Dive Brief:
- Parabilis Medicines, a high-profile startup making medicines for “undruggable” targets, raised $670 million in an initial public offering on Wednesday, a record haul for a venture-backed biotechnology company.
- Parabilis boosted the size of its offering and ultimately sold 33.5 million shares at $20 apiece, eclipsing the amounts secured by Moderna in 2018 and Kailera Therapeutics earlier this year. It added another $75 million through a discounted private stock sale to new research partner Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
- The IPO extends a streak this year for large new biotech stock offerings. So far in 2026 a dozen drugmakers have gone public and raised a median of about $300 million each, more than doubling the median total biotech startups secured in IPOs last year, according to BioPharma Dive data.
Dive Insight:
Parabilis was founded by serial biotech entrepreneur Gregory Verdine, whose early research helped lay the groundwork for a breakthrough pancreatic cancer drug now being developed by Revolution Medicines. Verdine has long been focused on “undruggable” proteins, and formed Parabilis — once known as FogPharma — to pursue a different way of accessing them.
Since then, the startup raised more than $800 million in private funding, changed its name, and progressed therapies it calls “Helicons” — helix-shaped peptide drugs that can get into cells and battle tough-to-reach, cancer-driving proteins. Mathai Mammen, a former Johnson & Johnson research executive, is now its leader.
Parabilis’ most advanced drug candidate, dubbed zolucatetide, is aimed at a beta-catenin pathway connected to millions of cancer cases. It’s demonstrated early potential in desmoid tumors, a type of noncancerous growth, and Parabilis believes its treatment may prove more potent and safer than existing therapies.
The company plans to start a Phase 3 trial in desmoid tumors in the first half of 2027. Zolucatetide is also in early testing for multiple other cancer types and has potential treating an inherited condition linked to polyp growth. Parabilis is conducting preclinical research on other drugs for prostate cancer, too.
For close to a decade, Moderna’s $604 million IPO was the largest-ever for a venture-backed biotech. But Kailera’s $625 million stock sale last month surpassed that total and Parabilis has now topped that even that mark. More than half of the biotechs to go public in 2026 have banked at least $300 million in their offerings, an uncommon occurrence among offerings since at least 2018, BioPharma Dive data show.
Parabilis’ Tuesday pricing comes amid a torrid streak of large technology IPOs. OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX have all outlined or priced enormous offerings in recent weeks.
The cancer drugmaker began trading Wednesday under the ticker symbol “PBLS.”
