Trius IPO Plans Back on Track

San Diego’s Trius Therapeutics, which was forced to postpone its planned IPO earlier this year to accommodate new FDA guidelines, appears to be back on track. The biotech amended its IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this week, and the company’s stock offering is now on the runway and scheduled for the week of July 26, according to Renaissance Capital’s IPO calendar.

This one could be a testament of the fortitude at Trius, which submitted its initial IPO filing eight months ago. It’s also worth noting the 6 million shares the company is planning to offer are still expected to price as originally estimated, between $12 and $14 a share, according to the recently amended filing. If shares are priced at the high end of the range, the IPO would raise about $84 million for the company and its underwriters.

As we reported last year, the venture-backed startup’s lead drug candidate is torezolid phosphate, an antibiotic that targets MRSA infections, a fast-moving and life-threatening bacterial infection. (MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.) The company’s underlying technology for developing other antibiotic treatments appeared promising enough for the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency to award Trius a contract in May that could be worth as much as $29.5 million to develop novel antibiotics for gram-negative bacterial pathogens.

Trius said in March that it was postponing its planned IPO until its protocol for a late-stage clinical trial of torezolid could be revised to reflect new guidance from the FDA on so-called “non-inferiority” trials—which basically show a new drug is about equally effective as an old one. The company resumed plans for its IPO in June, after announcing it had agreed with the FDA on a special protocol assessment for its pivotal clinical trial.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.