Atreca IPO: What You Need To Know

Cancer biotechs are the hottest among drug development companies, given the lucrative market opportunity before them. One such company is testing the IPO waters this week.

The IPO Terms

Redwood, California-based oncology biotech Atrecplans to offer 7.35 million shares of its Class A common stock this week, according to the S-1/A filing from June 10. The offering is estimated to be priced in the range of $16-$18, rendering the size of the offering at about $125 million at the mid-point of the estimated price range.

Since the company qualifies as an "emerging growth company" under the SEC rules, it is subject to reduced public company reporting requirements.

The company has applied for listing its shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol BCEL.

Cowen, Evercore ISI and Stifel are among the underwriters for the IPO.

The Company

Atreca is a biopharma company that uses its differentiated platform to discover and develop antibody-based immunotherapies to treat a range of solid tumor types. Unlike the traditional oncology drug discovery approaches, Atreca uses human immune system to lead it to unique antibody-target pairs from patients experiencing a clinically meaningful active immune response against their tumors.

The company's lead product candidate ATRC-101 is a monoclonal antibody, which reacts in vitro with a majority of human ovarian, non-small cell lung, colorectal and breast cancer samples from multiple patients. ATRC-101 has demonstrated robust anti-tumor activity as a single agent in multiple preclinical models.

Atreca plans an IND filing for the candidate in late 2019 and initiate a Phase 1b trial in patients with solid tumors in early 2020.

The Finances

Atreca generated a loss of $37.94 million in fiscal year 2018, wider than the loss of $27.53 million in the year-ago period. For the third quarter ended March 2019, the loss was $13.58 million.

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