In a page taken from the discount retailing playbook, San Diego’s Trius Therapeutics slashed the proposed price of its pending IPO by roughly 60 percent and increased the number of shares it is offering by 67 percent.
Trius now plans to offer at least 10 million shares at $5 apiece, after initially planning to sell six million shares at a price range between $12 and $14 a share, according to Renaissance Capital, which tracks IPOs. The biotech, which was founded in 2004, plans to use the proceeds to complete late-stage clinical trials of its antibiotic, torezolid phosphate.
As Luke reported last year, the company’s lead antibiotic candidate is from the same class of compounds as Pfizer’s linezolid (Zyvox), which represents a billion-dollar-plus market. Trius, which says it has a technology platform for creating a class of similar molecules, says its torezolid phosphate represents an improved alternative, a pill that can be taken at a lower dose, over a shorter period of time, and be given once a day instead of twice.
Trius has raised more than $68 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sofinnova Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Versant Ventures, and Prism Venture Partners, according to VentureWire. The venture investors do not appear to be selling shares in the initial offering.
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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