Tossing their names in the hat just before long weekend, four life sciences companies filed for $100 million IPOs Friday afternoon.
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Tossing their names in the hat just before the long weekend, four life science companies filed for $100 million IPOs Friday afternoon.
Rallybio launched three years ago to tackle rare diseases by industry vet Martin Mackay and two of his Alexion co-workers after the company axed their jobs along with 600 more. After scooping up $145 million in Series B financing last May, the company is ready to take it public with an IPO debut.
The team’s first target is a rare condition that occurs in about one in every 2,000 births. When a baby inherits a protein found on the father’s platelets that is absent from the mother’s, the mother’s immune system launches an attack with an antibody that can destroy the baby’s platelets and lead to bleeding, sometimes in the brain. The most common protein that causes Fetal and Neonatal Alloimmune Thrombocytopenia (FNAIT) is HPA-1a.
While current treatments usually involve close monitoring of the baby after birth, Rallybio’s approach aims to prevent it altogether by giving mothers a polyclonal anti-HPA-1a antibody to suppress the immune response early in the pregnancy. Along with the IPO announcement, a clinical proof of concept for the RLYB211 antibody also came out Friday. The treatment was safe and able to rapidly and completely clear HAP-1a platelets in six male participants.
Also in the works is RLYB212, a subcutaneous monoclonal anti-HPA-1a antibody, which is expected to enter the clinic in the first quarter of next year. With these treatments in the works for at-risk mothers, Rallybio hopes to eliminate the risk of FNAIT occurrence.
While the $100 million from the IPO is expected to be primarily funneled into the FNAIT programs, three other programs are also in the pipeline for diseases of complement dysregulation, immuno-inflammation and metabolic indications. It’ll go up on the board as RLYB when the deal is done.
After scooping up $110 million in October, Swiss health tech SOPHiA GENETICS is ready to hit the NASDAQ for its next raise. Providing a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, the company has partnered with Hitachi, MiNA Therapeutics, and GE Healthcare just this year. Ten-year-old SOPHiA has around 240 applications used by its partners for precision medicine across all primary disease areas.
Using the power of AI has become increasingly popular in the life sciences landscape. Drug development, clinical trials, real-world patients all provide mountains of data to sort through. AI dramatically speeds the process for discovery and development.
SOPHiA hopes to make its stand in the field through its size. With over 1,000 hospitals using their platform, the real-world data collection can prove essential to the future treatments in the works. Funds from the IPO will continue to build out the platform, expand marketing efforts as well as maintain existing partnerships. SOPHiA will trade under the symbol SOPH.
After the Caribou Biosciences’ $115 million Series C, CEO Rachel Haurwitz, Ph.D., said an IPO was “conceivable one day.” That day has come as the company, co-founded in 2011 by Nobel laureate and CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D., added its name to the list of SEC filings last week with a $100-million place holder last week.
Funds from the IPO will funnel into Caribou’s three off-the-shelf CAR-T therapies. The lead is an anti-CD10 candidate, CB-010, which is currently in Phase 1 for B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
The raise will also support IND-enabling activities for CB-011 and CB-012, both for relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma but with different targets. CB-012 utilizes a fully human single-chain variable fragment that has been exclusively in-licensed from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in an agreement last fall.
Caribou announced a $40 million partnership with pharma giant AbbVie, with another $300 million in potential milestones. This scores AbbVie exclusive rights to the company’s next-gen Cas12a chRDNA genome-editing and cell therapy tech for two therapies against undisclosed targets.
While Caribou’s CAR-T programs target blood cancer, the biotech is also working on allogeneic NK cell therapies for use against solid tumors. The shares for Caribou will list under the symbol CRBU.
Just a few weeks after introducing its latest tech, cell analysis solutions developer Cytek Biosciences is ready to take a swing at the market, filing for a $100 million IPO.
The company’s Aurora and Northern Lights systems are flow cytometers that deliver full-spectrum profiling. With over 750 instruments in 620 companies around the world, Cytek’s latest release is a cell-sorting system that delivers high-resolution capabilities at the single-cell level to resolve and sort challenging cell populations, regardless of assay complexity.
The California-based company will list under the symbol CTKB.
