Synageva BioPharma Announces $80 Million Stock Offering

Synageva BioPharma  (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GEVA]]) announced today that it is commencing an $80 million secondary offering, less than six months after raising $115 million in a July secondary offering.

The Lexington, MA-based company is developing drugs for very rare diseases, and currently has one candidate, SBC-102, in a Phase I/II clinical trial. The drug targets lysosomal acid lipase deficiency, a genetic disease that leads to the buildup of fatty materials in the liver, spleen, and blood vessel walls, and usually leads to an early death. The late-onset version of the disease treated by SBC-102 is diagnosed in about 25 people out of every one million births.

SBC-102 received fast-track designation for SBC-102 from the FDA in June 2011, but the drug will likely be in clinical trials for another two to three years. Also in June 2011 Synageva went public through a reverse merger with already public Trimeris in an all-stock deal. The Trimeris merger garnered Synageva some revenues from royalties earned by Fuzeon, an older AIDS drug developed by Trimeris and distributed by Roche.

Synageva’s shares closed yesterday at $47.87 and it has a current market cap of $1.16 billion.

Author: Catherine Arnst

Catherine Arnst is an award- winning writer and editor specializing in science and medicine. Catherine was Senior Writer for medicine at BusinessWeek for 13 years, where she wrote numerous cover stories and wrote extensively for the magazine’s website, including contributing to two blogs. She followed a broad range of issues affecting medicine and health and held primary responsibility for covering the battle in Washington over health care reform. Catherine has also written for the Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report and The Daily Beast, and was Director of Content Development for the health practice at Edelman Public Relations for two years. Prior to joining BusinessWeek she was the London-based European Science Correspondent for Reuters News Service. She won the 2004 Business Journalist of the Year award from London’s World Leadership Forum, and in 2003 was the first recipient of the ACE Reporter Award from the European School of Oncology for her five-year body of work on cancer. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University.