Bill Doyle, Executive Chairman
The outcome of the EF-14 study in newly diagnosed GBM transformed the company.
“Starting with the successful EF-14 interim analysis, Novocure delivered a cadence of good news,” recalled Bill Doyle, Novocure’s Executive Chairman. By 2015, Novocure was building commercial operations on three continents and establishing a clinical pipeline studying Tumor Treating Fields in multiple additional solid tumor indications.
As the business evolved, so did the capital needs of the company.
“In the early R&D days, we would raise funding in rounds of $5 million, and then rounds of $10 million,” Bill said. “All of a sudden, we needed to raise $100 million to build a global oncology company.”
To meet the capital requirements of commercialization, Novocure’s leadership team decided to take the company public and began to educate the investor community to build support for an initial public offering, or IPO.
Company-wide preparations culminated in a two-week roadshow to meet investors in 10 cities across the U.S. and Europe. On October 2, 2015, after months of tremendous effort, Novocure went public on the NASDAQ Global Select Market with a market capitalization of $1.8 billion, raising $165 million in funding for the company.
“We pulled it off,” Bill said. “We all went to NASDAQ headquarters in Times Square and rang the bell.” Reflecting on 20 years of fundraising to support the company’s growth, Bill put the importance of the IPO into perspective. “For us, the Novocure journey has always been about bringing a new cancer therapy to patients,” Bill said. “The IPO was pivotal for the company, but it was really just one of the tools we used to finance our mission to bring Tumor Treating Fields therapy to patients, not an end in itself.”
