US-headquartered vaccine developer HilleVax floated on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on Friday in a $200m initial public offering enabling Takeda, the pharmaceutical firm from which it was spun off, to exit.
The company had increased the size of the offering from approximately 10.3 million shares to nearly 11.8 million shares and priced them at $17.00 each, in the middle of the IPO’s $16 to $18 range. They closed at $20.06 yesterday, giving it a market capitalisation of about $635m.
HilleVax was founded by the late Tadataka Yamada, formerly chief medical and scientific officer for Takeda. Its lead product candidate is a norovirus vaccine candidate known as HIL-214 which has already undergone nine clinical trials while under development by Takeda subsidiary Takeda Vaccines.
Takeda transferred an open investigational new drug application to the company in September 2021, and and it will channel $125m of the IPO proceeds into clinical development of HIL-214, including a phase 2b trial which was initiated yesterday and related manufacturing activities.
HilleVax received $1.3m in convertible note financing from Frazier Healthcare Partners in 2019 before it added $35.8m in an August 2021 convertible note round sized at approximately $140m. Deerfield supplied $15m for that round and Lightspeed Venture Partners $10m.
Takeda Vaccines held a warrant which added almost 5.9 million shares to the 840,000 it already owned, giving it a 17.9% stake in the company post-IPO. Frazier Healthcare Partners’ August note granted it more than 2.7 million extra shares, but its stake was cut from 43.7% to 21.4%.
Joint book-running managers JP Morgan, SVB Securities, Stifel and Guggenheim Securities have the 30-day option to buy a further 1.76 million shares, which could lift the size of the offering to $230m.
Photo courtesy of CDC via Unsplash.