Septerna is joining biotech’s IPO on-deck circle, preparing for a public offering with two other startups that have recently announced similar plans.
It announced its plans in a securities filing Wednesday evening and would trade as $SEPN on the Nasdaq. Two other companies, Upstream Bio and CAMP4 Therapeutics, have also recently filed to list.
Septerna is working on a class of drugs that target G protein-coupled receptors, or GPCRs and has touted its ability to go after previously untapped or difficult-to-drug receptors in that category. The Bay Area biotech’s oral small molecule SEP-786 entered Phase 1 last month and will have data in mid-2025, according to the Wednesday night filing.
After a dismal three years for new biotech listings, the industry has started to pick up steam with three IPOs in one day last month and another Nasdaq debut last week from obesity drugmaker BioAge Labs.
Like MBX Biosciences, one of last month’s IPOs, Septerna’s lead drug candidate is also going after hypoparathyroidism, a disease in which the body doesn’t make enough parathyroid hormone, harming people’s ability to regulate levels of calcium and phosphorus.
It’s been an active area for drug developers. AstraZeneca bought Amolyt Pharma earlier this year to gain access to its late-stage hypoparathyroidism drug candidate and Ascendis Pharma got an FDA greenlight for its medicine treating the disease in August. Takeda stopped making its hypoparathyroidism drug Natpara this year after manufacturing issues.
“We think that the game-changer for this whole space will be an oral small molecule instead, and we’ve developed compounds that we believe should work as well as those injectable peptides,” CEO Jeffrey Finer told Endpoints News when it raised a $150 million Series B in July 2023.
Septerna launched with $100 million in 2022 based on work in the labs of Nobel laureate and GPCR pioneer Robert Lefkowitz. G-protein coupled receptors are popular targets, leading to more than 700 drugs over the decades, but Septerna thinks the industry has only scratched the surface.
It’s creating allosteric modulators, which Lefkowitz previously analogized to “drill[ing] all over the country rather than just in that one tiny little orthosteric place.” And it sold a discovery-stage GPCR program to Vertex last year for $47.5 million upfront.
Septerna spent $28 million on R&D in the first six months of the year, a $12 million increase over the same period of 2023. It had $143 million in working capital at the end of June.
Its biggest stockholders, owning more than 5%, are Third Rock Ventures, Samsara BioCapital, RA Capital, Deep Track, Invus, BVF and Goldman Sachs’ West Street Life Sciences.