5 months after launch, Allogene guns for $100M IPO

Arie Belldegrun and David Chang launched Allogene earlier this year with $300 million and a clutch of allogeneic CAR-T assets. Now, five months, a new chief financial officer and another $120 million later, the company has filed to raise up to $100 million in its IPO. 

The South San Francisco biotech started out with 17 off-the-shelf CAR-T assets licensed from Cellectis by way of Pfizer. Of them, only one, UCART19, was clinical stage; the other 16 had not yet been tested in humans. Allogene plans to use its IPO proceeds to bankroll its "ongoing and planned clinical trials of UCART19" and the preclinical assets ALLO-501 and ALLO-715, according to an S-1 filed Friday. It will also use the cash to build out its headquarters and clinical and commercial manufacturing facility. 

Cellectis’ CAR-T stable took the scenic route to Allogene. Pfizer acquired the global rights to the 16 preclinical assets in 2014 for $80 million up front. With $185 million per product on the line, the deal could have been worth as much as $2.9 billion. Allogene has inherited responsibility for those milestones and royalties for each commercialized product. As for UCART19, Pfizer and Servier picked that up a year later. 

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