Medicus Pharma completes IPO, becomes second local life sciences company to go public in 2024
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—(Philadelphia Business Journal — Nov 15, 2024 - Written by: John George)
The second initial public offering this year by a local life sciences firm is in the books.
Medicus Pharma Ltd., which is domiciled in Toronto and has its management team in Conshohocken, completed a $4 million IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange Thursday. Its shares are trading under the “MDCX” symbol.
Medicus, which is working on a new way to treat skin cancer, sold 970,000 shares of its common stock at $4.125 per share. The total proceeds from the offering could grow by another $600,000 if the underwriters exercise in full their option to purchase an additional 145,500 shares to cover over-allotments.
Shares of Medicus (NASDAQ: MDCX) were trading at $2.16 per share early Friday afternoon.
Medicus is already publicly traded in Canada and will continue to trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange, where it’s also listed under the MDCX symbol.
Raza Bokhari, the company’s CEO, told the Business Journal in May that Medicus pursued a public stock listing in the U.S. to gain access to a larger pool of potential investors and raise funds for its business model. Medicus focuses on acquiring and accelerating the clinical development of innovative therapeutic assets.
The largest shareholders of Medicus, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, are Dr. Kenneth Melani, who owns 3.2 million shares for a 30.6% stake in the company; Ajay Raju, who has 2 million shares for an 18.4% stake; and Bokhari, who has 793,174 shares for a 7.3% stake.
Melani, the former CEO of Pittsburgh-based Highmark, now leads the private equity firm Velocity Fund Partners, also based in western Pennsylvania. Raju’s company, Philadelphia-based 215 Capital, invests in early and growth stage companies.
Medicus plans to use the bulk of its proceeds from the offering to fund a phase 2 proof-of-concept clinical trial for its experimental basal cell carcinoma product SkinJect. SkinJect is a dissolvable micro-needle patch containing the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin. The device was invented by Dr. Louis D. Falo, chairman of the department of dermatology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
About 2 Million biopsy-confirmed patients are diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma, which accounts for nearly 80% of all skin cancer cases. Basal cell carcinomas is typically treated with MOHS surgery to remove all of the cancer, layer by layer, along with some of the healthy tissue around it.
“We believe we have a novel treatment that not only cuts costs but is aesthetically pleasing and is non-invasive,” Bokhari said.
The potential market size for treating basal cell carcinomas is estimated at $20 billion annually, according to Medicus. Bokhari said if SkinJect can get approved and used in patients who are not suitable candidates for surgery, it would present a $2 billion revenue opportunity for the company.
Medicus was launched in October 2023 through a transaction that combined Interactive Capital Partners Corp., a publicly traded shell company in Canada, and SkinJect Inc., a University of Pittsburgh spinout.
The only other Philadelphia-area life sciences company to go public through an IPO so far this year was ArriVent Biopharma (NASDAQ: AVBP). The Newtown Square firm raised a $175 million upsized initial public stock offering in January by selling 9.7 million shares of its common stock at $18 per share.
ArriVent is focused on bringing biopharmaceutical medicines approved and under development in China to the U.S. and European Union. Its stock was trading at $27.03 per share early Friday afternoon.