By Brady Huggett

EntreMed Inc., gathering funds for its growing anticancer product line, priced its public offering at $18 per share and netted about $24.5 million.

Earlier this month, EntreMed said it planned to offer 1.7 million shares of its stock, which would have brought the Rockville, Md.-based company about $42 million, based on its price at that time. Since then, its stock has slid some and EntreMed sold about 1.45 million shares in the offering. (See BioWorld Today, Feb. 7, 2001.)

EntreMed's stock (NASDAQ:ENMD) fell $1 Tuesday to close at $19. It has about 18.1 million shares outstanding following the offering.

The offering is underwritten by Gerard Klauer Mattison & Co. Inc., of New York, and it has an option to purchase 100,000 shares at any time over the next 30 days. The shares were issued pursuant to a shelf registration statement filed with the SEC on Jan. 14. The offering is expected to close on March 2.

EntreMed said it would use the proceeds for working capital, general corporate purposes and clinical trials. The company has multiple clinical trials ongoing.

Most recently, it began a split-location Phase II trial for its product, Panzem, formerly called 2ME2. Panzem also is in two Phase I trials for breast cancer and one Phase II trial for patients with multiple myeloma. It has two products, Endostatin and Angiostatin, in Phase I trials.

Endostatin has shown the potential to inhibit new blood vessels from forming and to weaken the network of blood vessels that feed primary and metastatic tumors. It is in three Phase I trials in the United States and another in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Angiostatin, a naturally occurring angiogenesis inhibitor that is a component of plasminogen, is in two Phase I trials in the United States and a third in Europe.

Just last week EntreMed disclosed an addition to its anticancer line. It discovered and published in the Feb. 1, 2001, issue of Cancer Research news of an angiogenesis inhibitor and antitumor agent, Metastatin, an endogenous complex isolated from bovine cartilage.

As of Sept. 30, 2000, it had cash and cash equivalents of approximately $38 million. n