On the heels of disclosing a planned 2014 R&D investment hike of more than 60 percent over last year, Compugen Ltd. took the opportunity to pad its coffers with a $63 million public offering.

Taking advantage of its stock increase – shares have gained more than 150 percent over the past year as the firm continues its transition from a technology and life sciences tools provider into a bone fide drug development company – Compugen, of Tel Aviv, Israel, priced 6 million shares Friday at $10.50 apiece, marking a 26 percent discount to Thursday’s closing price. Underwriters could add another $9.5 million if the full overallotment option is exercised.

Proceeds, which will be used to support pipeline work and for general corporate purposes, will provide a nice cushion for the company, which, as of Dec. 31, had a cash position of $46.8 million that was expected to cover the increased R&D expenditures. President and CEO Anat Cohen-Dayag explained in January that the total R&D costs, directed primarily to the area of immune-oncology, would jump from $10 million to more than $16 million this year.

Compugen also could earn a $30 million milestone payment from Bayer AG this year. The company inked the potential $540 million deal – its first big pharma revenue-sharing collaboration – back in August, with the aim of developing drugs for cancer immunotherapy. (See BioWorld Today, Aug. 6, 2013.)

Though it’s been around since the 1990s, Compugen has had a relatively low profile. It spent more than a decade building out its platform capabilities, which as its name suggests, centers on in silico predictive drug discovery. Those discovery technologies helped land a handful of target deals with pharma, including a 2009 discovery-on-demand partnership with New York-based Pfizer Inc., which called for Compugen to use its platform to discovery drugs against a Pfizer target. (See BioWorld Today, Dec. 31, 2009.)

In 2010, the company began turning its capabilities toward building its own pipeline, with a focus on oncology and immunology. Work in immune checkpoint regulators attracted the attention of Leverkusen, Germany-based Bayer, which picked up rights to two preclinical antibody-based therapeutics: CGEN-15001T, a membrane protein predicted to be a B7/CD28-like protein, and CGEN-15022, a B7-like protein.

Both emerged from the list of nine protein targets discovered to date by Compugen.

The two companies are working together on preclinical development, and Bayer will retain full control over further development and commercialization, with Compugen eligible for milestones and mid to high single-digit royalties on product sales.

At the time of the Bayer deal, Cohen-Dayag said the firm’s strategy is to partner out most of its programs at early stages of development, though Compugen will select one or two to advance to later stages on its own before seeking collaborations.

With the planned R&D boost, the company is looking to expand the breadth of its pipeline, allowing for a larger number of checkpoint target and product candidates for immunotherapy to move forward in parallel through research and preclinical development. Additional efforts are expected to set up a biomarker discovery program and accelerate validation for the newest of the company’s programs, an antibody-drug conjugate discovery initiative launched early last year.

Compugen, which opened a research facility in the U.S. in 2012 to develop oncology and immunology monoclonal antibodies, also will relocate that operation to a larger facility in South San Francisco around midyear.

Jefferies LLC is acting as the sole bookrunner for the public offering, set to close on or about March 5, while JMP Securities LLC, Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. and Chardan Capital Markets are acting as co-managers.

Shares of Compugen (NASDAQ:CGEN) closed Friday at $11.50, down $2.70, or 19 percent.

In other financings news:

Celladon Corp., of San Diego, closed its initial public offering (IPO) of 5.5 million shares priced at $8 apiece, plus the full underwriters’ overallotment option of 825,000 shares, for total gross proceeds of $50.6 million. Though the company cut the share price of its IPO, its stock has soared since it disclosed last week an option deal with Servier, of Suresnes, France, based on SERCA2b modulators for metabolic disease. After hitting 52-week high of $12.94, Celladon’s shares (NASDAQ:CLDN) closed Friday at $11.30. (See BioWorld Today, Jan. 31, 2014, and Feb. 25, 2014.)

Neptune Technologies & Bioressources Inc., of Laval, Quebec, said it commenced an underwritten public offering of common shares, with the number of shares to be issued and the price of each share to be determined at the time of the offering. Roth Capital Partners and Europe Pacific Canada Inc. will act as joint book-running managers and National Securities Corp. will act as lead manager. Underwriters will receive a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 15 percent of the number of common shares sold to cover overallotments. Neptune develops, manufactures and commercializes marine-derived omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids.