Dicerna Pharmaceuticals this week priced its initial public offering of 6 million shares of its common stock at $15 a share — higher than the $13 to $15 range it had previously projected.
As a result, the IPO is valued at $90 million, significantly more than the $69 million Dicerna originally said it hoped to raise in the offering. That number could increase should the underwriters of the offering exercise their option to buy another 900,000 shares.
Jefferies, Leerink Partners, and Stifel, Nicolaus & Company are the joint book-running managers of the IPO. Robert W. Baird & Co. is co-lead manager.
Dicerna's stock will now trade under the symbol "DRNA" on the Nasdaq.
The public offering, which marks only the second time an RNAi drug developer has completed an IPO, is widely seen as indication that Wall Street is warming up to RNAi after the field hit a rough patch in 2010/2011 when Pfizer and Roche dropped their in-house nucleic acid drug-development efforts.
Even more compelling is that Dicerna completed the IPO even as a company without a single drug in the clinic and, as it noted in a recent regulatory filing, without exclusive ownership of its core RNAi drug technology.
Dicerna aims to used the proceeds of the IPO, which follows a $60 million private Series C round in August, to advance its internal pipeline, which includes the Myc-targeting hepatocellular carcinoma treatment DCR-M1711 — set to reach phase I testing this year — and earlier-stage therapies for primary hyperoxaluria 1 and other rare, genetic diseases.