Ziopharm Oncology Inc. (NASDAQ: ZIOP) saw its shares slide early on Friday after the company announced the pricing of its secondary offering. The company priced its 9.71 million shares at $5.15 per share to a single institutional investor. The gross proceeds from the offering are expected to be roughly $50 million.

Guggenheim Securities is acting as the sole underwriter and book-running manager for the offering.

This Massachusetts-based biotechnology company employs novel gene expression, control and cell technologies to deliver safe, effective and scalable cell- and viral-based therapies for the treatment of cancer and graft-versus-host-disease.

Ziopharm’s immuno-oncology programs, in collaboration with Intrexon Corp. (NYSE: XON) and the MD Anderson Cancer Center, include chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T) and other adoptive cell-based approaches that use non-viral gene transfer methods for broad scalability.

The company is advancing programs in multiple stages of development together with Intrexon’s RheoSwitch Therapeutic System technology, a switch to turn on and off, and precisely modulate, gene expression in order to improve therapeutic index. Ziopharm’s pipeline includes a number of cell-based therapeutics in both clinical and preclinical testing that are focused on hematologic and solid tumor malignancies.

The company intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for general corporate and working capital purposes, including the advancement of its clinical programs.

Shares of Ziopharm were last seen down 2.5% at $6.94 on Friday, with a consensus analyst price target of $23.00 and a 52-week trading range of $4.45 to $7.99.

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