Happy 2014, especially if you’re a life sciences company. It looks like the biotech IPO window will stay open in the new year. Watertown’s Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, which makes drugs based on RNA interference, has just filed paperwork to raise $69 million in a public offering. Dicerna is the third Boston-area company to file in the past couple of weeks, after eye disease drugmaker Eleven Biotherapeutics and vaccine developer Genocea Biosciences. We’ll see how long the trend continues, but for now going public seems like a reasonable way to finance clinical trials.
In other innovation news:
— The local tech IPO pipeline is looking up as well. Waltham’s Care.com has already filed papers to go public, while companies like Actifio, HubSpot, Veracode, and Wayfair are waiting in the wings. Of course, a good way to get acquired is to make noise about going public.
— Our startup of the week is Scholar Rock. The stealthy Cambridge firm has licensed intellectual property from Boston Children’s Hospital to develop a new class of drugs. It has also added biotech leaders Katrine Bosley and Michael Gilman to its board of directors.
— And finally, Boston venture capitalist Michael Greeley has three notable lessons for 2014: Beware the “crowdfunding” phenomenon; bet on healthcare architecture over biotech drugs; and remember the dot-com crash. Those last two certainly make you wonder about that IPO window.
