San Diego’s Receptos, Ambit Biosciences, Get Ready for IPO Debuts

Receptos, Immune Disorders

[Corrected 5/6/13, 10:50 am. See below.] San Diego-based Receptos, a biotech developing new treatments for immune disorders, is among 13 IPOs expected to go public this week, according to Renaissance Capital, a financial firm in Greenwich, CT, that specializes in IPOs.

Another San Diego biotech, Ambit Biosciences, also set a price range for its shares last week, but Ambit was not in the lineup for IPOs ready to take off this week.

Receptos plans to raise $71 million by offering 4.7 million shares at a price between $14 and $16 per share, according to Renaissance. The company submitted its IPO filing on Feb. 13 under new securities law that enables companies to submit their registration statement confidentially for SEC review before making their plans public. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Receptos would command a market value of $257 million. The company plans to list on the Nasdaq market under the symbol RCPT.

In a recent regulatory filing, Receptos said its lead drug candidate is an oral drug in late-stage clinical trials that is being developed for the treatment of Relapsing Multiple Sclerosis and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Receptos was founded in 2008 and so far has not generated any revenue from product sales. The company posted a loss of $17.7 million in 2012, and booked $8.6 million in revenue from collaborative R&D agreements and other fees, according to a recent regulatory filing.

Ambit Biosciences has been developing small molecule therapeutics to treat cancers, and was working under a strategic partnership with Astellas Pharma. But the Japanese pharma said in March that it would end its collaboration with Ambit by September.

[Corrected to increase valuation after IPO.] Ambit plans to raise $65 million by offering 4.6 million shares at a price range of $13 to $15, according to Renaissance. At the midpoint of the proposed range, the market value of Ambit Biosciences would be about $194 million. A spokesman for Ambit notes that an additional $25 million raised from a concurrent private placement leads to a total valuation of almost $220 million at $14 a share. Ambit has designated its lead drug candidate for patients who have a particularly aggressive form of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), and who have relapsed. Quizartinib targets a mutation in a kinase protein signaling pathway (FMS-like tyrosine kinase-3, or FLT3), which represents roughly a third of AML patients, or about 4,000 new cases a year.

Ambit Biosciences was founded in 2000 and plans to list on the Nasdaq exchange under the symbol AMBI. The company filed its IPO plans confidentially in December.

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.