scPharmaceuticals filed recently with the SEC regarding its plans for an IPO.
scPharmaceuticals filed recently with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding its plans for an initial public offering (IPO). It intends to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol SCPH. It hopes to raise $100 million.
scPharmaceuticals focuses on developing drugs for subcutaneous delivery. It works to take widely used generic drugs that are only available for intravenous or intramuscular injections, and develop them to be administered via a proprietary patch pump.
The company’s lead product candidate is Furoscix, which is a patented subcutaneous formulation of furosemide delivered by the company’s sc2Wear Infusor for treatment of worsening, or decompensated, heart failure outside of the inpatient setting. The company indicated it had launched in January the first phase of its study, which was conducted by the Heart Failure Clinical Research Network (HFN), which is an initiative funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is also developing ceftriaxone for subcutaneously deliver for infectious diseases.
In a statement in January, Pieter Muntendam, president and chief executive officer of scPharmaceuticals, said, “One of the core objectives of healthcare reform is to concurrently improve treatment outcomes while reducing cost of care. Patients with heart failure make up 42 percent of all Medicare admissions and in 2012 we set out to develop a product that would offer a home-based, hospital-strength diuretic option for treatment of fluid overload in heart failure, the single most common reasons for these hospitalizations. The NHLBI SUBQ-HF will help to define how to best use this novel option to reduce length of stay.”
Also in January, the company announced it had closed a $45.6 million Series B investment round. The round was co-led by OrbiMed and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries. Existing investors FAM Ventures and Lundbeckfond Ventures also participated. The funds were expected to support the development of the operational and commercial infrastructure to bring Furoscix and the sc2Wear Infusor to the U.S. market.
“We are pleased with the strong interest in this financing round from leading life science and strategic corporate investors,” Muntendam said in a statement at the time. “The additional funds will support our preparation for the commercial introduction of Furoscix and the sc2Wear Infusor, as well as further development of our antibiotic pipeline products.”
As part of that financing, Jonathan Silverstein, a partner and co-head of Global Private Equity at OrbiMed and Abhay Gandhi, chief executive officer of North America at Sun Pharma, joined the company’s board of directors.
sbPharmaceuticals was founded in 2013. Jefferies, Leerink Partners and BMO Capital Markets are the joint bookrunners for the IPO. At this time now, pricing terms were revealed.
The company’s technology platform has two parts. One is a Micropiston Pump using the SenseCore micro-piston pump technology developed by Swiss company Sensile Medical. A rotary piston pump utilizes both a rotational and an up-and-down movement to pump drugs. The second component also has two parts—a reusable activator the size of a cell phone that includes electronics, a rechargeable battery, LED light indicators, and a small speaker, which can be used up to 100 times. The other component is a single-use cartridge.
