Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s initial public offering of twomillion shares was priced late Thursday at $10 and the shares begantrading Friday.

The Boulder, Colo., company raised $20 million, and brought inanother $5.4 million through the sale of stock and warrants to ChironCorp. Underwriters Montgomery Securities Inc., of San Francisco,and Vector Securities International Inc., of Deerfield, Ill., have anoption to purchase 300,000 shares to cover overallotments.

Chiron, of Emeryville, Calif., is Ribozyme's largest shareholder, withabout 10 percent of the 6.4 million shares outstanding. That doesn'tinclude the 444,444 shares Chiron has an option to purchase throughthe warrants at $22.50 each. Another 350,000 Ribozyme shares areissuable upon the exercise of stock options.

The company's platform technology is based on Nobel Prize winnerThomas Cech's discovery of ribozymes, which have the ability toinhibit protein production. Ribozymes, after binding selectively totheir specific messenger RNA(mRNA) target, act catalytically to cutthe target mRNA molecule. Once the mRNA is destroyed theparticular protein won't be produced, indicating the technology canbe applied to any protein-induced disease.

Chiron and Ribozyme are collaborating in five areas: HIV, diabeticretinopathy, corneal transplant rejection, tumor angiogenesis andoncogenes. Ribozyme's first major collaboration, signed in 1993 withthe Parke-Davis division of Morris Plains, N.J.-based Warner-Lambert Co., initially is in the area of osteoarthritis. In June 1995they extended the collaboration.

The company's third collaboration, with Dow Elanco _ a jointventure between The Dow Chemical Co., of Midland, Mich., and EliLilly & Co., of Indianapolis _ involves an agricultural feasibilitystudy using ribozymes in corn.

The initial offering came in between the $9 and $11 price that wasproposed in the prospectus. Ribozyme reported $6.4 million in cashand equivalents at the end of 1995, with a net loss for that year of$12.4 million.

Ribozyme was started by United States Biochemical Corp., ofCleveland, and a group of venture capital firms _ MorgenthalerVentures, of Cleveland; Venrock Associates, of New York; CWGroup, of New York; and Advent International, of Boston. Ribozymewas licensed ribozyme patent rights by U.S. Biochemical.

After Chiron the largest shareholders in Ribozyme are theInternational Biotechnology Trust plc, of London; J.H. Whitney &Co., of New York; Oak Investment Partners, of Menlo Park; andCech. n

-- Jim Shrine

(c) 1997 American Health Consultants. All rights reserved.