Last week, CAR-T biotech Poseida Therapeutics said it was gunning for another IPO attempt a year after ditching it in favor of a new funding round led by Novartis.
This time, the IPO is still going ahead, but, in the middle of it, the company has announced a new $110 million funding round ahead of its $115 million public offering attempt.
Novartis didn’t appear on its statement this time, with the financing led by funds advised by Fidelity Management Research Company with help from Adage Capital Management and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors. “A number of current investors also participated in the financing,” the biotech added in its brief update.
In April last year, the cell therapy player put the kibosh on original its IPO plans, settling instead for a $142 million series C round with more than half of the money coming from cell and gene therapy devotee Novartis.
The Big Pharma put up a $75 million equity investment in the San Diego-based company, which has a stable of CAR-T candidates manufactured through a nonviral process.
The expected IPO cash and its series D is earmarked for Poseida’s leading candidate P-BCMA-101, an autologous CAR-T currently in a potentially registrational phase 2 trial for multiple myeloma.
“This financing supports the approach we are taking to leverage our broad proprietary gene engineering platform technologies, including the piggyBac DNA Modification System and Cas-CLOVER site-specific gene editing system, for the creation of numerous differentiated cell and gene therapy product candidates,” said Eric Ostertag, M.D., Ph.D., CEO at Poseida.