After forming out of the combination of two biotech companies earlier this year, a Dallas-based vaccine maker is looking to go public.
Vaxxinity, a synthetic peptide vaccine platform, has filed to hit the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol VAXX. The company is seeking a listing size of $100 million, though that number is likely used as a placeholder. Pricing terms were not disclosed.
“Our vision is to disrupt the existing treatment paradigm for chronic diseases, increasingly dominated by drugs… which suffer from prohibitive costs and cumbersome administration,” the company wrote in its filing. “We believe our synthetic peptide vaccine platform has the potential to enable a new class of therapeutics that will improve the quality and convenience of care, reduce costs and increase access to treatments for a wide range of indications.”
Bank of America Securities, Jefferies and Evercore ISI are the bookrunners.
Vaxxinity was created in March through the combination of COVID-19 vaccine-focused C19 Corp. (dba as COVAXX) and Dublin-based United Neuroscience, which has its U.S. headquarters in Dallas. The deal that combined the firms was valued at around $1.35 billion.
According to Vaxxinity, its chronic and infectious disease-focused vaccines help the body’s immune system to stimulate antibody production. The company currently has six therapies in its pipeline, ranging from the preclinical phase to Phase II and focused on treating things from migraines and Alzheimer’s disease to COVID-19 and hypercholesterolemia.
“The modular and synthetic nature of our Vaxxine Platform generally provides significant speed and efficiency in candidate development and has generated multiple product candidates that we are designing to have safety and efficacy equal to or greater than the standard-of-care treatments for many chronic diseases, with more convenient administration and meaningfully lower costs,” Vaxxinity wrote.
Because Vaxxinity meets the financial requirements defining it as an “emerging growth company,” its reporting requirements in its S-1 filing were reduced. However, it does provide some insights into the company’s finances.
Since launching, Vaxxinity said it has raised nearly $128 million from backers including Blackfoot Healthcare Ventures and Prime Movers Lab. The filing also shows Vaxxinity has been operating at a loss, sometimes common with biotech firms, which often don’t see income until their drugs are approved and hit the market. For the first six months of 2021, the company reported a net loss of nearly $58.6 million, with the majority of its money – around $30.6 million – spent on research and development work. In that same time, it reported $17,000 in revenue, nearly all of which came from the sale of its COVID-19 antibody tests.
The company said the money raised through the IPO will fund it through 2024. It’s planning to use the funds to further development on its current product pipeline, in addition to exploring potential new therapies.
Vaxxinity is led by led by Co-founder and CEO Mei Mei Hu, whose husband, Lou Reese, serves as executive chairman. While its principal offices are in Dallas, the company also has offices in Florida and Taiwan. The company has grown to 75 employees, up from 44 in March. The majority are based in the U.S., with additional workers in Taiwan and Ireland.
“From both clinical trials and pre-clinical studies, we have observed the rapid expansion of antibodies upon administration of a booster of our product candidates,” Vaxxinity wrote.
With the announcement, Vaxxinity is now the third local company to make IPO moves this month. Southlake-based outdoor lifestyle company Solo Brands and Dallas-based BlackBoxStocks filed to go public earlier in October.
