Viking Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VKTX]]) said its shares are expected to begin trading today, after the San Diego biopharmaceutical raised $24 million in its initial public offering last night by selling 3 million shares at $8 a share. The price fell within the $7 to $9 range set last week, when Viking expected to raise $20 million by offering 2.5 million shares.
Viking was founded in 2012 to develop treatments for diabetes and other metabolic and endocrine disorders, with five drug candidates based on small molecules licensed from Ligand Pharmaceuticals. Its lead drug was an oral treatment in mid-stage trials for Type 2 diabetes.
Terms of the IPO set the company’s market valuation at $73 million.
Viking set out to raise $55 million in September 2014, but postponed the offering. The company returned earlier this year with a new banker and a different lead drug candidate, a compound intended to ease rehabilitation following surgery to repair a broken hip.
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.
View all posts by Bruce V. Bigelow
