NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – BG Medicine today lowered the expected share price for its proposed initial public offering to $7, the second time it has lowered its price since filing for the IPO a year ago.
The company disclosed its plan in an amended prospectus filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, in which it said it plans to offer 4.75 million shares, which would raise about $33.3 million, less than 40 percent of the $86.3 million the Waltham, Mass.-based firm had targeted when it filed its prospectus for an IPO last year, and about half of the $67 million it targeted in November.
In its amended S-1, the biomarker-based diagnostics firm said that it expects net proceeds of $28.6 million from its IPO. If the underwriters exercise the over-allotment option in full, the net proceeds will increase to $33.2 million.
Of that, 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.
To date, BG Medicine said it has recognized only "limited" product revenue from the test, and the company added that it will need to develop automated instrument versions of the test for the company to realize broad customer acceptance and clinical adoption.
BG Medicine also said that it has entered into worldwide development and commercialization agreements with Abbott Laboratories, Alere, bioMérieux, and Siemens to include the galectin-3 test on "a variety of automated laboratory instruments, including point-of-care instruments."
It added that it expects an automated instrument version of the test to be commercially available in the first half of 2012 through one or more of those instrument manufacturers.
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, while $3 million will go toward biomarker discovery and potential clinical development of other tests. All remaining proceeds will be directed at general corporate purposes, it added.
BG originally filed to go public in 2007, but it withdrew the offer later due to market conditions.