Dive Brief:
- On Monday, Seattle-based Juno Therapeutics filed for an initial public offering of common stock with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
- The number of shares that Juno will issue remains unclear, as does the expected price of the stock. However, the IPO did include a $150 million fundraising target. Juno has already raised $310 million since April through investors such as ARCH Venture Fund VII LP and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs are all underwriting the IPO.
- Juno is working on a novel line of cancer immunotherapies that modify the genes in patients' T cells in order to turn them into cancer-targeting and killing cells.
Dive Insight:
The total size of the IPO remains unknown—but this is going to make waves in the biotech sphere. Industry watchers had been expecting a Juno IPO based on its rapid and successful fundraising efforts for months.
The company said it plans to trade under the JUNO ticker on the Nasdaq. Two out of its three in-development therapies, JCAR014, JCAR015, and JCAR017, have shown promising results in trials. For instance, JCAR015 eliminated all signs of relapsed/refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 20 out of 22 patients in an ongoing phase I trial. Phase II studies will begin next year, as well as more phase I trials testing the therapies for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.