Maze Therapeutics, Inc.

Sionna Therapeutics and Odyssey Therapeutics have joined Metsera and Maze in an attempt to go public via the still rocky IPO route. The biotechs, focused on cystic fibrosis and immunology respectively, filed for their initial public offerings on Friday evening. Sionna and Odyssey departed last week’s annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference with plans for public life as $SION and $ODTX . They join the Nasdaq queue alongside obesity drug developer Metsera and kidney disease startup Maze , which has spun out other companies and formed joint ventures over the years. None of the IPO hopefuls have yet outlined the size of their planned debuts. If all four biotechs follow through with their plans, they’d create a buzzy start to 2025 compared to the relatively dry IPO market of the past few years. The new entrants Sionna and Odyssey are both well-funded, clinical-stage biotechs with experienced management teams, ticking most of the boxes that public market investors seek for drug development startups in the current IPO environment. Last year, Boston-based Sionna in-licensed three cystic fibrosis drug candidates from AbbVie, just months after disclosing a $182 million Series C that would take it through 2026, CEO Mike Cloonan told Endpoints News last July. Cloonan was a long-time Biogen executive and Sage Therapeutics operating chief before joining Sionna in spring 2021. New details on the AbbVie deal were revealed in Sionna’s S-1 paperwork, which was filed on 17 January. AbbVie got $5 million upfront and $8.6 million worth of common stock. The pharma giant could also get up to $360 million in development and commercial biobucks, plus up to $130 million in commercial and sales-based milestones, according to the S-1 filing . Sionna had $180 million in cash, equivalents and marketable securities at the end of September, according to the filing. The mid-stage biotech spent about $43 million on R&D in the first nine months of 2024, a $12 million jump over the same period the prior year, per the S-1. Sionna has raised about $330 million since its 2019 founding. RA Capital owns the largest chunk of the biotech at 29.2%. TPG Growth holds 17.4%, Atlas Venture owns 11.4% and OrbiMed maintains a 9.9% stake. OrbiMed is also one of the largest stakeholders in Odyssey. SR One is the biggest shareholder at 16.2% followed by OrbiMed (14.3%), Fidelity (6.7%) and Foresite Capital (6%), according to Odyssey’s S-1 filing . Odyssey is developing small molecule therapies for ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, atopic dermatitis, systemic sclerosis and other indications. It’s also creating protein therapeutics for vitiligo, type 1 diabetes, systemic lupus erythematosus and asthma. The preclinical asthma program is part of the burgeoning TSLP arena. Gary Glick, a chemistry professor-turned-serial entrepreneur, leads Odyssey. The biotech startup formed in 2021 and quickly disclosed three successive megaround financings, most recently a $101 million Series C in December 2023. Glick is also a co-founder of Scorpion Therapeutics. During last week’s JPM, Eli Lilly said it would buy Scorpion for up to $2.5 billion . Odyssey spent $81 million on R&D in the first nine months of 2024, a $5 million decrease compared with the same period of 2023. The company had about $155 million in cash, equivalents and marketable securities at the end of September.

Biopharma leaders will descend on San Francisco next week hopeful that the industry’s biggest dealmaking event will finally yield some much sought-after M&A. The industry needs it after a slow fourth quarter, which had the lowest number of deals and total quarterly value since the first quarter of 2022, according to a JP Morgan analysis published this week. There were only 18 M&A transactions in the final three-month stretch of 2024, compared to 31 in the same period in 2023. The total deal value was about one-tenth of 2023’s exuberant fourth quarter. “Somehow the bubbles in New Years’ champagne weren’t quite as robust as they might have been a year ago,” Stifel’s Tim Opler wrote Tuesday. The biggest deal of 2024 was Vertex’s $4.9 billion acquisition of Alpine Immune Sciences in April. In a securities filing, Alpine said it held talks during the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference with four unnamed companies about its R&D plans before entering a confidentiality agreement with Vertex in mid-February. The conference has long served as a place to announce major deals in addition to being one of the industry’s biggest breeding grounds for dealmaking. It’s viewed as a kind of bellwether for the M&A and trends that will shape the biopharma industry over the course of the year. And as the meeting’s profile has risen, many investors and startup executives now expect a drumbeat of deals to kick the first quarter into gear, particularly this year since large drugmakers spent last year inking deals that hovered around $1 billion in value. “Note that some see this as [a] source of near-term downside risk if we don’t have a busy start to the year/JPM given expectations relatively high for a quick start,” Raymond James’ bankers wrote Sunday in a note. There were no megadeals or even medium-sized M&A in 2024, even though big pharma companies had about $1 trillion in cash and debt capacity for deals, according to a Jefferies report in August. Those companies with firepower appeared to play it safe, betting on early-stage private biotechs that likely would’ve been on the Nasdaq if the public markets weren’t so uncertain. Johnson and Johnson, Merck and Novo Nordisk have the most firepower, Jefferies analysts noted. It was the first year in more than two decades without a $5 billion or larger biopharma deal, according to William Blair. It was also the first year without a $10 billion deal since 2012, they wrote. The firm’s bankers predict 2025 will have “meaningful public company M&A” and about 30 IPOs. The looming patent cliff is a massive concern for many large drugmakers, which still need to address near-term revenue holes that won’t be filled by the longer-term bets they made last year. Many of the deals last year focused on drugs that are still years away from pivotal trials or a shot at approval. That said, while some Wall Street bankers expect a better year for dealmaking, it may not be noticeably different than the past two years. “Our initial hope was that M&A would pick up after a decisive US election outcome, but with uncertainty around Trump’s healthcare appointees and macroeconomic headwinds, our sense is that big pharma is taking a wait‐and‐see approach,” Oppenheimer bankers wrote this week. “We expect 2025 M&A activity to land somewhere between 2023 & 2024 levels, given the overall pro‐business stance of the incoming administration, particularly around changes at the helm of the FTC.” The Oppenheimer team recorded 57 M&A transactions in 2024, down from 65 in 2023, and 172 business development and licensing deals in 2024, down from 194. Headed into next week’s JP Morgan conference, there has been a flurry of licensing deals, collaborations and megaround financings to kick off 2025 . And one company — Maze Therapeutics — finally unveiled its IPO intentions . A notable deal may also be in the works; The Financial Times this week reported that GSK is considering buying cancer drugmaker IDRx for about $1 billion, citing sources familiar with the discussions.

Maze Therapeutics hopes to use some of its IPO proceeds to boost its Compass platform, which uses human genetic variation to pinpoint genes associated with disease to identify potential new drug targets.\n Just a month after announcing a $115 million series D financing to advance its lead assets, Maze Therapeutics is looking to boost its kidney disease candidates further by going public.The Bay Area-based biotech revealed the planned IPO in a Jan. 7 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission but did not divulge how many shares it plans to offer or at what price.Maze applied to be listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol \"MAZE,\" according to the filing. Proceeds from the offering, like the series D round before it, will go toward guiding MZE829 and MZE782 through clinical development. MZE829 is an oral APOL1 inhibitor being tested for APOL1 kidney disease, with a phase 2 trial planned to begin by the first quarter of 2025.MZE782, an oral SCL6A19 inhibitor, is earlier in its clinical journal, and is currently being tested in a phase 1 trial with healthy volunteers. Maze plans to pursue the drug in chronic kidney disease and phenylketonuria, according to the filing.The remainder of the funds will go towards “further development of additional common disease programs” in cardiovascular, renal and metabolism indications, the company said in the filing, “including preclinical studies, IND-enabling studies and initiation of clinical trials.” Maze also hopes to use the IPO to boost its Compass platform, which uses human genetic variation to pinpoint genes associated with disease to identify potential new drug targets. The company’s work on genetic variation earned it a place on Fierce Biotech’s 2019 Fierce 15 list.The biotech\'s fundraising efforts thus far have paid off to the tune of almost $500 million, including its $191 million 2019 debut and a $190 million round in 2022.