One of B.C.’s brightest biotech stars started trading on the Toronto and the New York stock exchanges simultaneously on April 28, as the company raised US$58.5 million in an initial public offering (IPO).
The Zymeworks transaction is the first B.C. biotech venture-capital-backed IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) in more than a decade, according to Brian Bloom, CEO of Bloom Burton & Co., a health-care investment and research company.
Victoria’s Aurinia Pharmaceuticals Inc. (TSX:AUP; Nasdaq:AUPH) went public via a reverse takeover , instead of an IPO, on the TSX in 2013 and on the Nasdaq in 2014. Xenon Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s (Nasdaq:XENE) Nasdaq IPO was in 2014.
“It’s a great time for Zymeworks to go public,” LifeSciences BC chairman James Hatton told Business in Vancouver. “If I were to have picked one company that was next in line to go public, I would have picked them. There’s lots of good energy in the industry, and the market is bubbling, but not frothy.”
Zymeworks is focused on killing cancerous cells using platforms that help other drugs more accurately identify and target them.
It has four platforms that CEO Ali Tehrani compares to different engines that an auto-parts manufacturer might produce. Each engine is versatile and can be placed into multiple vehicles – perhaps a motorcycle, a golf cart or a lawn mower.
Zymeworks’ platforms have similar versatility. As a result, pharmaceutical giant Glaxo-SmithKline PLC (NYSE:GSK) has an agreement whereby it pays Zymeworks to access one of its platforms to develop drugs.
Agreements with various Big Pharma companies could yield billions of dollars in revenue for Zymeworks if they can develop marketable drugs because Zymeworks collects cheques from them while they access Zymeworks’ drug delivery platforms.
Zymeworks also develops…