO, according to the company’s IPO prospectus.  

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are joint lead book-running managers for the IPO, with Piper Sandler, Guggenheim Securities, and Cantor acting as book-running managers. 

Leaders and laggards 

• CASI Pharmaceuticals (OTC Pink Limited: CASIF) shares plunged 74% from 80 cents to 21 cents on Wednesday after a NASDAQ hearings panel told the company it would be delisted from that exchange for failing to satisfy continued listing conditions. CASI Pharmaceuticals did not appeal the decision, so its shares were suspended effective Thursday from NASDAQ, where it traded under the ticker symbol CASI. CASIF shares have begun to be traded on the “over the counter” Pink Limited Market operated by OTC Markets Group, where they closed Thursday at 24 cents but dipped 4% to 23 cents on Friday. CASI Pharmaceuticals is developing CID-103, an anti-CD38 monoclonal antibody for organ transplant rejection and autoimmune diseases.

• Novavax (NASDAQ: NVAX) shares jumped 17% Thursday after the vaccine developer raised its revenue guidance to investors, with executive vice president, CFO, and treasurer Jim Kelly saying it expects to generate between $230 million and $270 million in “adjusted” total revenue subtracting sales, royalties, and milestone payments from a partnership with Sanofi (Euronext Paris: SAN)—up from between $185 million to $205 million. Novavax finished 2025 with net income of $440 million, compared with a $187 million net loss in 2024. The company attributed its new profitability to cost cutting—Novavax in October transferred one U.S. facility and sold equipment, netting $60 million cash and saving $230 million in future cash outlays—as well as licensing deals, the most recent of which was Pfizer (NYSE: PFE)’s licensing of Novavax’s Matrix-M® adjuvant in return for paying Novavax $30 million upfront and up to $500 million tied to achieving development and sales milestones. 

• PMV Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: PMVP) shares soared 52% over two days, from $1.12 to $1.37 on Thursday and $1.70 on Friday after announcing that The New England Journal of Medicine published positive data from the company’s Phase I, first-in-human portion if the ongoing Phase I/II PYNNACLE trial (NCT04585750) evaluating rezatapopt in patients with advanced solid tumors harboring a TP53 Y220C mutation. During the treatment period, 76 patients (99%) had at least one adverse event, and 29 (38%) had an adverse event of grade 1 or 2. Overall (complete or partial) response was 20% among all 77 patients and 30% among those who had a KRAS wild-type tumor and received a dose of at least 1150 mg once daily, with confirmed responses seen across multiple tumor types, including ovarian and breast cancers. All patients who showed a response had a solid tumor harboring TP53 Y220C and wild-type KRAS.  

• Sarepta Therapeutics (NASDAQ: SRPT) shares slipped 12% over two days from $18.97 to $17.45 on Thursday and to $16.76 on Friday after the company said CEO Douglas S. Ingram planned to retire “by the end of 2026 or upon the appointment of his replacement,” according to a regulatory filing. Ingram told analysts on the company’s quarterly earnings call that he planned to spend more time with family in California, where two immediate members of his family have been diagnosed with myotonic dystrophy, type 1 (DM1). Ingram said he and the board have launched an internal and external search for his successor: “I and the board understand where we are as an organization, and we’re gonna be very thoughtful that we choose a person that can continue to drive us forward and execute these plans and get the most out of this team.”