The latest news in investment offerings, financial products and other services relative to wealth advisors and their clients.

M&G
UK headquartered M&G Investments has invested in Harbinger Health, a biotechnology company pioneering technologies to fundamentally change cancer screening and detection.

The US based company has raised $140 million in Series B funding to complete the clinical validation of the firm’s first blood-based cancer screening product and scale-up ahead of its first product launch, the firm said in a statement. The company’s goal is to lead the way to a future where cancer screening is routine, affordable and accessible to everyone, and is expected to launch its first product – a laboratory developed test for the detection of early cancer – in 2025. 

Harbinger’s product development strategy is designed to enable low-cost population testing to achieve broad affordability, improve Positive Predictive Value (PPV) to reduce the burden of false positives, and quantitative individual longitudinal monitoring to better guide clinical decision making if cancer is detected. Harbinger’s platform, HarbingerHx, leverages machine learning, proprietary insights into the molecular biology of cancer’s origins, and growing datasets to develop insights that maximise clinical informativeness.

M&G was one of a number of investors in the company’s latest financing round. M&G’s investment was made by Catalyst, the firm’s £5 billion ($6 billion) purpose-led flexible private assets strategy, which invests in innovative solutions to some of the world’s biggest environmental and social challenges, on behalf of the £129 billion Prudential With-Profits Fund, which includes the £53.5 billion PruFund.  

Niranjan Sirdeshpande, head of catalyst investment at M&G, said: “Innovation in medical science is being led by companies such as Harbinger, whose technology has the potential to change how we screen, detect and treat cancer in the future. By providing patient capital over the long-term, we are investing in companies that are scaling-up, to bring transformational products such as this to the market which stand to benefit our societies as a whole.”

Baron Capital
Baron Capital, the New York-based investment house, has launched a new fund concentrating on US growth companies.

The firm, which oversaw $41.8 billion of assets under management (as of 31 August 2023), has rolled out the launch of the UCITs fund Baron Capital US All Cap Focused Growth Fund.

In addition to the UCITS fund, the strategy is available as a segregated mandate. 

The strategy is is managed by Ron Baron, founder, chairman, and CEO of Baron Capital and Michael Baron, vice president and portfolio manager. They use proprietary research to find and monitor US companies of any size that they believe will deliver above-average long-term risk-adjusted results.

The launch expands the range of Baron Capital strategies available to non-US investors, with the Baron Global Advantage Equity and Baron Emerging Market Equity strategies already available as UCITS vehicles.

The fund will be registered in Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. Baron Capital expects to register this fund in additional jurisdictions in the future.