Mineralys Therapeutics hopes to raise $192 million in its initial public offering - one week after Structure Therapeutics announced its own IPO.
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Hypertension-focused Mineralys Therapeutics announced its upsized initial public offering Thursday, putting 12,000,000 shares of common stock for sale for $16.00 per share – and infusing a little hope into a bear biopharma market.
The offering is set to close Feb. 14.
Mineralys expects to make $192 million in gross proceeds before taking away underwriting discounts, commissions and other expenses associated with the offering. The company will make its debut on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on Feb. 10 under the ticker $MLYS.
Based in Pennsylvania, Mineralys launched in April 2021 with $40 million in Series A funding and a goal of seeing its hypertension hopeful MLS-101 through the clinic. The company is backed by HBM Healthcare Investments and Samsara BioCapital, both of which led the Series A round and were joined by Catalys Pacific and Adam Street Partners.
MLS-101 is an oral inhibitor of the enzyme aldosterone synthase, which plays an important role in hypertension. The candidate was in-licensed from Mitsubishi Tanabe Corporation and, at the time of Mineralys’ launch, had already received clearance from the FDA to begin Phase II proof-of-concept testing.
A year later, in June 2022, the company collected $118 million in its Series B financing round, which was led by European private equity firm Andera Partners, through its MedTech practice Andera Life Sciences. Mineralys channeled its Series B proceeds into MLS-101.
In November 2022, Mineralys announced topline data for the Phase II trial of MLS-101, dubbed Target-HTN. The hypertension candidate met its primary and secondary endpoints at both the 50-mg and 100-mg once-daily doses.
In patients with inadequately controlled hypertension, treatment with MLS-101 induced statistically significant and clinically meaningful drops in systolic blood pressure relative to placebo. Mineralys reported similar effects for diastolic, nighttime and central blood pressure.
Doors Edge Open for IPOs
Mineralys is the second biopharma company to go public in as many weeks.
On Feb. 3, Structure Therapeutics announced its own initial public offering and put 10,740,000 American depositary shares (ADS) up for sale for $15.00 per unit. Each ADS is equivalent to three ordinary shares, yielding a gross total of $161.1 million in gross earnings before discounts, commissions and other expenses.
Structure is developing oral small molecule drugs for metabolic and pulmonary diseases. It currently has two Phase I assets for pulmonary arterial hypertension and type 2 diabetes and obesity.
A few other companies have braved the industry-wide chill and gone public in recent months. In January, Texas’ Coya Therapeutics went for a tiny $15.25 million offering while in October 2022, gene therapy developer Prime Medicine announced its $175 million Nasdaq bid.
