A company that turns research in genetically driven diseases into subsidiary companies has filed to go public.
Palo Alto, California-based BridgeBio said Friday that it had filed a Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the proposed $225 million initial public offering. The company would trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol BBIO. The company closed a $299.2 million financing round in January.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
The company was formed in 2015 and adopted a model developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, whereby it identifies drugs to treat genetic diseases and also cancers that have clear genetic drivers and then turns them into subsidiaries to develop them further. The pipeline includes more than a dozen development programs, spread across a roughly equal number of subsidiaries, ranging from small-molecule drugs in areas like KRAS-mutated cancers to gene therapies for inherited diseases.
One of BridgeBio’s portfolio companies, Eidos Therapeutics, went public last year and trades on the Nasdaq. The company, which is developing the drug BBP-265 for transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy, or ATTR-CM, currently has a market cap of more than $1.1 billion. Earlier this month, the FDA approved a Pfizer drug in two formulations for ATTR-CM, Vyndaqel (tafamidis meglumine) and Vyndamax (tafamidis).
Other programs the company has in its pipeline include Adrenas’ BBP-631 and Aspa’s BBP-812, both gene therapies currently in preclinical development, respectively for congenital adrenal hyperplasia and Canavan disease. Another company in BridgeBio’s portfolio is TheRas, which is developing the preclinical BBP-454, for KRAS-mutant cancers. Despite being widely expressed by solid tumors, KRAS mutations have long been considered undruggable due to the protein’s lack of suitable pockets for drugs to target. But this weekend, biotech company Amgen will present early data on AMG 510, a small-molecule inhibitor of a particular type of KRAS mutation that has shown signs of efficacy in some patients.
A company with a similar business model is Cambridge, Massachusetts-based ElevateBio, which launched two weeks ago with a $150 million Series A funding round and is focused on cell and gene therapies. Last week, ElevateBio named AlloVir as its first portfolio company. AlloVir is developing cell therapies to treat viral infections in patients with compromised immune systems.
Photo: jxfzsy, Getty Images
