Artiva Biotherapeutics, a clinical-stage NK cell therapy biotech, is trying again for the public markets, it revealed Friday afternoon in an SEC filing.
The San Diego biotech is going for a Nasdaq debut but in a very different biotech financing environment than when it originally sought an IPO in the spring of 2021, at a time when large public floats were easier to achieve thanks to low interest rates and generalist investors’ intrigue in drug development.
And this time around, it’s without partner Merck, which axed their CAR-NK solid tumor collaboration last October, according to Friday’s S-1 filing.
The biotech plans to list as $ARTV. It has yet to disclose a size range for its proposed IPO.
The move comes the same day autoimmune biotech Alumis went public, ending its first day of trading nearly 17% below its initial pricing of $16 per share $ALMS.
Artiva spent $50 million on R&D in all of 2023 and about $11 million through the first three months of this year, according to the SEC paperwork. It had cash, equivalents and short-term investments of $62 million at the end of March.
Artiva officially backed out of its IPO ambitions on Nov. 1, 2022, so that it could reveal a partnership with Affimed two days later. At the time, CEO Fred Aslan told Endpoints News that the main reason for halting the IPO was to reveal the joint development, manufacturing and commercialization pact with its Germany-based partner.
The biotech is working on developing NK cell-based therapies for solid tumors, blood cancers and autoimmune diseases. Artiva is one of multiple cell therapy companies to join the autoimmune race, including fellow NK company Nkarta.
The NK cell therapy space has had its ups and downs. Sanofi recently shuttered a Dutch NK cell therapy biotech that it acquired in 2020, Catamaran Bio wound down earlier this year, BeiGene scrapped its pact with Shoreline Biosciences in February and Affimed reduced its workforce last year.
Artiva’s lead off-the-shelf therapy is in a Phase 1/1b study in various forms of lupus nephritis. It’s also in Phase 1/2 in certain forms of B cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Artiva’s main stockholders are GC LabCell, 5AM Ventures, venBio and RA Capital. GC is its South Korea-based partner that has more than a decade of manufacturing NK cells under its belt, Aslan previously said.