Car­lyle vaults in­to biotech in­vest­ing, buy­ing Abing­worth and launch­ing a new com­pa­ny aimed at piv­otal leaps

Car­lyle Group’s glob­al head of health­care Steve Wise is mak­ing a big for­ay in­to the biotech fi­nanc­ing scene. And the pri­vate eq­ui­ty play­er is acute­ly aware of how it will like­ly play out in the cur­rent fi­nan­cial crunch af­flict­ing the sec­tor’s pub­lic com­pa­nies.

This morn­ing Wise is pulling back the cur­tains on Car­lyle’s deal to buy out Abing­worth, a glob­al biotech in­vestor which has grown deep roots in­to the en­tre­pre­neur­ial dirt of drug de­vel­op­ment over the decades through its tra­di­tion­al VC role, while de­vel­op­ing a sub­stan­tial busi­ness fund­ing late-stage tri­als. That spe­cial­ty of theirs — pick­ing up 100% of the Phase III risk in ex­change for a share of the rev­enue — has swelled in pop­u­lar­i­ty as the once boom­ing streams of pub­lic mar­ket mon­ey fun­neled in­to the in­dus­try dries up.

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