April showers bring more biotechs to Nasdaq, as Rain and Impel bump 2021's total raise above $6B

2021-04-23

合作小分子药物IPO

Editor’s note: Interested in following biopharma’s fast-paced IPO market? You can bookmark our IPO Tracker here. What’s that in the sky — is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s another handful of biotech IPOs. Two more biotechs priced their public offerings late Thursday, coming just one day after Zymergen blew folks away with its $500 million pricing. This week’s winners are Rain Therapeutics and Impel Neuropharma, who raised $125 million and $80 million, respectively. Rain priced at $17 and Impel’s shares debuted at $15 apiece. Combined, the sector has now raised more than $6 billion among nearly three dozen debuts, according to the Endpoints News tally. That’s on pace to top last year’s record raise of $16.5 billion and 91 IPOs, per Nasdaq. Also on Thursday came the F-1 filing of Swiss biotech Molecular Partners, which is penciling in $100 million for its leap to Nasdaq. The company is already publicly traded in its home country. Rain stock price could bring company’s valuation to $427 million After a 2020 that led to a significant expansion of its pipeline, Rain Therapeutics has priced its IPO. The biotech that specializes in oncology has priced its 7,352,941 shares of its stock at $17 a share, and is expected to raise $125 million. In a release Monday, the company stated that price would command a market cap of $457 million. Rain’s pipeline tripled in a single week around Labor Day last year, when it licensed a research program from Drexel University and grabbed a Phase II-ready drug from Daiichi Sankyo. That program has become RAIN-32. That is the company’s lead program now, and should see the majority of IPO funds funneled toward it. RAIN-32 is a small molecule inhibitor of MDM2 taken orally to reduce tumors activity in liposarcoma and other solid tumors. In 2018, the company launched the experimental drug tarloxotinib with its $18 million in Series A fundraising. Last year, it raised $63 million. Rain will trade under the ticker $RAIN. — Josh Sullivan Impel announces IPO to launch migraine treatment Impel NeuroPharma is going public a little more than two years after its crossover raise, and Thursday, the company announced that it would be priced at $15 a share. Impel is expected to take home $80 million in proceeds with the public offering of 5,333,334 shares of its stock. The biotech from Seattle will use that money to commercially launch its migraine treatment Trudhesa, delivered through an upper nasal formulation of dihydroergotamine. The proceeds will also help its INP105 program, which is designed for treatment of agitation and aggression associated with autism spectrum disorder. This candidate, like many of the company’s drugs, is delivered to the brain through the nose, as it’s a nasal reformulation of olanzapine. Shares of Impel’s stock — which will be listed as $IMPL — will begin trading today. — Josh Sullivan Swiss biotech looking to hop across the pond with its protein therapies Molecular Partners is ostensibly seeking to capitalize on last month’s news that one of their antiviral programs will participate in an NIH-run Covid-19 trial. Molecular Partners teamed up with Novartis for the candidate, which is what they’re calling a “trispecific” DARPin antiviral known as ensovibep. Researchers will evaluate the antiviral as part of the NIH’s ACTIV-3, the hospitalized mild-to-moderate patient arm of their ACTIV protocol against Covid-19. If the medicine hits all its milestones, Novartis will be on the hook for up to $231 million. But Molecular Partners is also focusing on eye diseases, oncology and AML. The company has a Phase III program for wet AMD AMD where they’ve partnered with Allergan/AbbVie and a lead cancer program for FAP-positive cancers in collaboration with Amgen. The biotech has three programs it expects to fund with its IPO: a Phase I trial for its second oncology program seeking to bind FAP and CD40, to complete a Phase I study for the second Novartis-partnered Covid-19 program known as MP0423, and to advance their liquid tumor portfolio in AML through Phase I as well. Once the IPO is closed, Molecular Partners will trade on the ticker $MOLN, which is also their Swiss ticker. — Max Gelman

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