MiNK Therapeutics inked its spot on the Nasdaq with a $40 million initial public offering Friday to take its lead candidate through phase 1 trials in multiple cancers and infectious diseases.
The New York City biotech's public debut comes at the low end of its price range, at $12, after originally revealing the planned IPO in July. Getting onto Wall Street gives the Agenus spinout the cash needed to fund multiple early-stage studies for lead asset AGENT-797, an off-the-shelf, allogeneic iNKT cell therapy.
At the $13 midpoint of the IPO price range, MiNK had planned to spend the biggest portion of the proceeds, at $7.8 million, on early development for the lead candidate alone and a combination study of AGENT-797 with PD-1/CTLA-4 checkpoint inhibitors. That study will look at treating people with non-small cell lung cancer, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma and hepatocellular carcinoma.
About $3 million of the proceeds will fund a phase 1/2 trial of the drug in people with graft-versus-host disease, in which donated bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cells attack the body after the patient's original stem cells have been replaced.
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A little over $1 million will support a phase 1 trial for the drug in patients with multiple myeloma, and almost $2 million will fund the completion of an early-stage study of the drug in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) as a result of COVID-19. Agenus completed the dose-escalation portion of the COVID-19 trial in the second quarter and phase 1/2 expansion trials in viral ARDS are underway, the company said in August.
The cash infusion will also benefit studies to get MiNK's CAR-iNKT-programs into human trials and fund process validation and manufacturing batches for AGENT-797. MiNK will ask the FDA next year if it can bring the two CAR-iNKT programs into the clinic.
MiNK is led by Agenus President and Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Buell, Ph.D. Buell joined Agenus originally in September 2006 and then took a nearly three-year hiatus to be the senior director of clinical program management at the Harvard Clinical Research Institute from December 2010 to September 2013, when she rejoined Agenus as a vice president.