San Diego’s Celladon Sets Price Range for IPO Shares

Another San Diego life sciences company is taxiing toward an IPO takeoff.

Celladon, a biotechnology company targeting heart disease, disclosed plans to offer 5 million shares of its stock at a price range of $14 to $16 a share, according to a regulatory filing. At the mid-range price of $15 a share, Celladon would raise about $75 million in gross proceeds from its IPO. At that price, the company’s market value would be about $257 million, according to Renaissance Capital.

The company plans to lists its shares on the Nasdaq market under the ticker symbol CLDN.

Celladon was founded in 2000 and has 14 employees. The company has been on a fast track since early 2012, though, after scientists in Los Angeles said they had used Celladon’s cardiac therapy to regenerate heart muscle in patients who had suffered heart attacks. Shortly afterward, the company raised $43 million to advance the clinical development of Mydicar, its lead drug candidate. The FDA later granted “fast track status” to Mydicar.

More recently, in mid-September, Celladon disclosed “encouraging” follow-up results from a three-year, long-term study of patients treated with Mydicar for advanced heart failure. The company revealed its IPO filing last month.

Celladon is targeting its stem cell and small molecule drug treatments on a family of enzymes that play an integral part in regulating intra-cellular calcium. In its IPO filing, Delladon says calcium dysregulation is a key factor in heart failure, diabetes, and neurodegenerative disease. Mydicar uses gene therapy to target a particular enzyme, called SERCA2a, which becomes deficient in patients with heart failure.

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.