Atreca Raises $113.8 Million in IPO to Advance Antibody-Based Immune Therapies for Solid Tumors

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) has learned that biopharmaceutical company Atreca recently announced its listing on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker symbol BCEL. Atreca offered 7.5 million shares of common stock in its initial public offering at a price of $17 per share, raising a total of $113.8 million. In addition, Atreca has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 1.1 million additional shares of common stock at the initial public offering price.

Atreca is a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Redwood City, California, dedicated to discovering and developing novel antibody-based immunotherapies for the treatment of various solid tumors by leveraging its proprietary differentiated platform.

Since its establishment in 2010, Atreca has completed six rounds of financing, raising more than $220 million. Notably, on September 12, 2018, Atreca closed a $125 million Series C financing round.

The funds from this financing round have two purposes: first, $45 million will be used to advance the Phase 1b trial of its lead drug candidate, ATRC-101; second, $65 million will be allocated to the discovery and development of other drug candidates.

Atreca leverages its proprietary platform and infrastructure, including sample collection and repositories, differentiated technologies, bioinformatics expertise, and industrialized network laboratory infrastructure, to discover and develop clinical candidates.

Sample Collection and Repository: Atreca begins by collecting simple blood samples from patients to build a growing biobank, collaborating with leading physicians and scientists in multiple non-interventional clinical trials to lay the groundwork for discovering clinical drug candidates. Currently, the Atreca repository contains samples from more than twenty types of solid tumors.

Differentiated Technology: Atreca’s proprietary Immune Repertoire Capture (IRC) technology, powered by deep immunology expertise and dedicated infrastructure, accurately generates the naturally paired heavy- and light-chain sequences of antibodies expressed by individual B cells isolated from patient samples.

Bioinformatics Expertise: Leveraging the superior data provided by IRC technology, Atreca accurately quantifies and analyzes patient antibody repertoires to intelligently select antibody sequences for immediate gene synthesis, expression, and further analysis in the laboratory.

Industrial-Scale Network Laboratory Infrastructure: Atreca conducts industrial-scale in vitro and in vivo assays to characterize recombinant patient-derived antibodies during the development of leading pipeline candidates. In oncology, Atreca aims to develop therapeutics for large patient populations; therefore, its primary screening strategy focuses on identifying patient-derived antibodies that selectively bind to non-self tumor tissues.

(Compiled by: Li Chengping)