San Diego’s aTyr Pharma Raises Total Proceeds of $75M in IPO

Shares of San Diego-based aTyr Pharma are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq market tomorrow morning, after the company priced its IPO late today, selling nearly 5.4 million shares at $14 a share.

The offering raised gross proceeds of $75 million, and gives aTyr a fully diluted market value of $333 million, according to Renaissance Capital, a manager of IPO-based exchange traded funds. In a statement, aTyr said it also granted underwriters a 30-day option to purchase as many as 804,000 additional shares.

The company’s stock will trade under the ticker symbol “LIFE,” which was left unused by Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies after Waltham, MA-based Thermo Fisher Scientific completed its $13.6 billion buyout in early 2014.

The San Diego biotherapeutics company specializes in drugs derived from a new class of natural proteins called physiocrines that offer potential therapeutic advantages to existing anti-inflammatory drugs. Paul Schimmel, a biochemist at The Scripps Research Institute, helped show that physiocrines are naturally occurring proteins that modulate the body’s immune response. He is a scientific founder of aTyr and serves on the company’s board.

At the end of April, aTyr said the FDA granted its orphan drug designation for the company’s lead drug candidate, Resolaris, for the threatment of patients with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), a genetically based degeneration of muscles of the face, shoulder blades, and upper arms.

The company says Resolaris is being developed as a first-in-class intravenous protein therapeutic for the treatment of rare myopathies with an immune component. The compound is in an early stage clinical trial in adult patients with FSHD at multiple sites in the European Union.

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.