Scribe Therapeutics has overshot its own expectations with an IPO that's set to bring in $128.7 million for the in vivo gene editing outfit.
Scribe is issuing 8.6 million shares—above the 7.1 million shares that the company had suggested on Monday. At $15 apiece, the biotech has also priced the shares, which will list on the Nasdaq today under the ticker “SCTX,” at the top end of the $13-15 range it had previously set out.
It means the company expects to bring in $128.7 million in gross proceeds from the IPO, compared to $96 million in net proceeds that Scribe had predicted earlier in the week. This haul would be boosted by a further $19.3 million if underwriters fully take up their option to buy an additional 1.3 million shares at the same price, according to a July 24 release.
“Scribe has been very intentionally efficient with our capital,” the biotech's co-founder and CEO Benjamin Oakes, Ph.D., told Fierce from the Nasdaq stock exchange. With the IPO haul, the company now has the resources to see its three programs “through major data events,” he said.
Scribe emerged in 2020 with $20 million, a Biogen partnership and the backing of Nobel Laureate and CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D. Oakes joined Doudna’s group 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 lead candidate, STX-1150, is designed to silence the PCSK9 gene a known cardiovascular target that is already inhibited by approved cholesterol-lowering medicines such as Amgen’s Repatha and Novartis’ Leqvio. In its previous filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Scribe outlined its plans to spend $30 million to $35 million of the IPO proceeds on an ongoing phase 1 study of STX-1150.
That study recently launched in Australia and is enrolling patients with elevated cholesterol and increased risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Topline data should read out in the first half of 2027.
Scribe is getting into a field that recently saw significant innovation in the form of Lipfendra, a new medicine from Merck that just became the first PCSK9 pill to garner FDA approval.
“I love the advent of PCSK9 orals,” Oakes said. Right now, he said, far too few patients who could benefit from the lipid-lowering drugs are taking them. By silencing the PCSK9 gene for many years, Scribe hopes that STX-1150 can provide an attractive option for patients who may struggle to regularly take a pill or an injection.
“The fundamental challenge that Scribe is focused on solving is the fact that patients struggle to stay on their medicine,” Oakes explained.
Another $15 million to $20 million of the proceeds has been earmarked to take the APOC3-targeting therapy STX-1400 into the clinic and through initial readouts. A similar amount is expected to be needed for another preclinical asset dubbed STX-1200, which targets the LPA gene. Both STX-1400 and STX-1200 are being lined up for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.
On top of that, Scribe suggested in Monday's filing that $20 million to $25 million will be needed to advance the rest of its pipeline, including its partnered programs, as well as “further development of next-generation gene editing technologies and assets.”
Sanofi—which penned a $1.5 billion biobucks research pact with Scribe back in 2023—has agreed to purchase around $7.5 million of Scribe’s stock in a concurrent private placement, the biotech confirmed in this morning's release.
Taken together, Oakes views Scribe's pipeline as a toolbox that physicians can draw from to design custom treatment options for patients, based on their particular cardiovascular risk factors.
“We truly are creating for the first time a suite of therapeutics that can be combined to be thought about as this customized personalized medicine, in a way that's actually probably much more tractable than the buzzwords of the past,” Oakes told Fierce. “How do we fundamentally offer to patients the ability to get access to genetics that evens the playing field on cardiovascular risk?”
Biotech IPOs have taken off in recent months, a turnaround from last year’s lull. Kailera Therapeutics and Parabilis Medicines both broke industry records with their offerings earlier this year, while the likes of Braveheart Bio, BlossomHill Therapeutics and Latigo Biotherapeutics are queuing up to list on the Nasdaq.
Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:20pm E.T. with comment from Scribe.