CRO PRA Health Sciences Sets Terms For $400 Million IPO

November 5, 2014

By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

Outsourcer for clinical trials firm PRA Health Sciences will offer an initial public offering of $400 million, with 18.6 million shares priced between $20 to $23, for a fully diluted market value of $1.3 billion, the company said this week.

The Raleigh, NC-based firm said it will price during the week of Nov. 10 and will list on the NASDAQ as PRAH. Jefferies, Citi, KKR, UBS Investment Bank, Credit Suisse and Wells Fargo Securities are the joint bookrunners on the deal.

PRA will join peers INC Research and Catalent in the hottest biotech IPO climate in decade. INC saw a whopping $700 million IPO earlier this week, while Catalent, a Blackstone LBO, has returned more than 25 percent since its July debut.

PRA estimates the global contract research organization market was $22 billion in 2013, which could grow to as much as $32 billion in five years. Biotechs outsourced as much as 31 percent of Phase 1 through Phase 4 trials were in 2013, a number PRA said could grow to as much as 43 percent in 2018.

The company has had a circuitous route to the public market. PRA previously went public for in 2004 as a subsidiary of Genstar, which had paid $95 million to buy it from Carlyle. Genstar took it private in 2007, before selling it to KKR in September 2013 for around $1.3 billion. KKR then bough snap-on company ReSearch Pharmaceutical Services (RPS) in September 2013 from Warburg Pincus for $289 million, a marriage that is likely to make PRA a stronger candidate as it comes to market with a fuller set of tools.