BlossomHill Therapeutics plans to raise $111.7 million to fund the clinical journey of its potential challenger to Tagrisso.
The San Diego-based oncology outfit first outlined an ambition last month to go public, but now the company has sketched the potential size of the IPO. The aim is to offer 7.8 million shares priced between $15 and $17.
Assuming the final price falls in the middle of this range, BlossomHill expects to raise $111.7 million from the IPO—rising to $129.1 million if underwriters exercise their option to buy an additional 1.2 million shares at the same price.
A total of $70 million of this IPO cash has been earmarked for the company’s lead asset, a macrocyclic EGFR-targeting molecule called BH-30643, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. BH-30643 is currently undergoing a phase 1/2 trial in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), with the biotech intending to use some of this sum to launch a “potentially registrational” phase 2 trial.
By pursuing EGFR-mutant NSCLC, BlossomHill is teeing up a showdown with AstraZeneca’s approved Tagrisso, the current first-line standard of care that brought the Big Pharma more than $7 billion in global sales (PDF) last year. Johnson & Johnson’s Rybrevant is another established challenger in the field, and BlossomHill noted in the filing that numerous other companies are also developing potential rivals for BH-30643.
While acknowledging that the EGFR-mutant NSCLC landscape is “particularly competitive,” BlossomHill suggested in its filing that BH-30643 could be targeted at patients who have developed C797S-mediated resistance to Tagrisso or other third-generation EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors.
Meanwhile, around $20 million of the IPO haul will be used to push ahead with a phase 1 study of BH-30236, which the company is pitching as the first drug to successfully target a CDC-like kinase. The study is enrolling patients with relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia or higher-risk myelodysplastic syndrome.
There’s also $5 million that will be set aside to take the pan-KRAS inhibitor BH-501284 from IND-enabling studies into the clinic.
The company emerged in February 2024 having raised a total of $173 million from the likes of Colt Ventures, Cormorant Asset Management, OrbiMed and more. BlossomHill’s seeds were planted by scientific founder, president and CEO J. Jean Cui, Ph.D., after her previous venture, Turning Point Therapeutics, was bought by Bristol Myers Squibb for $4.1 billion.
The company entered April with $116 million still in the bank and 63 full-time employees on its books.
BlossomHill is in a queue with the likes of Braveheart Bio, Attovia Therapeutics and Vogenx, who have all lined up their own imminent listings to take advantage of the improved environment for biotech IPOs this year.