Two Rare Disease Focused Biotechs Raise $172.5 Million in Public Offerings

Rare Daily Staff

Gene therapy focused Avrobio and precision medicine focused Stoke Therapeutics together raised $172.5 million in underwritten public offerings to advance their programs.

Avrobio priced 5 million shares of its common stock at $15.00 per share to raise $75 million. In addition, the company granted underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 750,000 additional shares at the public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions.

Proceeds from the offering will be used to fund its current lentiviral gene therapy clinical programs in Fabry disease, cystinosis, Gaucher disease type 1, and preclinical programs in Hunter syndrome, Pompe disease and Gaucher disease type 3. Proceeds from the offering will also be used for external and internal manufacturing and process development activities, and research and development activities that relate to its current and future clinical and preclinical activities, including the cost of research and development personnel. The company intends to use the remainder for planned general and administrative expenses, working capital and other general corporate purposes.

Stoke Therapeutics priced 2.5 million shares of its common stock at $39 per share to raise $97.5 million. Stoke also granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 375,000 shares of common stock in connection with the public offering.

Stoke is pioneering a new way to treat the underlying cause of genetic diseases by developing antisense therapeutics that upregulate protein expression to restore target proteins to near normal levels. Stoke aims to develop the first precision medicine platform to target the underlying cause of a broad spectrum of genetic diseases in which the patient has one healthy copy of a gene and one mutated copy that fails to produce a protein essential to health.

Proceeds from the offering will be used to fund research, clinical and process development and manufacturing of its product candidates, including late stage development of STK-001 for Dravet syndrome, clinical development of its next target for the treatment of autosomal dominant optic atrophy, developing additional product candidates, working capital, capital expenditures and other general corporate purposes.