Apogee Therapeutics (APGE) shares jumped $4.50 to open at $21.50 in their NASDAQ debut today – Friday, July 14, 2023. The clinical biotech’s stock was up 26.5 percent at its opening trade at 10:47 a.m. EDT today on volume of 474,312 shares, according to NASDAQ. Apogee Therapeutics upsized its IPO by 13 percent to 17.65 million shares – up from 15.625 million shares in the prospectus – and priced the deal at $17.00 – the high end of its $15.00-to-$17.00 range – to raise $300.05 million on Thursday night (July 13,2023).
Jefferies, TD Cowen, Stifel, Guggenheim Securities and Wedbush PacGrow were the joint book-runners.
For people who love numbers – and who doesn’t on Wall Street if the numbers are going your way – there’s some symmetry in the details of this deal:
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17.65 million shares priced at $17.00 each
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The number of additional shares – 2,025,000 shares – is an increase of 12.96 percent – rounds up to 13 percent, of course – in an IPO priced on the 13th of July.
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The IPO’s pricing at $17.00 – the high end – gives Apogee Therapeutics a market cap or valuation of $808.88 million.
We’ll never know, of course, if the symmetry was by design or just serendipity. But the poker players in my family would love it.
Apogee Therapeutics (APGE), based in Waltham, Massachusetts, is a clinical biotech targeting inflammatory and immunology (I&I) disorders. Apogee Therapeutics’ two leading product candidates are monoclonal antibody treatments in clinical trials:
– APG777 is targeting AD (atopic dermatitis), a chronic skin disease, and
– APG808 is targeting COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder), which can lead to emphysema and death.
This is a young biotech with big name backers, including Fidelity and OrbiMed. Fierce Biotech reported that Apogee Therapeutics raised $169 million in private financing when it was launched in 2022 by Paragon Therapeutics, a biologics discovery company that was started in 2021. Apogee has a collaboration agreement with Paragon to develop I&I drugs.
Like most biotechs, Apogee Therapeutics is not profitable. The company has no product revenue and red ink on the balance sheet – a net loss of $39.8 million for the last 12 months, according to the prospectus.
The word is that Apogee Therapeutics’ IPO attracted interest even before launch. But some IPO investors say they took note when Jim Cramer mentioned the deal on Monday night on his “Mad Money” show on CNBC.
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