Metacrine, a liver and gastrointestinal disease therapy developer backed by pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly, floated yesterday in an $85m initial public offering on the Nasdaq Global Market.
The offering was made up of 6.54 million shares priced at $13.00 each, in the middle of the offering’s $12 to $14 range. The company’s shares opened at $14.39m on their first day of trading yesterday before closing at $11.76.
Founded in 2015, Metacrine is developing treatments for gastrointestinal and liver disease and will put a total of $25m of the IPO proceeds into phase 2a clinical trials for drug candidates MET409 and MET642 in the liver disease non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).
Another $5m will go to a phase 2a trial for one of the candidates in an inflammatory bowel disease known as ulcerative colitis and between $9m and $13m is set to support a phase 2b trial for one of them in NASH.
Metacrine had raised a total of $125m as of its last round, a $65m series C in mid-2018 led by Venrock Healthcare Partners and backed by Eli Lilly unit Lilly Asia Ventures and Alexandria Venture Investments, the venture capital arm of real estate investment Alexandria Real Estate Equities.
Arrowmark Partners, Invus, Vivo Capital, Arch Venture Partners, Franklin Templeton Investments, Deerfield Management, VenBio, Polaris Partners and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) also took part in the series C round.
NEA led the company’s $22m series B round the previous year, investing with Alexandria Venture Investments, Arch Venture Partners, Polaris Partners and VenBio.
VenBio remains Metacrine’s largest shareholder, with a 10.9% stake diluted from 14.6% in the offering. Its other notable investors are Arch Venture Partners (10.4% post-IPO), Polaris Partners (10.3%), NEA (8.8%) and Alexandria Venture Investments (4.9%).
Jefferies, Evercore ISI and RBC Capital Markets are joint book-running managers for the offering while Canaccord Genuity is lead manager. They have the 30-day option to acquire another 981,000 shares at the IPO price, which would potentially lift its size to $97.8m.
