The fear of going out of business before getting a drug submitted to regulators is one that a couple of European biotechs have had to face up to this week.

Special purpose acquisition companies can bring biopharma firms to market faster than a traditional initial public offering, but frequent failures and increased scrutiny from the US Securities and Exchange Commission mean their heyday in the life sciences space is arguably over.

Even with higher interest rates, some debt on the balance sheets of profitable biotechs is healthy. However, among loss-making biotechs and in the current environment, raising new debt has unhealthy connotations.

ARCH closed a $3bn VC fund to end the month of June while in the same week six public biopharma firms said they are cutting jobs. Even so, some publicly traded companies have been able to launch sizeable offerings, including a $450m note sale by Cytokinetics and Xenon’s $250m follow-on.