(Updated, 2/7/14, 12:39 pm ET) Bind Therapeutics started off its 2013 with a flurry of big partnerships and a name change designed to show it’s serious about making its own drugs. Now it’s trying to cap it off by joining the parade of biotech companies lining up for the public markets.
The Cambridge, MA-based company became the latest biotech to inch its way towards the Nasdaq on Monday, filing papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission outlining plans to raise $80.5 million through an IPO. It aims to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “BIND.”
(Correction below) Bind has raised about $94.2 million total since its inception in 2007, of which about $76.2 million consisted of preferred stock and convertible debt securities. Polaris Partners is its largest institutional shareholder, holding an 18 percent stake. Polaris is followed by Flagship Ventures (13.9 percent), Rusnano (11.5 percent), DHK Investments (8.6 percent), Arch Venture Partners (8.5 percent), and NanoDimensions (5 percent). Bind co-founders Robert Langer (7.6 percent), the famed MIT professor, and Harvard Medical School professor Omid Farokhzad (3.3 percent), are also among the company’s most significant stockholders. (An earlier version of this story indicated that Farokhzad owned 13.9 percent of Bind’s stock before the IPO)
Credit Suisse (USA) Securities, Cowen and Co., Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., and JMP Securities are Bind’s underwriters.
Bind was originally called Bind Biosciences and was built on technology that it calls “Accurins,” which are nanoparticles that are supposed to help distribute a drug more efficiently throughout the body, and thus target diseased tissue more effectively. That technology has enabled Bind to piece together a network of collaboration deals with the likes of Pfizer (NYSE: [[ticker:PFE]]), AstraZeneca (NYSE: [[ticker:AZN]]), and Amgen (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMGN]]), which were all interested in loading up unspecified drugs of their choice into the company’s Accurins. It also gave Bind a chance to become a drug development company in its own right. After inking its first deal with Amgen in January, Bind changed its name to reflect that new goal, all while moving its lead drug, Bind-014, towards a mid-stage clinical trial.
Bind-014 is an Accurin that is supposed to take the well-known, but highly toxic chemotherapy docetaxel—which is used in a number of breast, head, neck, and other cancers—and deliver it in a way that makes it easier for cancer patients to efficiently and absorb, making the drug more effective while reducing its side effects. Bind has two mid-stage clinical trials underway that test the drug in patients with non-small cell lung cancer and prostate cancer. It expects data from those studies in the second half of 2014.
Bind’s three partnerships, meanwhile, all involve drugs that haven’t reached clinical trials as of yet. Though the deals give Bind the opportunity to earn more than $1 billion if things break right, almost all of that must still be proven. The three upfront payments gave Bind about $13 million combined, according to the IPO prospectus.
