US-based exosome therapeutics developer Codiak BioSciences will go public today in an $82.5m initial public offering representing an exit for life science real estate investment trust Alexandria Real Estate Equities.
The company is issuing 5.5 million shares on the Nasdaq Global Market priced at $15.00 each, in the middle of the offering’s $14 to $16 range.
Codiak is developing medicines to treat diseases with high unmet medical need, including cancer, by using extracellular cell vesicles known as exosomes as intercellular drug delivery vehicles.
Approximately $24.8m of the IPO proceeds will be used to advance a drug candidate called exoSting through a phase 1/2 clinical trial in for advanced/metastatic, recurrent, injectable solid tumours.
A further $10.1m will fund a phase 1 trial for a second candidate, exoIL-12, in healthy volunteers and patients with early-stage cutaneous T cell lymphoma. Codiak will put $34.3m into expanding its engEx Platform in addition to other preclinical development activities.
The company had raised $168m in total including $61m in series B funding in 2016 from investors including Alexandria Real Estate Equities’ venture capital arm, Alexandria Venture Investments.
The round also featured financial services and investment group Fidelity, Alaska Permanent Fund and existing investors Arch Venture Partners and Flagship Ventures.
The series B participants joined Qatar Investment Authority, Flagship Pioneering, Boxer Capital, Sirona Capital, EcoR1 Capital and Casdin Capital in a $76.5m series C round the following year.
Arch Venture Partners owned a 27.7% stake cut to 19.5% in the offering. Flagship Ventures came out with a 13.1% stake, Fidelity with a 10.4% share and University of Texas System’s board of regents with 4.6%.
Goldman Sachs, Evercore ISI and William Blair are joint book-running managers for the IPO while Wedbush PacGrow is lead manager. They have the 30-day option to buy up to 825,000 more shares which would take the size of the offering to approximately $95m.
