Juno Therapeutics Raises IPO Target to $191 Million
Seattle cancer-immunotherapy company Juno Therapeutics recently announced it has upped the target for its pending initial public offering of stock and gave the first indication of its intended pricing.
The company aims to sell up to 9.25 million shares at $15 to $18 each, it said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. If its underwriters exercise an option to sell another 1.3 million shares, the offering could raise as much as $191 million before costs. Juno would have about 76 million shares of common stock after the IPO, meaning that at the high end of the pricing range, its market capitalization would be roughly $1.4 billion. The offering is expected to price next week, according to IPO tracker Renaissance Capital.
The preliminary prospectus Juno filed in November 2014 outlined plans to raise a maximum of $150 million and gave no pricing details. Investor interest in biotechnology stocks has been strong recently. The Nasdaq Biotechnology Index of 117 companies is up more than 23% since mid-October 2014.
Juno is pursuing several techniques that use genetic engineering to help individual patients’ immune-system cells attack cancer cells. It is building on clinical results and technology from its partnerships with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Seattle Children’s.
Results in small numbers of patients have been strong but the company has yet to begin large-scale trials. Its two most advanced product candidates target patients who have not responded to other treatments for B cell leukemias and lymphomas, which are cancers of the blood and the lymph nodes.
Juno is focused on revolutionizing medicine by re-engaging the body’s immune system to treat cancer. Founded on the vision that the use of human T cells as therapeutics will drive one of the next important phases in medicine, it is developing cell-based cancer immunotherapies based on its chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) and high-affinity T cell receptor (TCR) technologies to genetically engineer T cells to recognize and kill cancer cells. The company has shown compelling evidence of tumor shrinkage in clinical trials using multiple cell-based product candidates to address refractory B-cell lymphomas and leukemias. Longer term, Juno aims to develop its cell-based platform to include additional product candidates to address a broad range of cancers and human diseases. For more information, visit www.junotherapeutics.com.
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