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ReNeuron: Going Private

 
• By Melanie Senior

VCs don't usually buy back portfolio companies once they've floated. But Merlin's offer to take struggling stem-cell group ReNeuron back into the private realm gives shareholders a slightly less unattractive deal than liquidation, even though the group is still valued below cash. More importantly, it gives ReNeuron another shot.

The final straw for UK biotech ReNeuron Group PLC came in January 2003 when the group announced that its Phase II tricyclic anti-histamine ReN1869 for diabetic nephropathy didn't work. Shares fell by more than 60% to 3p (see Exhibit 1); they had already sunk from the 30p heights reached during mid-2002. Any investors not yet put off by the firm's core focus on an area that had long since lost its appeal—stem cells--certainly were following the clinical failure of these outlier projects.

The failure left ReNeuron--Europe's first public stem cell company--with a very early stage pipeline in an unfashionable, risky field where...

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