West Coast Biotech Roundup: IPOs, Gilead, Sofinnova, & Denouements

the wet form of age-related macular degeneration. Pfenex raised $50 million in its IPO by offering 8.3 million shares at $6 a share. Pfenex initially planned to raise $65 million by offering 5 million shares priced somewhere between $12 and $14 a share. At $6, Pfenex has a market valuation of $118 million, or 43 percent below its initially proposed market cap of $207 million.

—Seattle-based immunotherapy company Immune Design (NASDAQ: [[ticker:IMDZ]]), meanwhile, did make it through the IPO queue this week—albeit not with as big a splash as it had hoped. Immune Design priced 5 million shares at $12 apiece, the low end of its $12 to $14 range, raising a total of $60 million. Further, insiders bought about $20 million of the stock in the IPO, according to research firm Renaissance Capital. Column Group (26.1 percent stake before the IPO), ProQuest Investments IV (24.1 percent), Alta Partners (20.9 percent) and Versant Ventures (20.9 percent) own most of the company’s shares.

—Another San Diego biotech, La Jolla Pharmaceutical (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LJPC]]), raised over $50 million in gross proceeds after pricing an underwritten offering of 4.8 million shares at $10.50 a share. After deducting the underwriting costs, the company said it plans to use the proceeds for general corporate purposes, including funding its ongoing and future clinical trials, and for general and administrative expenses.

—Brisbane, CA-based Atara Biotherapeutics looks like it’ll have to wait a little longer before it makes its debut on the Nasdaq. A report from Thomson Reuters indicated that Atara has postponed its IPO because clinical data came in that it has to disclose publicly to investors before pricing the offering. Atara was formed a few years ago around some drug programs licensed from Amgen for muscle-wasting disorders and cancer. The company aims to raise about $80 million in its IPO.

—Perhaps encouraged by the strong IPO activity, venture capital firms invested a record $1.8 billion in 122 biotech startups nationwide during the three months that ended June 30, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association, and Thomson Reuters. The previous high for venture dollars invested in biotech was set during the

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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.