More stock, priced at the top of its range: Phase II biotech UpStream Bio (UPB) upsized its IPO at pricing to 15.0 million shares – up from 12.5 million in the prospectus – and priced the deal at $17.00 – the top of its $15.00-to-$17.00 range – to raise $255.0 million on Thursday night, Oct. 10, 2024. UpStream Bio’s stock surged to open at $21.50 – up $4.50 for a 26.5 percent gain from its $17.00 IPO price – at 12:42 p.m. EDT today – Friday, Oct. 11, 2024 – on the NASDAQ on volume of 655,129 shares.
J.P.Morgan, TD Cowen, Piper Sandler and William Blair acted as joint book-runners.
At pricing, UpStream Bio had a market cap of $872.81 million.
UpStream Bio, founded in 2021, is developing its leading drug candidate, verekitug, a monoclonal antibody, in two separate Phase II clinical trials – one trial is focused on severe asthma, with Phase II topline data due in the second half of 2026, and the other trial is focused on chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps, with Phase II topline data due in the second half of 2025.
The Waltham, Massachusetts-based biotech plans to start development of verekitug as a treatment for COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) in 2025, the prospectus said.
Principal shareholders include entities affiliated with OrbiMed, with a pre-IPO stake of 13.4 percent and a post-IPO stake of 9.97 percent, and AI Upstream LLC, controlled by billionaire Len Blavatnik, according to the prospectus. AI Upstream LLC owns a pre-IPO stake of 11.88 percent and a post-IPO stake of 8.84 percent.
UpStream Bio has received about $4.2 million in licensing and collaboration revenue so far – for the years 2022 and 2023 and the first six months of 2024 – under a licensing agreement with Maruho, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, according to the prospectus. The Phase II biotech, however, is not profitable. For the 12 months that ended June 30, 2024, UpStream Bio reported a net loss of $40.51 million on collaboration revenue of $2.2 million.
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