A company that markets the first gene therapy to win European Medicines Agency approval has filed for an initial public offering.
London-based Orchard Therapeutics is looking to become the next biotechnology company to go from a big venture capital fundraising to an IPO. The firm, which also has a location in Boston that it opened in April, filed an F-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a $172.5 million offering on the Nasdaq, on which it would trade under the ticker symbol ORTX. The move comes less than two months after the company closed an oversubscribed $150 million Series C financing round, on Aug. 13. An F-1 form is used when a foreign company files for an IPO, while a US company would use an S-1 form.
In April, Orchard acquired British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline’s rare disease gene therapy portfolio, including Strimvelis, which the EMA approved in May 2016 for adenosine deaminase severe combined immunodeficiency, or ADA-SCID. ADA-SCID is one form of SCID, also known as “bubble boy syndrome.” All forms of SCID are rare, affecting no more than 1-in-100,000 births and being more common in people with Navajo, Apache or Turkish ancestry, according to the National Organization for Rare Diseases. Strimvelis, which consists of autologous, CD34-positive stem cells that are transduced with a retroviral vector to express adenosine deaminase, is not yet approved in the US, though the Food and Drug Administration has granted it a Rare Pediatric Disease designation. Spark Therapeutics won the first FDA approval for a gene therapy, Luxturna, for a rare form of blindness, last year.
Orchard isn’t the only biotech company lately to quickly follow a large fundraising with an IPO. Last month, South San Francisco, California-based Allogene Therapeutics – founded by Kite Pharma founders David Chang and Arie Belldegrun – filed for a $100 million IPO, only five months after it closed a $300 million Series A fundraising and days after it raised $120 million in a private financing. While Allogene’s IPO followed a much earlier venture capital investment, another thing the two companies have in common is that they each are betting on therapy candidates that they picked up from another commercial developer. Allogene’s pipeline consists of 16 preclinical “off-the-shelf” allogeneic CAR-T cell therapies that it in-licensed from Pfizer and that the New York-based pharmaceutical company had licensed from France-based Servier and Cellectis.
In addition to the already commercialized Strimvelis, pipeline candidates that Orchard took over from GSK include another gene therapy for ADA-SCID, as well as product candidates for metachromatic leukodystrophy and Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome.
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