Two withdrawals of recently submitted initial public offering (IPO) filings by drug developers, plus a dearth of new filings this month, suggest that the outlook for biopharma IPOs remains cloudy, complicated by factors that include share price declines for some recent offerings and the ongoing war in Iran and the broader Middle East. Invea Therapeutics, a developer of oral small molecule drugs for inflammatory diseases, cited market conditions earlier this month in withdrawing the planned IPO for which it filed on December 15, more than two years after first filing, then withdrawing its first S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Invea had planned to list its shares on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol INAI, and raise about $35 million in gross proceeds by offering 3.2 million shares at between $10 and $12 a share. According to its most recent preliminary prospectus, filed January 27, the largest share of its proceeds—about $15 million—was to advance the development of lead product candidate INVA8001, including the launch of a Phase IIa trial and expected data readout for chronic inducible urticaria, subject to a clinical trial application filing and regulatory clearance. Future plans call for expanding the development of INVA8001 into chronic spontaneous urticaria. “The grounds for this application for withdrawal are that, due to current market conditions, the registrant has determined not to pursue the public offering to which the registration statement relates at this time,” Invea stated in a regulatory filing. A week earlier, Edison Oncology, a…
