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Chimeric Therapeutics lists on ASX after being swamped by IPO investor support

Last updated: 12:33 18 Jan 2021 AEDT, First published: 12:32 15 Jan 2021 AEDT

Chimeric Therapeutics Limited - Chimeric Therapeutics to list on Monday after being swamped by IPO investor support
The company increased its IPO target to $35 million.

Chimeric Therapeutics Limited (ASX:CHM) received strong interest in an IPO from institutional and sophisticated investors for its ASX listing today, surpassing its target raising of $25 million.

After opening at 32 cents, the biotech company has traded up to 37.5 cents with more than 25 million shares changing hands with a value in excess of $8.5 million.

The company’s executive chairman Paul Hopper said the original target was upped to $35 million after increasing interest from investors led to more than $90 million of bids received.

He said: “I’ve raised a lot of money over the years, but I haven’t had a response to a capital raising like this.

“We started out planning to raise $25 million and we were swamped, in fact, we had bids up to $94 million.

“Because it was so heavily oversubscribed, we increased the book a little bit and took $35 million – and we’re quite pleased with the result.”

Increasing interest in biotech

Hopper said: “The interesting thing about biotech and life science in this last 12 months is that they almost pushed COVID to the side.

“Capital raisings have been huge, share pricing and valuations have been strong so the life science and biotech market has boomed over the last year.

“There’s a huge amount of investor interest in the sector.”

CLTX-CAR T therapy

Chimeric Therapeutics is developing ground-breaking CAR-T cell therapies for solid tumours based on scientific research conducted by leading US CAR-T experts at the City of Hope (COH) Cancer Centre in Los Angeles.

The company’s CLTX-CAR T therapy uses a peptide derived from scorpion toxin to direct T cells to target glioblastoma (GBM) - an aggressive form of brain cancer.

Looking forward

The treatment is being used in a Phase 1 clinical trial at COH to treat GBM where dosing of patients is underway, and the company is well funded and plans to conduct a patient study of 50 to 75 people following the completion of its phase one clinical trial.

Hopper said: “At the moment we have a phase 1 clinical trial in glioblastoma or brain cancer that’s recruiting patients now, so the focus of the company is to get that trial recruited as fast as we can.

“Depending what the signals are in the phase 1 trial, we would look to go into a phase 2 in brain cancer as quickly as we can.”

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