Mirati announces CEO resignation, then a $300M public offering after disclosing clinical plans

David Meek, the CEO of Mirati Therapeutics, has resigned from the biotech and its board, the San Diego drug developer said Tuesday after the markets closed.

Minutes later, Mirati also announced plans for a $250 million public offering, with $37.5 million more on the table for underwriters, and reported a quarterly update. Overnight, the biotech increased the offering size to 9.67 million shares for expected gross proceeds of $300 million. Mirati priced the sale at $27.80 per share, its Tuesday closing price, with a 30-day option for another 1.6 million shares. The company’s stock price $MRTX was up about 6% before Wednesday’s opening bell.

The “mutually agreed” departure comes about nine months after Mirati became a commercial-stage company, following in Amgen’s footsteps in securing a drug approval for a KRAS cancer treatment, and as it looks to move beyond a recent Phase III flop.

Mirati’s drug, Krazati, reeled in net product revenues of $13.4 million for the second quarter, including $11.7 million in commercial sales and $1.7 million collected from a “third-party commercial customer for its clinical trials,” the biotech said in its earnings release. The EU’s medical regulatory committee recommended against conditional authorization of the drug last month. Amgen’s competing drug, Lumakras, which was approved about 18 months prior to Krazati, racked up $77 million in sales in the same quarter, the drugmaker said last week.

Charles Baum

Taking Meek’s spot on an interim basis is former CEO and founder Charles Baum, who is currently president and head of R&D. Mirati will search for a permanent CEO and Meek will consult for the company through mid-October. Baum was set to retire this quarter, per a plan Mirati laid out last November.

“I am proud of the accomplishments Mirati has achieved with the successful launch of KRAZATI and advancing an innovative pipeline,” Meek said in a statement. “I had the pleasure of working with an accomplished team, and together we have helped to improve the lives of many people which is and will continue to be a purpose and passion going forward.”

Meek took on the CEO post from Baum in September 2021, joining after an implosion at FerGene, and prior to that, he had the lead role at Ipsen. Weeks into steering the ship at Mirati, the operating and finance chiefs were out the door.

As part of the quarterly update, Mirati said by year’s end it will start a Phase III combination study of Krazati and Merck’s Keytruda as a first-line treatment for patients with non-small cell lung cancer with TPS greater than or equal to 50%. This month, the biotech began a Phase II study of Krazati in combination with chemo-immunotherapy for patients with TPS below 50%.

In the first half of next year, Mirati will also start a Phase II study of its PRMT5 inhibitor MRTX1719, in patients with solid tumors who have MTAP-gene deletions.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to include details on Mirati’s upsized offering. 

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