Codiak – based on research at Gothenburg and MD Anderson Cancer Center – has succeeded in going public after previously cancelling plans.
US-based exosome therapeutics developer Codiak Biosciences has gone public in an $82.5m initial public offering offering an exit to University of Texas System.
The company is issuing 5.5 million shares on the Nasdaq Global Market priced at $15 each, in the middle of the offering’s $14 to $16 range. It had previously filed for an IPO in May 2019, but cancelled those plans within two months.
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.
The approach is based on research conducted at the VentureLabs unit of Flagship Pioneering, by Jan Lotvall, chairman of Krefting Research Centre at University of Gothenburg, and by Raghu Kalluri, chairman and professor of the Department of Cancer Biology and director of the Metastasis Research Center at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
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 life sciences real estate trust 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.
– A version of this article first appeared on our sister site, Global Corporate Venturing.
