Chandler Robinson's second company has recently been described as having the best first day for an IPO since the tech giant Baidu.
The Cambridge MBA gave me an opportunity to hone my leadership and business judgment skills, which in turn gave me the confidence and ability to manage and operate these companies.
Chandler Robinson
A business venture started by Gates Cambridge Scholar Chandler Robinson recently IPO’d and experienced the “best first-day pop for an IPO since [Chinese tech company] Baidu in 2005”, according to Nasdaq News.
After the initial public offering through which private companies seek to raise capital from public investors, the company’s stock price jumped 231 percent on its first day, reaching a market valuation of $289 million.
The company, Monopar Therapeutics Inc. (Nasdaq: MNPR), is Chandler’s second successful biotech exit since completing his studies at the University of Cambridge in 2010. The first company Chandler co-founded was Tactic Pharma. It was started immediately following his completion of the MBA at Cambridge. Tactic Pharma’s lead drug was a compound which Chandler had researched in depth as an undergraduate and published on in Science. He was the CEO of Tactic and its lead drug went on to have promising phase 2 clinical data in Wilson Disease patients and was acquired by Alexion for $855M.
Chandler’s current company, Monopar, where he is again the CEO, is focused on developing proprietary therapeutics designed to improve clinical outcomes for cancer patients. The company's pipeline consists of Validive® for the prevention of chemoradiotherapy-induced severe oral mucositis in oropharyngeal cancer patients, Camsirubicin for the treatment of advanced soft tissue sarcoma, and a late-stage preclinical antibody MNPR-101 for the treatment of several solid tumours.
Chandler gives a lot of credit to the Gates Cambridge Scholarship and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he said “enabled me to pursue an MBA when I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford it. The Cambridge MBA gave me an opportunity to hone my leadership and business judgment skills, which in turn gave me the confidence and ability to manage and operate these companies.”
