BioCentury
ARTICLE | Finance

Ebb & Flow

June 12, 2000 7:00 AM UTC

IPO overallotment sales are closely watched on Wall Street as a barometer of investor appetite for a new security. So perhaps it doesn't bode well that underwriters for the last two biotech IPOs couldn't fill their greenshoes. Underwriters UBS Warburg, Lehman Brothers and Dain Rauscher Wessels last week sold only 63 percent of the overalloted shares in Genomic Solutions' May IPO, which raised $61.3 million for the marketer of instruments, software and consumables for the genomics industry. GNSL is valued at $251.6 million, using Friday's close of $10.375.

The other company with "small feet" is Paradigm Genetics (PDGM), which on May 31 announced that its underwriters - Chase H&Q, J.P. Morgan, Pacific Growth Equities and Stephens Inc. - sold 750,000 shares of the 900,000-share overallotment at $7. PDGM, which is developing its GeneFunction Factory profiling technology and FunctionFinder bioinformatics system to determine gene function in agricultural crops and model system plants and fungi, raised a total of $47.3 million in the IPO. Friday's close of $13.188 values the company at $335 million...