Eighteen companies have gone public this year so far, putting 2026 on pace to record the highest number of IPOs since the pandemic-driven high of 2021.
Two more biotechs have joined the ranks of young drugmakers looking to battle it out on the public markets, with BlossomHill Therapeutics and Latigo Biotherapeutics separately revealing plans for initial public offerings late last week.
On Friday, both California companies filed their respective applications to appear on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. Neither have indicated how much money they expect to raise or when they expect to close their offerings. Once complete, however, BlossomHill will trade as BLSM while Latigo, a member of BioSpace’s NextGen Class of 2025, will have the ticker LTGO.
Eighteen biotechs have already gone public in the first half of 2026, more than double last year’s total of eight. If two new IPOs materialize, the 2026 class would become the biggest since the pandemic-driven surge of 2021, when more than 100 biotechs entered the public markets.
Three other companies also filed IPO plans last week: Braveheart Bio, Attovia Therapeutics and Vogenx. None have yet closed their offerings.
Latigo plans on using the IPO proceeds to chase Vertex Pharmaceuticals in the non-opioid pain space after the January 2025 approval of Journavx. Latigo’s lead asset LTG-001 is an orally available NaV1.8 blocker proposed to ease moderate to severe acute pain. The California biotech wants to usher LTG-001 through a Phase 3 study in patients undergoing a bunionectomy—a surgical procedure to correct a deformity of the big toe—and toward a new drug application submission, according to its prospectus.
Latigo will also put its IPO money toward LTG-321, a next-generation NaV1.8 inhibitor, which the company hopes to push through a Phase 2 osteoarthritis pain study and into late-stage development. Owing to structural differences, LTG-321 could enable lower doses than LTG-001, which the company says is important in cases of chronic use.
BlossomHill, on the other hand, is playing in the much more crowded cancer field. The biotech has two clinical-stage candidates: the EGFR inhibitor BH-30643 and the CLK blocker BH-30236. The former, designed to specifically target mutated forms of EGFR, is being proposed for non-small cell lung cancer, while the latter is under evaluation for relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia.
The cancer company said it would use the IPO money to complete an ongoing Phase 1/2 study and initiate a Phase 2 trial for BH-30643, as well as continue the Phase 1 development of BH-30236, as per its prospectus.
