UK biotech firm Astex eyes IPO in 2007

LONDON (Reuters) - British biotechnology company Astex Therapeutics -- which recently signed one of Europe's biggest deals with Novartis -- is considering an IPO next year, its chairman and its main investor said on Wednesday.

"Astex is clearly a company that could go public," Stephen Bunting, managing director of venture capital group Abingworth, which helped found the company in 1999, told the Reuters Biotechnology Summit. Floating in 2007 was a "reasonable assumption", he added.

The company's chairman, Peter Fellner, who previously headed Britain's flagship biotech group Celltech, also told the summit in London that the company was discussing an initial public offering next year.

Cambridge-based Astex develops targeted drugs, primarily in cancer, using a proprietary X-ray crystallography system.

It has so far raised 51 million pounds ($89 million) in two private funding rounds and has signed external collaborations worth more than $1 billion, assuming products develop satisfactorily.

The biggest agreement, worth up to $520 million, was clinched in December, when Novartis secured the worldwide licensing rights to Astex's cell cycle inhibitor AT9311, currently in preclinical studies, and bought an option on another anti-cancer drug, AT7519, which is in Phase I clinical trials.

Cell cycle inhibitors are a class of compounds that target mechanisms of cell division to prevent or interfere with cancer growth.

They represent a new approach to fighting cancer and a potentially lucrative area for drug manufacturers, who are increasingly targeting cancer as the fastest-growing sector of the pharmaceuticals market.

The Novartis deal marked the latest vindication of Astex's technology. Astex also has alliances with AstraZeneca, Astellas Pharma, Sanofi-Aventis, Boehringer Ingelheim, Mitsubishi Pharma and Schering.