Following a year that saw a third of staff laid off and a sliding share price, NGM Bio has decided to go private as part of a $135 million buyout by VC firm The Column Group.
A special committee of “independent and disinterested directors” had made a “thorough exploration and review of strategic and financial alternatives” including mergers with a number of other entities before recommending NGM take up the Column offer, the biotech said in a Feb. 26 release.
“We conducted a thorough review of our financial and strategic alternatives, including remaining a publicly held company, with particular focus on NGM Bio’s ongoing need for significant additional funding,” Suzanne Sawochka Hooper, an independent member of the board and chair of the special committee, explained in the release.
The Column Group, an early-stage drug discovery-focused VC firm, already owns almost 27% of NGM’s outstanding stock, making it the biotech’s largest shareholder. The merger offer is $1.55 per share in cash—an 80% premium on the company’s Dec. 29 closing price—for NGM’s remaining shares. This equates to a total equity value of $135 million, the company explained. NGM entered 2024 with $144.2 million in cash and equivalents.
Things looked tough in spring 2023 when NGM laid off 75 employees—equivalent to a third of its workforce—in the wake of a phase 2 trial failure for an age-related macular degeneration asset. The company reduced operating expenses to fund its solid tumor programs.
Last month, the company reported “encouraging responses” from a phase 1 trial of its dual ILT2/ILT4 antagonist, dubbed NGM707, in combination with Merck & Co.'s Keytruda in multiple solid tumor indications.
There’s also aldafermin, an engineered FGF19 analog that failed in trials for the rare liver disease primary sclerosing cholangitis and for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH). Despite some better MASH data down the road, NGM is now only pursuing aldafermin for primary sclerosing cholangitis, where it has secured an orphan drug tag from the FDA.
Meanwhile, NGM’s GDF15/GFRAL antagonist NGM120 is in clinical development for hyperemesis gravidarum, a term for severe vomiting and nausea in pregnancy.
NGM’s stock entered 2023 at over $5 per share but by October had dropped to below the $1 mark, leading Nasdaq to threaten the company with delisting. Last month, the biotech was informed by the Nasdaq that it had regained compliance to list on the exchange as a result of the share price rising out of the danger zone.
But it looks like NGM's days on the Nasdaq are numbered anyway. Should the merger with Column close in the second quarter of 2024 as planned then the biotech will return to being a private entity.
Earlier this month, Column co-launched a $400 million fund described as a “novel venture-biotech model ... to support the advancement of ideas from bench to clinical proof of concept.”