Akebia Hits New Low After Pricing Secondary Offering

By Chris Lange April 17, 2015 Updated April 17, 2015

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Akebia Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: AKBA) announced the pricing for its secondary offering Thursday evening. A total of 7.27 million shares of common stock were registered for the offering at a price of $8.25 per share. The net proceeds from this offering are expected to be roughly $56.1 million, after deducting underwriting discounts and commissions.

The underwriters for this secondary offering are UBS, Morgan Stanley, JMP Securities, Needham and Brean Capital.

Akebia is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of novel proprietary therapeutics based on hypoxia inducible factor (HIF) biology and the commercialization of these products for patients with kidney disease. HIF is the primary regulator of the production of red blood cells (RBC) in the body and a potentially novel mechanism of treating anemia.

According to the filing, Akebia sees its addressable market as:

More than 30 million people in the United States have CKD, with estimates that over 1.8 million of these patients suffer from anemia. Anemia from these indications is currently treated by injectable rESAs—including Epogen, Aranesp and Procrit—with iron supplementation or RBC transfusion. Based on the reported revenues of companies that market and sell rESAs, we estimate that global sales of injectable rESAs were approximately $7 billion in 2013, the vast majority of which were for renal indications.

The company intends to use the net proceeds from this offering to continue clinical development of AKB-6548 in patients with anemia secondary to CKD, including the preparation for and initiation of Phase 3 trials; to advance its preclinical candidate, AKB-6899, through Phase 1 development in oncology; and for working capital and other general corporate purposes.

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Shares of Akebia were down 5.6% at $8.18 Friday morning, in a 52-week trading range of $8.24 to $31.00. Note that the 52-week low for the stock was hit during Friday’s trading session. The stock has a consensus analyst price target of $28.67.

As of 10:45 a.m. Eastern, nearly 3.9 million shares had moved on the day. The average daily volume was roughly 123,000.