Another Montgomery County biotech has filed to go public.
Sensei Biotherapeutics Inc., a clinical-stage immunotherapy company headquartered in Rockville, filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission to trade publicly on the Nasdaq stock exchange under ticker symbol “SNSE.” The company will look to raise $100 million in its initial public offering.
Sensei did not disclose in its preliminary prospectus a date for the public offering or estimated opening share price. But it said it plans to use net proceeds from the sale for clinical development of its lead product candidate, SNS-301, now in a phase 1/2 study for squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck expected to produce top line data by the end of 2021.
The funding would also support working capital and other general corporate purposes, other candidates in its clinical and preclinical pipeline, and the development of its ImmunoPhage vaccine platform — which uses bacteriophage, a type of virus that infects bacteria, to elicit the body’s immune response.
The company has also applied that technology to Covid-19 and has discussed its approach and potential clinical trial design with the Food and Drug Administration, it said in its filing with the SEC. “While advancing this program would advance our platform’s use to address other indications, we do not envision funding its development ourselves,” the company wrote. “As such, we would continue its development only if public funding is available or through some other collaborative initiative.”
Sensei reported a net loss of $15 million for the first three quarters of 2020, after a net loss of $16.7 million in 2019. The business, which does not have any products to market, ended September with $3.7 million in cash and later received $41.4 million in proceeds from stock sales, according to its filing. The business also opened 2021 with $30 million in a funding round led by Apeiron Investment Group and Catalio Capital Management alongside other investors.
“We believe that the net proceeds from this offering, together with our existing cash, will enable us to fund our operating expenses and capital expenditure requirements through the completion of several Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials,” the company wrote in its filing. “However, this funding will not be sufficient for us to fund any of our product candidates through regulatory approval, and we will need to raise additional capital to complete the development and commercialization of SNS-301 and our other product candidates and in connection with our continuing operations and other planned activities.”
Sensei Bio was founded in Maryland in 1999 as Panacea Pharmaceuticals Inc. before reincorporating in Delaware and taking its current name in December 2017. The original business garnered recognition in 2007 for its ability to diagnose lung cancer, then it struggled — laying off and furloughing a majority of its staff, cutting its then-Gaithersburg headquarters by nearly half, facing a lawsuit alleging unpaid wages and sustaining more departures.
The company went silent for years but, in late 2015, resurfaced with $15 million in Series E funding.
“With what went down with the whole economy, we were at a time when so many people lost money,” the company’s longtime leader, founder and then-CEO Hossein Ghanbari, said in a December 2015 interview with the WBJ. He said he took out a couple of second mortgages to keep the business going, adding: “We were lucky we stayed alive.”
Sensei President and CEO John Celebi joined the company in spring 2018 after positions with Boston's X4 Pharmaceuticals, Burlingame, California-based Igenica Biotherapeutics and ArQule of Woburn, Massachusetts. Sensei counted 25 employees at the end of September, and said in its filings it expects to hire more as it transforms into a public company.
The biotech set out last year to open a Boston research hub. In its filing, Sensei disclosed a new 10,000-square-foot lease that includes its Boston lab that starts April 1, 2021 at $880,000 annually.
Sensei Bio looks to go public on the heels of several other companies, including Gaithersburg immunotherapy company NexImmune — which, too, filed for its IPO within the last week — as well as Silver Spring’s Aziyo Biologics (NASDAQ: AZYO), Gaithersburg’s Viela Bio (NASDAQ: VIE), Beltsville’s NextCure (NASDAQ: NXTC), Reston’s SOC Telemed (NASDAQ: TLMD) and more beyond the biotech, life sciences and health care arenas.
