ProNai Therapeutics Inc. has filed an amended S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its initial public offering (IPO). The expected price range for the offering is $15 to $17 for 8.1 million shares, with an overallotment option for an additional 1.215 million shares. At the maximum price, the total offering is valued up to roughly $158.36 million. The company intends to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol DNAI.

The underwriters for the offering are Jefferies, Merrill Lynch, Wedbush PacGrow and SunTrust Robinson Humphrey.

This is a clinical-stage oncology company pioneering a novel class of therapeutics based on its proprietary DNA interference (DNAi) technology platform. The lead DNAi product candidate, PNT2258, targets BCL2, a widely overexpressed oncogene that is an important gatekeeper of the programmed cell death process known as apoptosis and has been linked to many forms of cancer.

In a recent single-agent Phase 2 trial of 13 patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, PNT2258 demonstrated evidence of anti-tumor activity, with 11 patients achieving a complete response (CR), partial response (PR) or stable disease. Additionally, all four of the diffuse large B-cell lymphoma patients treated in this trial experienced a clinical response, including three CRs and one PR, with reported durations on study in the range of nine to more than 20 months.

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In the filing ProNai further described its lead candidate:

Although PNT2258 is in early stages of development and these trials were not statistically powered for a formal efficacy analysis, we believe the preliminary evidence of efficacy observed in this trial, coupled with safety and tolerability data collected to date, suggest that PNT2258 has the potential to change treatment paradigms across a wide range of oncology indications. Accordingly, we plan to pursue a broad registration-oriented clinical development program, initially in hematologic malignancies, that we anticipate will provide the foundation of a global registration strategy for PNT2258.

The company intends to use the proceeds from this offering to fund its ongoing Wolverine Phase 2 trial and the Brighton Phase 2 trial that it expects to initiate in mid-2015. The remaining proceeds from the offering will be put toward future PNT2258 trials, further development of the DNAi technology platform and for working capital and general corporate purposes.

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