The icy IPO market for biotech may be thawing slightly, with two companies—Apogee Therapeutics and Sagimet Biosciences—revealing their pricing plans for going public.
Apogee, the first spinout from Paragon Therapeutics, launched at the end of 2022 with a sizable $169 million on hand. The inflammatory and immune-focused biotech quickly set its sights on the public markets, announcing in June plans to list on the Nasdaq.
The biotech has now revealed an expected public offering of around $228 million, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed July 10. The figure is based on an assumed offering price of $16 per share for 15.6 million shares of common stock. The offering could reach $263 million if underwriters fully exercise their option to buy additional shares of common stock.
The biotech appears to be living up to its namesake—Apogee, which means the highest point in the development of something. In an almost year-long stretch of frozen IPO conditions for biotech, with only a handful of companies debuting on the market in 2023, the young biotech is charging ahead.
Apogee plans to use the proceeds from the offering to fund clinical trials, manufacturing programs and preclinical research. The company’s lead candidate is a monoclonal antibody, dubbed APG777, that Apogee is touting as a potential rival to Dupixent. Like Regeneron and Sanofi’s blockbuster, the asset is designed to inhibit IL-13 signaling, although Dupixent also inhibits IL-4 signaling. In preclinical studies, APG777 has demonstrated “equivalent or superior” IL-13 inhibition than Eli Lilly’s investigational therapy lebrikizumab—another IL-13 drug, according to Apogee.
The biotech expects to investigate APG777 in similar indications to Dupixent and lebrikizumab, namely atopic dermatitis and asthma. A phase 1 trial in healthy volunteers is planned in Australia for the second half of this year, which is designed to set up phase 2 and 3 studies in atopic dermatitis.
At the same time, San Mateo, California-based Sagimet has also shared expected pricing info for its IPO: $66.3 million for 4.68 million shares of series A common stock. Using an approximate price of $16 per share, the liver disease and cancer company said the offering could reach $76.7 million if underwriters exercise their option to purchase additional shares in full.
The company had actually planned to hit the markets in 2021 with a $75 million offering—a time when biotech IPOs flourished—but backed away in early 2022 as the market started to ice over.
Sagiment plans to use the potential $66 million to further development of denifanstat, or TVB-2640, an oral, once-daily pill that is being evaluated in a phase 2b trial for patients with non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. The company also hopes to use the money to launch a pivotal phase 3 trial for the program in the same indication.