January 14, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
Nitric oxide clinical stage company Bellerophon Therapeutics filed an S-1 form Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $69 million for an initial public offering, a sign the spin-out from Ikaria is ready to take its late-stage products to the big time.
Bellerophon has applied to list its shares on NASDAQ under the symbol BLPH. In its filing, the company listed Leerink Partners and Cowen and Co. as bookrunners for the deal.
Hampton, N.J.-based Bellerophon creates nitric oxide-based therapies for cardiopulmonary diseases. It narrowly missed the acquisition of Ikaria’s non-biotech business by Madison Dearborn for $1.6 billion, instead spinning out in February of last year. Ikaria must be looking at today’s news as bittersweet, because it, too, attempted to go public in 2010, but instead had to withdraw its offer for last of subscribers.
Bellerophon has recently attracted notice for its two late-stage products, which are in advanced clinical development.
One is a bioabsorbable cardiac matrix, or BCM, cardiac remodeling, which often leads to congestive heart failure following an ST-segment elevated myocardial infarction, or STEMI.
That therapy is currently undergoing a placebo-controlled clinical trial designed to support CE mark registration in the European Union. The company enrolled 303 patients in the trial in December 2014, with a goal to present top line results in mid-2015. If those results are positive, Bellerophon will then attempt a pre-market approval trial of BCM beginning in the first half of 2016, aimed at getting American regulators on board.
The second, dubbed INOpulse, is based on a proprietary pulsatile nitric oxide delivery device. The INOpulse program has one product for the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension, or PAH, with Phase III clinical trials slated for the second half of 2015; and a second, for the treatment of pulmonary hypertension associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or PH-COPD, which is in Phase II development.
See the filing itself here.
