A company that filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering has decided to pull back.
Centrexion Therapeutics confirmed reports Thursday that it had decided not to pursue the IPO for which it had filed with the SEC in October.
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“The company has decided not to move forward with an IPO at this time given current market conditions,” an emailed statement from the company read. Renaissance Capital had reported earlier in the day that the Boston-based company had decided to postpone the IPO.
In an Oct. 19 S-1 filing, the company said it would seek to raise $86.25 million in the IPO, while a Nov. 5 amendment to the filing increased the proposed amount to $92 million. The company would have traded under the ticker symbol CNTX, and Nasdaq notified Centrexion in a letter Tuesday that it had approved the company’s listing and registration, upon official notice of issuance.
The company – which in January raised $67 million in a Series D financing – is developing a pipeline of non-opioid painkillers. Its most advanced product candidate is the Phase II and Phase III drug CNTX-4975, which is in development for Morton’s neuroma pain, human osteoarthritis pain and osteoarthritis pain in dogs. Most recently, it gave two presentations on the drug at the American College of Rheumatology’s annual meeting in Chicago.
The news comes just days after another company, Moderna Therapeutics, filed papers with the SEC for what could be the largest biotechnology IPO ever. In an S-1 filing last Friday, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company indicated it would seek to raise $500 million for its offering, trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol MRNA. Moderna is developing therapies that target messenger RNA, focusing on disease areas like infectious diseases and oncology.
Other biotechnology companies that have recently filed for IPOs have included South San Francisco, California-based Allogene Therapeutics, which filed for a $100 million IPO in September and raised $324 million in gross proceeds. Another, London-based Orchard Therapeutics, is raising $172.5 million.
At the same time, Malvern, Pennsylvania-based PhaseBio began trading on the Nasdaq last month, but priced its IPO at $5 per share, far short of the $12-14 per share it had sought.
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