Okyo Pharma announced plans to sell off some of its shares on Friday, but the ophthalmology-focused biotech clearly had a change of heart over the weekend as the offer was withdrawn this morning over “changing market conditions.”
Friday saw the London-based company unveil plans to sell an undisclosed number of ordinary shares in an underwritten public offering—a common way for publicly listed companies to raise some extra cash. Details about when and how many shares would be sold were left vague for the time being, but the company said proceeds would be used for “clinical development … general corporate purposes and working capital.”
That all went out the window early Monday morning when Okyo made a fresh announcement that the offering was off. The biotech’s management had “carefully evaluated the current financial landscape and concluded that it is in the best interest of the company and its shareholders to withdraw the public offering at this time.”
“After thorough consideration and in-depth analysis of market conditions, we have made the difficult but necessary decision to withdraw our public offering,” CEO Gary Jacob added in the Monday release.
Okyo first listed on the Nasdaq in May 2022 in a small-scale IPO that brought in gross proceeds of $2.5 million with the sale of 625,000 American Depositary Shares for $4 each.
Since then, the company’s public listings have run into some trouble. Only minutes before Friday’s announcement about the short-lived offer, Okyo revealed the Nasdaq had written to warn that the company faces being delisted from the stock exchange because the market value of its ordinary shares had sat below the lower limit of $35 million for the previous 30 days.
The biotech’s shares were already delisted from the London Stock Exchange in May. The company had voluntarily requested the cancellation of the listing back in April as “the volume of trading of the ordinary shares … is negligible and does not justify the associated costs.”
Okyo’s stock had a productive day Friday, rising almost 19% to close at $2.20 on the Nasdaq. But in premarket trading Monday, the share price had dipped around 7% to sit at $2.05.
The company’s sole candidate is OK-101, a membrane-anchored chemerin peptide that was licensed from Boston-based OTTx Therapeutics. OK-101 is in a phase 2 trial for dry eye disease, while Okyo also has plans to launch a phase 1 trial in neuropathic corneal pain later this year.