Health and Healthcare

Editas Medicine Gears Up for IPO

Chris Lange

Published: January 5, 2016 12:40 pm

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 3:25 pm

Editas Medicine has registered an S-1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in regards to its initial public offering (IPO). The company did not include any pricing details in the filing, but the offering is valued up to $100 million, although this number is normally just a placeholder. The company intends to list on the Nasdaq Global Market under the symbol EDIT.

The underwriters for the offering are Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Cowen and JMP Securities.

This leading genome editing company is dedicated to treating patients with genetically defined diseases by correcting their disease-causing genes. Editas believes that it has entered a new era of genomic medicine as the growth of genomic information in recent decades has significantly expanded the understanding of genetically defined diseases. A new technology known as CRISPR (clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/Cas9 (CRISPR associated protein 9) has the potential to achieve precise, directed changes in DNA.

The confluence of these two streams of scientific endeavor, understanding genetic defects and having the tools to be able to address them, creates the opportunity for it to achieve a longstanding goal of medicine: to treat the root causes of diseases at the genetic level. While genetic defects are now recognized as the causes of many diseases, the vast majority of these diseases lack effective treatments. Of the estimated 6,000 diseases that are known to be caused by genetic mutations, Editas believes fewer than 5% are served by approved therapies. Its mission is to translate the promise of science into a broad class of transformative genomic medicines to benefit the greatest number of patients.

In the filing the company described its use of the net proceeds as follows:

We intend to use approximately $15 to $20 million of the net proceeds from this offering for preclinical studies and clinical trials for our LCA10 program and up to $22 million of the net proceeds from this offering for preclinical studies in our collaboration with Juno Therapeutics. We intend to use the remainder of the net proceeds from this offering for continued expansion of our platform technology, preclinical studies of our research programs in addition to LCA10 and engineered T cells, working capital and general corporate purposes.