Seattle-based biotech Alpine Immune Sciences (Nasdaq: ALPN) is raising $100 million through an underwritten public offering.
With the new funding, announced Tuesday, Alpine co-founder and CEO Mitchell Gold said the biotech now has more than three years of runway. He added that the company, which now has about 130 people, has grown 65% over the past nine months, but he didn't provide a target headcount growth for the near future.
"From a local and regional perspective, this is a big deal for biotech," Gold said.
Alpine has office space in the Alexandria Center for Science & Technology in Eastlake, built in 2019. Despite the new funding and plans to continue the company's growth, Gold said Alpine doesn't have plans right now to expand its physical footprint.
Alpine, an immunotherapy company focused on protein engineering, was founded in 2015. The biotech went public in 2017 through a merger with Nivalis Therapeutics, a Boulder, Colorado-based pharmaceutical company that was focused on cystic fibrosis.
Alpine's ALPN-202 drug is aimed at cancer, while ALPN-303 is aimed at autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Both drugs are in clinical trials. ALPN-101, meanwhile, is aimed at severe inflammatory diseases, according to Alpine's website, and is also in clinical trials. The biotech signed a $60 million licensing agreement in 2020 for ALPN-101 with Chicago-based AbbVie, which included an additional $805 million for the drug hitting certain milestones.
This is the second time in roughly a year that Alpine has looked to raise money. In September 2021, Alpine raised about $91 million, before expenses, through a private placement, a means of raising money by selling shares to select investors.
Alpine isn't the only publicly traded biotech in Seattle to raise money this month. Earlier in September, Adaptive Biotechnologies signed a royalty financing agreement with the health care investment firm OrbiMed worth up to $250 million. The agreement included different tranches of funding depending on how much revenue Adaptive would give up to OrbiMed.
