Juno Therapeutics boosted its IPO range at $21 to $23 per share today as the fast-growing Seattle biotech startup prepares to become a publicly-traded company.
Juno, which filed to go public last month just one year after the company’s creation, plans to sell 9.25 million shares and could raise up to $212 million through the offering. Demand appears to be strong for Juno, which had set its IPO range at $15 to $18 per share last week.
Juno, a spin-out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Seattle Children’s Research Institute, is using human T cells as therapeutic entities in the treatment of cancer and has already raised $314 million in venture funding from Arch Venture Partners, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and others.
Aimed at patients with advanced disease who have not had success with chemotherapy, radiation and transplants, Juno takes an individuals T-cells, which fight infection as well as cancers, out of their body.
From there, genetic engineering is used to make the T-cell recognize the cancer that’s specific to that person. Then, the T-cell goes back into the body and it can recognize a tumor, hopefully killing it.
Dr. Michael Jensen, a founding scientist of Juno, uses a computer comparison to help people understand the science.
“The T-cells are the hardware of the immune system,” he explained. “We are a bit like software engineers. We create apps for T-cells to make them do something they couldn’t naturally do.”
Given that Juno is such a young company, it is still years from commercializing its technology.
“Our very short history as an operating company makes any assessment of our future success or viability subject to significant uncertainty,” the company writes in a SEC filing. “We will encounter risks and difficulties frequently experienced by early-stage companies in rapidly evolving fields. If we do not address these risks successfully, our business will suffer.”
Juno is similar to Kite Pharma, another biotech company developing immunotherapies with human T cells. Kite Pharma went public in June and is trading at more than 206 percent from its IPO price. (Editor’s note: The percent increase was corrected)
