Shares of San Diego’s Vital Therapies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VTL]]) traded slightly above its IPO price this morning, in the company’s first day of trading.
The biotherapeutic company raised $54 million in its initial public offering, after pricing 4.5 million shares last night at $12 per share, for an initial market cap of approximately $253 million. That was below the $13 to $15 range the company had set in a recent regulatory filing.
Vital Therapies, founded in 2003, has developed an artificial liver support system that uses human liver-derived cells to augment the metabolic functions of a patient’s liver, enabling the patient’s own liver to recover or providing a bridge to transplant.
The company’s plans for an IPO were first disclosed in regulatory filings last November, when the company planned to raise about $75 million. But a sharp slowdown in Wall Street’s appetite for biotech IPOs led Vital Therapies to postpone its IPO, and the company had to adjust its expectations. When the company recently revived its IPO plans, the filings show it intended to raise about $63 million.
In February, Vital Therapies raised $12 million from an undisclosed venture investor.
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.
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