Wall Street’s enthusiasm ran high for Cambridge, Mass.-based Black Diamond Therapeutics Inc. (BDT), shares of which (NASDAQ:BDTX) closed 108% higher at $39.48, after the company priced its upsized IPO of about 10.5 million shares at $19 each, for gross proceeds of about $201 million. As recently as December, the company pulled down $85 million in a series C financing. BDT’s lead product candidates target oncogenic driver mutations of the ErbB kinases in EGFR and HER2. At the time, the firm noted that it had raised $194 million thus far. With the IPO, which first set sights on 8.9 million shares in the range of $16 to $18 each, the picture grows even brighter.
Bayer AG and Merck & Co. Inc. took Wall Street by surprise in November with their phase III success testing vericiguat in heart failure (HF), such that the guanylate cyclase stimulator’s odds not only have improved significantly but also in a different way than imagined before.
As attendees of last year’s American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting heard, B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA)-targeting therapies are steadily gaining ground on various fronts, even as companies such as Springworks Therapeutics Inc. bring forward candidates that might boost activity of the class.
Matthew Ros, chief strategy and business officer for Epizyme Inc., said the company is “not providing specific guidance at the moment” about the sales force that will be deployed to market Tazverik (tazemetostat) in follicular lymphoma (FL), an indication for which U.S. regulators are considering the oral, first-in-class EZH2 inhibitor. “But I can assure you we’ve planned very thoughtfully” about the effort, he said. “That's always been a part of why we thought epithelioid sarcoma [ES] was such a strategically important component of the overall business strategy to get on-the-ground experience.” The sales force numbers 19 for now.
Kintai Therapeutics Inc. CEO, president and board member Paul-Peter Tak told BioWorld that the company aims to reach the clinic in the first quarter of next year with obesity agent KTX-0200, which has begun IND-enabling studies after showing sustained weight loss and improved markers of health in preclinical experiments.
Shanghai-based I-Mab Biopharma Co. Ltd. became the first IPO out of the gate this year, pricing its IPO of about 7.4 million American depositary shares (ADSs) – each 10 representing 23 ordinary shares of the company, par value $0.0001 per share – at $14 each, within the planned range of $12 at the low end and $15 at the high. But the stock’s performance might not have been all investors hoped, as shares (NASDAQ:IMAB) closed at $12.50 Jan. 17.
Shanghai-based I-Mab Biopharma Co. Ltd. became the first IPO out of the gate this year, pricing its IPO of about 7.4 million American depositary shares (ADSs) – each 10 representing 23 ordinary shares of the company, par value $0.0001 per share – at $14 each, within the planned range of $12 at the low end and $15 at the high. But the stock’s performance might not have been all investors hoped, as shares (NASDAQ:IMAB) closed at $12.50 Jan. 17.
Albuquerque, N.M.-based Agilvax Inc. CEO Joseph Patti told BioWorld that his firm’s antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) method uses “the same linkers, same payloads” as other firms but the “unique factor for us is the target we’re going after” – SLC7A11 (xCT), an amino acid transporter implicated in the metabolic redox activities of metastatic cancer cells.
Emendo Biotherapeutics Inc. CEO David Baram told BioWorld his firm’s allele-specific gene-editing approach offers such an advantage over previous methods that “we decided to take the challenge of curing diseases that require the highest precision possible,” and the New York-based firm bears an impressive list of partners. “Doors opened immediately and collaborations formed very fast,” sometimes “even faster than we could digest,” he said.
With a label broadened by the FDA in December and two aspiring competitors apparently picked off via late-stage trial blowups, Amarin Corp. plc finds itself in strong position with fish oil therapy Vascepa (icosapent ethyl) – at least pending the outcome of court proceedings that involve challengers to patents for the cardiovascular (CV) drug.
