Regulus Therapeutics must be playing to a tough crowd.
The San Diego biopharmaceutical startup, which planned to offer 4.5 million shares priced between $10 and $12 a share, revised its IPO filing this morning—and now plans instead to offer 11.25 million shares at $4 a share.
The company, which is slated to go public this week on the Nasdaq market under the ticker RGLS, is focused on discovering and developing drugs that target microRNAs to treat a broad range of diseases. MicroRNAs, are fragments of ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules that play a critical role in regulating biochemical signals at the cellular level. In its IPO filing, Regulus says microRNAs represent a potential new class of drugs that could be as significant as small molecule drugs, biologics, and monoclonal antibodies.
The company was founded in 2007 with technology spun out from Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: [[ticker:ALNY]]) and Carlsbad-based Isis Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: [[ticker:ISIS]]).
Regulus plans to net about $43 million from its IPO, with another $25 million anticipated from the sale of shares in a concurrent private placement with AstraZeneca, a drug development partner. The company intends to use proceeds for preclinical and clinical drug development.
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
