CG Oncology is hoping to raise $209 million from its upcoming IPO, blazing a trail to the public markets that seems to be enticing more biotechs in the first month of the year.
Bladder cancer-focused CG kicked off 2024 by outlining plans to go public, although the company didn’t offer any figures at the time. Now, the biotech has said it is looking to sell 11.8 million shares at a price of between $16 and $18 apiece.
Assuming that the final share price falls in the middle of this range, CG said it expects to rake in $181.1 million from the IPO. However, if underwriters jump at the opportunity to snap up a further 1.77 million shares then the haul would rise to $209 million, the biotech explained in a Jan. 18 SEC filing.
California-based CG is focused on developing cretostimogene grenadenorepvec, an oncolytic adenovirus encoding immunohematopoietic cytokine granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF). The candidate is designed to infect and replicate in tumor cells, directly killing them while also causing the release of tumor-derived antigens and GM-CSF to stimulate an immune attack. CG has initially been developing the candidate as a treatment for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer.
Despite an icy IPO market last year, CG made no secret of its ambition to go public as far back as August. The company was one of the few that opted for a pre-IPO crossover funding round last year, a financing model that proved popular during the biotech boom years.
Since CG set out its IPO stall, Alto Neuroscience, gene-editing company Metagenomi, Arrivent Biopharma, and CAR-T developer Kyverna Therapeutics have all followed suit. ReCode Therapeutics CEO Shehnaaz Suliman, M.D., also told a Fierce Biotech event last week that her company was mulling going public in the second half of the year.
Last Friday, NeOnc Technologies filed its own plans for a Nasdaq IPO. The brain cancer-focused company didn’t offer any estimates for its share price but said it intended to allocate $23.7 million of the proceeds towards its clinical trials, along with $11.4 million going to R&D and $35 million earmarked for general corporate purposes and working capital. A further $10 million would be used to pay off a short-term loan, Neonc explained in the Jan. 12 SEC filing.
NeOnc’s lead candidate is NEO100, a purified form of perillyl acid that is administered to brain cancer patients intranasaly and is currently in a phase 2 trial. NEO212, a covalently conjugated molecule of the chemotherapy drug temozolomide and perillyl alcohol, is in a phase 1/2 trial for brain tumor patients.