NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – BG Medicine today began trading shares of its stock on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol "BGMD."
The company is offering 5 million shares of its stock at $7 per share, for potential proceeds of $35 million. Lazard Capital Markets is serving as the sole book-running manager for the offering. Baird and Cowen and Company are co-managers.
The underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase up to 750,000 shares to cover over-allotments, if any.
If the Waltham, Mass.-based company is successful in meeting its $35 million target, the amount raised would be about 41 percent of the original target of $86.3 million when it filed to go public a year ago. It also would fall short of the $67 million target price that BG Medicine set in November.
In an amended S-1 filed earlier this week, the company said it planned to offer 4.75 million shares at $7 per share, raising $33.3 million. Proceeds were expected to be $28.6 million.
Of that amount, about $15 million will fund the commercial launch of its lead product, the BGM Galectin-3 test for diagnosing chronic heart failure. The test was cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration in November and is marketed by Laboratory Corporation of America.
BG said about $8 million of the net proceeds will be used for the development, potential regulatory submission, and commercial launch of other cardiovascular diagnostic candidates, and $3 million is expected to go toward biomarker discovery and potential clinical development of other tests. All remaining proceeds would be directed at general corporate purposes, it added.
The company had filed to go public in 2007 but abandoned its IPO at the time citing market conditions.