Sarepta Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SRPT]]), based in Cambridge, MA, said it is planning a $125 million public stock offering, and on Thursday priced an aggregate of 4,950,485 shares at $25.25 each. It expects the offering to close by Dec. 18.
Sarepta, which is developing a treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, said it also granted the underwriters a 30-day option to buy up to another 752,574 shares. The company estimates that the offering will net approximately $118.2 million after underwriting and other costs are deducted.
Sarepta’s shares closed yesterday at $25.25.The stock has been trading strongly since October, when favorable long-term results were announced from a phase IIb trial of its drug eteplirsen, meant to improve walking in boys with the muscle wasting disease. As my colleague Luke Timmerman wrote then, the October results represented a stunning reversal of fortune from last April, when Sarepta announced that early results from the same trial showed little improvement in walking. The stock traded below $1 a share back then.
Since then the company, formerly known as AVI Biopharma, moved its headquarters from Bothell, WA, to Cambridge, even though it only moved to the Seattle area from Oregon in 2009. Sarepta was founded in 2000, and as Luke wrote in September, it “has burned through more than $320 million of investor money in its history without ever getting close to introducing a marketable drug in the U.S.”
Sarepta said the proceeds from the public offering will be used to continue development of eteplirsen and for general corporate purposes.
