If the sight of two biotechs hopping onto the Nasdaq on the same day isn’t enough of a sign that the freezing IPO waters may be thawing, then the fact both companies have overshot expectations may help warm up sentiment further.
Earlier this week, Apogee Therapeutics set out plans for a public offering of around $228 million. That estimate was based on an assumed offering price somewhere between $15 and $17 apiece for 15.6 million shares of common stock.
But as the company prepared to debut on the Nasdaq this morning, Apogee revealed that not only had it secured an offering price at the highest end of the estimates—$17 per share—but 17.6 million shares were sold, 2 million above the original estimates.
That means that Apogee—the first spinout from Paragon Therapeutics—has raised an impressive $300 million from the oversubscribed IPO. Unlike the original $228 million expectation, today’s figure doesn’t account for commissions and other expenses that will need to be deducted. But the biotech still has the opportunity to boost its coffers further thanks to a 30-day option for underwriters to pick up an additional 2.6 million shares.
Apogee has already set out plans to use part of the IPO proceeds to push lead candidate APG777 into a phase 1 trial. The biotech is pitching the IL-13 signaling monoclonal antibody as a potential rival to Regeneron and Sanofi’s atopic dermatitis blockbuster Dupixent.
While at the smaller end of the scale, Sagimet Biosciences also arrived on the Nasdaq this morning having sold more stock than expected. Earlier in the week, the San Mateo, California-based company shared expected pricing info for its IPO: $66.3 million—once expenses are deducted—for 4.68 million shares of series A common stock priced between $15 and $17.
The biotech has since revealed that the final price landed squarely in the middle, at $16 per share. But the amount of shares sold came to 5.3 million, bringing in $85 million before expenses are deducted. There’s still time to boost that further, with underwriters able to purchase more than 796,000 additional shares.
Sagimet plans to use some of the proceeds from the oversubscribed IPO to further develop denifanstat, or TVB-2640, an oral, once-daily pill that is being evaluated in a phase 2b trial for patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis.