Rubius Completes Upsized $241.1 Million IPO

Rare Daily Staff

Rubius Therapeutics, which is developing therapies for rare and other diseases, completed a $241.1 million IPO selling nearly 10.5 million shares at $23, above its expected range of $20 to $22 a share.

Shares of the company traded as high as $33.01 before ending their first day of trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market at $24.25, up $1.25 or 5.43 percent on volume of more than 5.7 million shares.  The ticker symbol is “RUBY.”

Rubius developing a new class of medicines known as Red Cell Therapeutics, or RCTs. The company has designed a proprietary platform to genetically engineer and culture RCTs that are selective, potent and ready-to-use cellular therapies.

The company said this approach can be used to manufacture missing enzymes for patients with enzymatic rare diseases, kill tumors in cancer patients, and regulate the immune system for the treatment of autoimmune diseases.

Using donation from a single O- blood donor, the company said it can generate enough potential doses to treat hundreds to thousands of individual patients.

The company is able to use a consistent manufacturing process to generate a broad pipeline of drugs changing only the gene cassettes that encode the biotherapeutics proteins from drug to drug.

The company is pursuing multiple programs in rare disease, cancer, and autoimmune disease. Its lead program, which is pre-clinical, is an experimental therapy for phenylketonuria, or PKU, a metabolic disorder that can cause cognitive and behavioral disabilities.

July 18, 2018