Months removed from a $38 million C round, Cambridge, MA's Sage Therapeutics is plotting to go public, filing for a $69 million IPO to bankroll its pipeline of seizure treatments.
The biotech, founded in 2010 by Third Rock Ventures, plans to use the bulk of its proceeds on Phase I/II studies for SAGE-547, a drug designed to treat super-refractory status epilepticus (SE). The disease is a rare, life-threatening seizure condition with no approved therapies, the company said, affecting roughly 150,000 people in the U.S. and killing about 30,000 each year.
Behind its lead drug, Sage has the preclinical '689, designed to treat adjunctive SE, and '217, under development as a maintenance therapy for the disease. Part of the biotech's planned IPO proceeds will support IND-enabling studies for those candidates, plus early work on a stable of preclinical CNS therapies that modulate the brain's GABAA and NMDA receptors, including treatments for depression, essential tremor, tinnitus and pain, Sage said.
 |
| Sage Therapeutics CEO Jeffrey Jonas |
The biotech has designed itself to be nimble, a lesson it learned from watching the industry's many failures in CNS development over recent years, CEO Jeffrey Jonas has said. Sage sees itself less as a startup with a single promising drug than as a product engine with a valuable platform, and the plan is to test its candidates against aggressive endpoints in studies with rapid readouts, giving it a chance to quickly pivot if any fail.
Third Rock and Arch returned for Sage's most recent round, closed in March, bringing along new backers OrbiMed Advisors, EcoR1 Capital Management, Foresite Capital Management and two undisclosed "blue chip" public funds, according to Sage. The Series C brought Sage's three-year haul to about $106 million, including a $10 million NIH grant for work on Fragile X syndrome.
The biotech has yet to disclose how many shares it intends to offer and at what price, saying only that it plans to trade on the Nasdaq under "SAGE."
- read the S-1
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Sage's founders. We regret the error.