A company developing a technology to edit genes at the single-letter level has filed to go public.
In an S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Beam Therapeutics announced its planned $100 million initial public offering on the Nasdaq Global Market, where it would trade under the symbol BEAM. JP Morgan, Jefferies and Barclays are joint bookrunners on the IPO, while Wedbush PacGrow is lead manager.
The company declined to comment because it is in a quiet period in connection with the filing.
Beam’s last major financing was a $135 million Series B funding round that it raised in March. It launched in May of last year with an $87 million Series A round after operating in stealth mode for a year. Venture capital firms ARCH Venture Partners and F-Prime Capital Partners led the Series A round.
The company is developing “base editing” technology designed to enable editing of the genome at the single-letter level, as opposed to the “cutting” of DNA and RNA usually involved in CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing. Each letter of the genome corresponds with a specific nucleobase: A for adenine, G for guanine, T for thymine and C for cytosine. Base editing would enable changing C to T, G to A and so forth.
In April, the company presented data the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy’s annual meeting in Washington on multiplex base editing for its engineered CAR-T cells. In the preclinical study, the company used the base editor BE4 to edit three different cell-surface targets on primary human T cells, namely the proteins TRAC, B2M and PD-1. It was able to knock out expression of each gene in 95 percent, 95 percent and 88 percent of cells, respectively, using electroporation.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Beam has been licensing technology from multiple firms and academic institutions. At the time of its launch last May, it had licensing agreements with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University’s Broad Institute for CRISPR/Cas9 pioneer Feng Zhang’s RNA base editing technology and with Editas Medicine for technologies it developed and licensed from Harvard, the Broad and Massachusetts General Hospital. In May of this year, it in-licensed intellectual property for base editing in human therapeutics from Bio Palette, a company based in Kobe, Japan.
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