{"id":653433,"date":"2010-02-03T16:44:29","date_gmt":"2010-02-03T21:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xconomy.com\/?p=61615"},"modified":"2010-02-03T16:44:29","modified_gmt":"2010-02-03T21:44:29","slug":"ironwood-climbs-3-6-percent-on-ipo-debut-day-shows-investor-interest%e2%80%94albeit-tepid%e2%80%94in-biotech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/653433","title":{"rendered":"Ironwood Climbs 3.6 Percent on IPO Debut Day, Shows Investor Interest\u2014Albeit Tepid\u2014in Biotech"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Biotech<\/a>, deals<\/a>, Finances<\/a><\/div>\n

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\n\t\tLuke Timmerman wrote:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ironwood Pharmaceuticals showed today that an IPO market does exist for a serious biotech company without a moneymaking product on the market, but that investors’ appetite for the speculative business of drug development is modest.<\/p>\n

The Cambridge, MA-based biotech company set its initial public offering price at $11.25<\/a>—a far cry from its forecasted price range of $14 to $16<\/a>. By the end of today’s trading, the initial investors had made a little money, as the stock (NASDAQ: IRWD<\/a>) opened trading at $12.40 and finished the day up 3.6 percent to close<\/a> at $11.65, after about 2.7 million shares changed hands. This action came on a ho-hum overall trading day, in which both the Nasdaq Composite and Nasdaq Biotechnology Indexes were basically flat.<\/p>\n

Importantly for Ironwood, the IPO raised $188 million in new cash for operations, turned the company’s stock into a liquid asset for its employees and venture investors, and established an initial market valuation of $1.1 billion.<\/p>\n

The Ironwood deal marks only the third time in two years that a biotech company in the product-development phase has been able to complete an IPO. Sunrise, FL-based Bioheart did it in February 2008, and flamed out soon after, while Seattle-based Omeros<\/a> (NASDAQ: OMER<\/a>) has lost almost 40 percent of its value since it went public in October. As I noted on Monday, Ironwood is clearly in a different category<\/a> than most biotech IPO candidates, since it has a drug for a big market that has already passed two pivotal clinical trials. Still, plenty of biotech investors were hoping Ironwood could crack open the IPO window, and re-ignite the interest of general public investors in other IPO aspirants.<\/p>\n

I have a few calls out to ask for commentary about what ripple effect the Ironwood deal may have on the rest of the biotech sector, and I may update this space later if I hear anything noteworthy.<\/p>\n

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Biotech, deals, Finances Luke Timmerman wrote: Ironwood Pharmaceuticals showed today that an IPO market does exist for a serious biotech company without a moneymaking product on the market, but that investors’ appetite for the speculative business of drug development is modest. The Cambridge, MA-based biotech company set its initial public offering price at $11.25—a far […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":843,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-653433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-2JZf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/843"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}