Intellia and Iveric sell stocks to raise money, each netting $300M

Wednesday afternoon, Gene editing company Intellia and eye disease company Iveric Bio announced that they had each raised $300 million by selling off some of their stocks. The two biotechs are the latest to raise money via public stock offerings, an increasingly popular tactic used by public companies as the industry falls back from its pandemic boom.

John Leonard

Intellia’s raise comes a few weeks after it posted an update on its hereditary angioedema program that uses CRISPR/Cas9 to directly edit the gene that makes the protein responsible for the attacks that occur with the disease. In that interim cut, Intellia showed that patients dosed with its one-time therapy became attack free (at least thus far) after an observation period of 16 weeks, with the longest patient remaining attack free for 10 months.

Following the data release, Intellia CEO John Leonard boldly claimed that the therapy “may be a functional cure.”

In raising $300 million, Intellia sold just over 6.5 million shares of its common stock at $45.80 a share. Goldman Sachs, the underwriter of the offering, also has an option to buy around another 980,000 shares. Intellia told Endpoints News in an email that the funds would be used to advance its clinical and pre-clinical CRISPR-based therapies.

Thursday morning, however, Intellia’s stock $NTLA was trading down 10%.

Iveric, on the other hand, is working towards an FDA submission for its drug for an advanced form of AMD known as geographic atrophy. The biotech dropped subgroup data on its drug in September at an ophthalmology conference in Chicago.

In early November, it submitted the first part of its NDA for avacincaptad pegol, a complement C5 protein inhibitor. In this arena, Iveric is trailing a bit behind Apellis, which is also developing a geographic atrophy treatment, though the FDA recently pushed its decision deadline on Apellis’ drug back to February. The decision was initially slated for November 26.

From its stock offering, Iveric said it raised $300.4 million from selling 13.3 million shares of its common stock at $22.50 a share. Iveric is giving underwriters an option to buy 2 million more shares at that price. Iveric said in an SEC filing that the money would be put towards “preparation for and, subject to regulatory approval, potential commercial launch of avacincaptad pegol in GA in the United States, including the hiring and associated expenses of a sales force, and for working capital and other general corporate purposes.”

Earlier this month, Biohaven also raised around $300 million on a public offering. And Cerevel, which in August infamously raised $250 million based on rival data, recently set itself up to sell up to $900 million worth of its stock via public offerings over the coming years.

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