After ditching an attempted IPO earlier this year in favor of another funding round, CAR-T biotech Poseida Therapeutics is happy to go again.
In April last year, the cell therapy player put the kibosh on original its IPO plans, settling instead for a $142 million series C round with more than half of the money coming from cell and gene therapy devotee Novartis.
The Big Pharma put up a $75 million equity investment in the San Diego-based company, which has a stable of CAR-T candidates manufactured through a nonviral process.
At the time, Poseida CEO Eric Ostertag told Fierce Biotech: “This plan was initially delayed due to the government shutdown, then delayed again to refile financials that went stale during the wait. Throughout the course of these delays, we continued prior conversations with strategic interests, one of which was Novartis.”
The company had planned to file an IPO again later in 2019, but it’s now doing so more than a year later in the middle of a pandemic that has, oddly, been a boon for biotech IPOs.
It’s looking for $115 million, with much of that earmarked for the company’s leading candidate P-BCMA-101, an autologous CAR-T currently in a potentially registrational phase 2 trial for multiple myeloma.