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Two Biotechs Each Issue $300M+ IPOs

NASDAQ share price display

(Julien Gong Min, Flickr)

27 June 2019. Two biotechnology enterprises in the U.S. issued their initial public stock offerings yesterday, with each company raising at least $300 million in their transactions. BridgeBio Pharma in Palo Alto, California offered 20.5 million shares priced at $14.00 to $16.00, while Adaptive Biotechnologies Corp. in Seattle issued 15 million shares priced at $20.00.

BridgeBio Pharma, trading on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol BBIO, is a developer of therapies for rare inherited diseases and cancer. The company says its technologies combine genomic sequencing and molecular biology, with computational techniques that tap into medical records databases and patient registries. BridgeBio discovers and develops new treatments through subsidiary companies, each with its own resources and particular assets.

The four year-old company lists three treatments for rare inherited disorders now in clinical trials, as well as a therapy for tumors resulting from fibroblast growth factor receptors expressed in breast, lung, gastric, and other cancer types. The company also says it has 11 other programs in preclinical development for inherited disorders and cancer, including two gene therapies.

Adaptive Biotechnologies, trading on the Nasdaq as ticker symbol ADPT, is a spin-off enterprise from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, founded in 2009. Its main technology sequences genes from receptors on T- and B-cells, white blood cells in the immune system, for diagnostics and therapies. The company says its high-throughput sequencing provides a deeper understanding of the quantity and diversity of T- and B-cells, and it supplements this analysis with machine learning and computational biology to map T-cell receptors to antigens — proteins that emit immune-system signals for a particular disease — and design T-cell receptors as therapies.

So far, Adaptive Biotechnologies accumulated a clinical database of more than 30 billion immune receptors it calls immunomics. The company applies machine learning to derive deeper insights into immune health and discover new treatment candidates. As reported by Science & Enterprise in January 2018, Adaptive Biotechnologies and Microsoft are collaborating on a map connecting T-cell receptors and antigens, eventually leading to a universal diagnostic test. Machine learning is expected to help analyze the genetics in trillions of T-cell receptors and matching them to the millions of antigens.

BridgeBio Pharma shares opened today on the Nasdaq at $17.00 per share, above its target range, and by the closing bell at 4:00 pm ET rose to $27.55 per share, a gain of 62 percent. Adaptive Biotechnologies opened at its target share price of $20.00 and closed at $40.30, an increase of 101.5 percent. The overall Nasdaq composite index rose 0.7 percent for the day.

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