PARIS - Crucell NV set a price of EUR17 to EUR20.50 (US$14.75 to $17.80) per share for its initial public offering of 8 million ordinary shares.

The offering would raise EUR150 million (US$130 million) and value the company at EUR654 million if the final price came in at the mid-point of this range and no overallotment option was exercised.

The shares are to be listed on the Euronext Exchange in Amsterdam and the Nasdaq in the U.S. They are being offered to retail and institutional investors in the Netherlands and the U.S. but only to institutional investors in other countries. The stock is being offered in the form of either ordinary shares or American Depositary Shares (ADSs), with each ADS representing one ordinary share. Goldman Sachs International is acting as global coordinator, lead manager and bookrunner of the IPO, with ING Barings and UBS Warburg acting as co-lead managers.

Crucell, of Leiden, the Netherlands, was created at the end of June by the merger of two Dutch companies, IntroGene BV and U-BiSys BV, and employs about 100 people. The merger brought together two different but complementary technologies - the PER.C6 human cell line platform developed by their subtractive phage antibody-display selection technology, called MAb'stract.

As the company's vice president for corporate affairs, Annemarie Haverhals, told BioWorld International that it is licensing out this technology platform to the pharmaceutical industry for drug discovery and development to generate an immediate income flow, but is also engaged in an in-house research program to develop therapeutic compounds for cancer and other diseases.

Crucell currently has licensing agreements with 11 companies, all for its PER.C6 technology. The licensees are Merck & Co. Inc. (in the area of gene therapy and recombinant adenoviral vaccines), Glaxo Wellcome, Aventis Pharmaceutical Products Inc., Novartis, Pfizer/Warner-Lambert, Schering AG, Genzyme Corp., Oxford BioMedica Ltd., Bioheart Inc., Cobra Therapeutics Ltd. and DirectGene Inc. (for gene therapy applications).

Turning to its own research and development program, Haverhals said Crucell had "a number of product leads for the treatment of different types of cancer, and we will make a risk/reward analysis for each one to decide whether to develop it alone or find a partner. There are seven or eight at the preclinical stage and we expect to have a lead compound in the clinic within a year or two." She stressed that the company is "developing fully human products," pointing out that while it is using Chinese hamster ovary cells in preclinical development, that was "going a lot further than the traditional use of mammalian cells." Although most of the antibodies it has in development are for cancer, the company also is exploring other applications of its technology, such as for inflammatory diseases and vaccines, she added.

Up to now, the two firms comprising Crucell have raised some EUR50 million (US$44 million) between them in private funding rounds, as well as generating license fees of about EUR10 million. As of June 30, the company had cash and cash equivalents of close to EUR18 million.

"The funds raised from the IPO will take us three or four years down the road," explained Haverhals, pointing out that its monthly burn rate had reached EUR1.5 million in the third quarter of this year, reflecting investments in a new research facility and corporate headquarters in Leiden, and that the figure would fall in the fourth quarter. "We expect to be turning a profit in three to five years," she added.

Crucell's IPO is due to close Oct. 26, but Haverhals said the company was preserving a margin of flexibility and that it might extend the book-building operation by a few days.