It’s been a slippery slope for Kura Oncology, which slashed the price of its IPO shares and substantially increased the size of its offering tonight. The startup is based in San Diego, and has an office in Cambridge, MA.
The company set out to raise as much as $86 million when it filed for the IPO on October 20, but lowered its sights in a revised filing that sought to raise $60 million by offering 3.75 million shares at $16 a share. Tonight, Kura sold 6.25 million shares at $8 a share—and raised a total of $50 million.
Kura, founded earlier this year to develop new drugs for solid tumors and blood cancers, is trying a new approach to determine if tipifarnib can be used to treat some people with certain blood cancers and solid tumor cancers. Tipifarnib was shelved in 2005, before advances in genomic sequencing had been developed to help drug researchers identify the genetic traits of patients who respond well to certain drugs.
Tipifarnib is currently in mid-stage trials for treating patients with locally advanced tumors that carry HRAS mutations and patients with peripheral T-cell lymphoma.
In a statement, Kura says its shares are expected to begin trading on the NASDAQ market Thursday morning under the ticker symbol KURA.
In addition, Kura has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase as many as 937,500 additional shares to cover any over-allotments.
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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