Scribe Therapeutics is the latest biotech to prepare a public listing, as the company looks to propel its lipid-lowering medicines through clinical trials.
While the Bay Area biotech has yet to set out how many shares it’s hoping to offer—or at what price—the company explained in a July 2 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the proceeds would be used to push forward with its three key candidates.
Scribe emerged in 2020 with $20 million, a Biogen partnership and the backing of Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D., the CRISPR pioneer who won a Nobel Prize the very next day. Benjamin Oakes, Ph.D.—now Scribe’s co-founder and CEO—joined Doudna’s lab to engineer new CRISPR molecules, eventually starting his own lab at the University of California, Berkeley, before transitioning his research into the startup Scribe.
The biotech’s goal is to bring genetic medicines out of the realm of rare diseases and into broader patient populations, Oakes explained to Fierce last year. Doing so requires gene-editing enzymes that are safer and more potent.
To that end, Scribe has modified an enzyme called CasX, a variant of the better known Cas9, to greatly improve its editing efficiency.
While CRISPR technology is best known for gene editing, Scribe’s lead program STX-1150 is instead a gene silencer. This means that rather than altering the genome, the compound adds methyl groups and tweaks the structure of DNA at the targeted gene, turning off gene expression. Scribe is aiming for STX-1150 to shut down the PCSK9 gene, a known cardiovascular target that is inhibited by approved cholesterol-lowering medicines like Amgen’s Repatha and Novartis’ Leqvio.
Oakes told Fierce back in November 2025 that he thinks of STX-1150 as the “end state” of RNA interference-style therapies, which includes Leqvio. While Leqvio is taken every six months, the Scribe CEO holds out hope that his company’s candidate could require a booster once every decade or two.
The company recently launched a first-in-human study of STX-1150 in Australia in up to 64 adults with elevated low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and increased risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD). Topline data on whether the candidate can indeed trigger LDL-C-lowering activity are expected in the first half of 2027.
Money from the IPO will also be used to advance TX-1200 and STX-1400, which target the LPA and APOC3 genes, respectively, in order to treat ASCVD.
Meanwhile, Scribe has been pursuing other therapeutic areas in big-name partnerships with Sanofi and Eli Lilly, deals inked after the company secured a $100 million fundraise in 2021. The California biotech’s clinical push began in earnest in early 2025, with a 20% layoff that followed an earlier preclinical data drop.
Scribe oversaw 89 full-time employees as of the end of March, with $49.7 million in the bank.
The company's potential path to the Nasdaq follows a boom period for biotech IPOs, including recent record-breaking listings from the likes of Kailera Therapeutics and Parabilis Medicines. Kardigan Therapeutics—which like Scribe is focused on cardiovascular disease—grossed $400 million for its IPO last month.