Morrisville drug maker raises $50M in Nasdaq debut
Morrisville biopharmaceutical firm Liquidia Technologies raised $50 million in an initial public stock offering as it began trading shares on the Nasdaq exchange on Thursday.
The 14-year-old company, which has no drugs on the market, plans to use most of the money it raised to complete development of a dry-powder inhaler for patients suffering from pulmonary arterial hypertension, a chronically progressive disease that can cause premature death.
The inhaler technology is undergoing a safety test on 100 patients, with the first 24 enrolled through July 9, and Liquidia expects to apply for regulatory approval to sell the inhalers in late 2019, CEO Neal Fowler said Thursday, after the company’s stock market debut.
Liquidia’s inhaler precisely controls the size and shape of powder particles used to carry medications into patients’ lungs, resulting in a more medicine penetrating deeply into the lung, Fowler said. That makes it more effective than other kinds of inhalers that use particles of varying sizes, some of which are too large to get out of the mechanism, and some too small to reach their destination, he said.
“This is a big step in that we can precisely control these particles,” Fowler said. “The bell curve in size and shape of current technologies leads to a bell curve of outcomes.”
Liquidia, which will trade under the symbol LQDA, will keep $46.5 million from the stock sale, after expenses, said Kevin Gordon, Liquidia’s President and CFO. Liquidia had announced plans in June to raise $57.5 million, and the underwriter of the stock offering has 30 days to buy $7.5 million more in Liquidia shares.
After the stock climbed as high as $13.43 a share Thursday morning, Liquidia ended the day at $11.10 a share, up 10 cents.
Liquidia, which employs 60 people, was spun out in 2004 from research developed at UNC-Chapel Hill by entrepreneur and inventor Joseph DeSimone, who is affiliated with both UNC Chapel Hill and N.C. State universities.
The company’s inhaler is designed to carry a medication that’s already approved and widely available, but in the future Liquidia hopes to use the technology to administer its own drugs as well as drugs developed by pharmaceutical partners like GlaxoSmithKline.
Pulmonary arterial hypertension is a rare disease with no known cure; treatment is used to relieve symptoms and extend patients’ lives. In 2020, Liquidia estimates that 25,000 to 30,000 Americans will have the condition and will be at some stage of treatment: pills, inhaler, injections.
It’s during the inhaler phase of treatment that Liquidia’s hand-held inhaler would compete for patients against the current approach of using nebulizers, which require special equipment and must be administered between four and nine times daily.
Liquidia is also developing a product to precisely administer non-opioid medications to patients experiencing post-surgical pain.
Liquidia’a proprietary technology, called PRINT, is an acronym for Particle Replication In Non-wetting Templates.
Liquidia generated $7.3 million in revenue last year, according to its June filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2016, it had $13.2 million in revenue, the bulk of that from a licensing agreement with GlaxoSmithKline. GSK, which has operations in Research Triangle Park, had expressed interest in Liquidia’s drug delivery technology for its vaccines and other treatments but has since scrapped those plans, eliminating Liquidia’s main source of revenue.
This story was originally published July 26, 2018 at 7:53 AM.