IP Group — Pfizer-Metsera deal offers upside potential

There have been several announcements on technical and commercial progress across IP Group’s portfolio this year. A recent highlight was Pfizer’s announcement that it will acquire Metsera. IP Group has the potential to generate significant income from the intellectual property (IP) related to anti-obesity programmes that it owns and exclusively licenses to Zihipp, which Metsera acquired in 2023. Metsera’s drug candidates represent a multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity, of which IP Group may receive a low-single-digit percentage amount of royalty income, on top of which it may collect technical and commercial milestone payments, as well as an earn-out related to its previous equity investment in Zihipp. Other notable announcements across IP Group’s life sciences portfolio include Istesso’s encouraging data, published in The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and clinical trial progress of other holdings. We also note that three of IP Group’s portfolio companies (Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT), Oxford Quantum Circuits and Oxa) were featured in NVIDIA’s press release on building the UK’s AI infrastructure.