Health and Healthcare

Voyager Therapeutics IPO Ticks Up After Lower Pricing

Jon C. Ogg

Published: November 11, 2015 11:55 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 5:17 pm

Voyager Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: VYGR) has debuted after pricing its initial public offering (IPO). The company sold 5 million shares at an offering price of $14.00 per share, for gross proceeds of $70 million, before discounting the amounts tied toward underwriting fees and commissions.

What matters here is that this IPO’s price of $14.00 per share went out under the range of $15.00 to $17.00, but the original plan was to offer 4.69 million shares.

Trading kicked off at 11:15 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday. Almost 100,000 shares trading in the first two minutes, and the last price seen was $15.75.

The clinical-stage gene therapy outfit targets severe diseases of the central nervous system. Parkinson’s disease is one such target, and that is its farthest stage development, along with Genzyme. Voyager’s product pipeline further includes other programs targeting a monogenic form of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), Friedreich’s ataxia, Huntington’s disease and spinal muscular atrophy.

As a reminder, clinical stage companies have little to no real revenues that can be assessed for historical purposes. That means that there may be years before investors get to evaluate real streams of revenues — and that is if the company’s drugs actually are approved by U.S. and/or international drug approval regulatory agencies like our own Food and Drug Administration.

Cowen and Piper Jaffray were acting as joint book-running managers for the offering. Wedbush PacGrow and Nomura were listed as Voyager’s co-managers for the offering. Voyager Therapeutics has granted the underwriters a 30-day green-shoe option to purchase up to an additional 750,000 shares of its common stock at the $14.00 IPO price to cover overallotments.

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