The wealthy clients of Swiss based investment bank and financial service provider UBS Group AG (SWX: UBSG) have raised $650 million for the biggest ever biotechnology impact fund. The bank made the announcement.
Impact investing is a financial terminology used to explain the philanthropic goals into mainstream financial holdings. Just like financial returns, Impact investing generate measurable social and environmental impact.
The fund is dubbed ‘The Oncology Impact Fund 2’ and its being managed by biotechnology investment company MPM Capital. The company announced having raised a total of $850 million including the $650 million of UBS wealth clients.
MPM Capital says it will be using the 80% of the funds to invest in privately held start-ups while the remainder will be directed into publicly held companies developing innovative treatments for cancer and other serious illnesses.
“With this fund, I feel like we tried to reimagine the impact space. The vision here is still extremely bold, which is to say: What if every drug that was developed and sold had that 1% go back to make the world a better place? When we started on this journey, impact investing was about impact bonds and at the time they were being done in $5 million increments. To launch something that is 100 times the size of that was very ambitious, and shows how this theme clearly resonates with our clients,” said the chief investment officer for UBS Wealth Management, Mark Haefele.
