About 40% of the UK’s biotech companies, developing drugs for everything from cancer to heart disease, were banking with SVB’s British arm, according to the UK BioIndustry Association .
SVB UK has loans of around 5.5 billion pounds , deposits of about 6.7 billion pounds, and about 3,000 UK clients, according to HSBC. Dima Kuzmin, managing partner of London-based investment firm 4BIO Capital, which does not bank with SVB directly but has portfolio companies exposed to the bank, said many entrepreneurs and CEOs of small startups had also opened personal accounts with SVB.
Worst case, he said, investors will become more concerned about liquidity in the sector and start drip-feeding the biotechs with smaller funding rounds.The turmoil follows a difficult year for biotech funding globally. Rising interest rates, recession fears, and geopolitical shockwaves saw investors pull back from anything considered risky last year.
The SVB collapse also comes after the UK’s biggest listed drugmakers GSK and AstraZeneca warned last month that the UK government’s ambition to become a life sciences “superpower” has been hampered by a discouraging tax environment among other problems.