Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Aveo Pharmaceuticals files for $100M stock offering

By Michelle Lang

Aveo Pharmaceuticals Inc., a cancer therapeutics company, has priced a public offering of 5.75 million shares of common stock at $17.50 per share. The offering is expected to bring the Cambridge company about $100.6 million before expenses.

Aveo (Nasdaq: AVEO) noted in a press release that underwriters have a 30-day option to buy 862,500 shares more.

J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Jefferies & Company Inc. are serving as joint book-running managers and underwriters of the offering. Canaccord Genuity Inc. is serving as co-lead manager.

Aveo was founded in 2001 as GenPath Pharmaceuticals Inc., before it changed its name in 2005. In May, the company said it would receive an initial $15 million and up to $540 million in milestone payments in an exclusive license agreement with Centocor Ortho Biotech Inc. for worldwide development and commercialization of Aveo’s antibodies targeting the Recepteur d’Origine Nantais (RON) receptor.  And in February, Aveo formed a development and commercialization deal with Astellas Pharma Inc., of Tokyo. The deal was expected to bring in $125 million upfront and up to $1.3 billion in potential milestone payments.
 

Editor's note: A previous version of this article referred to the offering as an initial public offering. Aveo is a public company, and this is a follow-on public offering of its common stock.