Ablynx to raise up to €57.5M in secondary public offering

Funding

Ablynx NV, has announced the terms of public offering in which it aims to raise up to €57.5 million, pricing the offer between €7.20 and €7.75 per share.

Edwin Moses, Ablynx’s Chairman and CEO of the Ghent-based antibody specialist, said the company is at an inflection point. “We have delivered on all the IPO milestones and more. We have a well validated platform and over 25 programmes in the pipeline resulting in multiple shots on goal.“

The company has had positive feedback from the market during last week and Moses said he is confident of raising the money. “[This] will increase Ablynx’s flexibility to retain and resource programmes until they are clinically validated, to co-invest in development alongside pharmaceutical partners and to potentially commercialise certain products such as ALX-0681 ourselves and to continue to invest in our technology platform in areas such as automation and industrialisation.”

The offering comprises a public offering in Belgium to retail investors who have supported the company strongly in the past, a private placement to qualified institutional buyers in the US, and a private placement to qualified and/or institutional investors in Belgium.

Ablynx is developing a portfolio of scaled-down antibody-based therapeutics, called nanobodies, in disease areas including inflammation, thrombosis, oncology and Alzheimer’s disease. The company has over 25 programmes in its pipeline including four in clinical development.

To date, nanobodies have been successfully generated against more than 190 different protein targets including chemokines, G-Protein Coupled Receptors, ion channels and viruses, which are very difficult to target with conventional monoclonal antibodies.