Biotech Values

[mcbio]

Re: OMER

Biotech Omeros gets $20M Vulcan investment, $5M state grant

Seattle Times business staff Seattle biotechnology company Omeros plans to announce Monday a $20 million investment from Paul Allen's Vulcan...

Seattle Times business staff

Seattle biotechnology company Omeros plans to announce Monday a $20 million investment from Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital and a $5 million grant from a state biotechnology-research fund.

The financing will help Omeros advance its research on what are known as G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) — a key family of proteins that guides cells' responses to nearby molecules and forms the basis for many modern pharmaceuticals.

Omeros says it uses a proprietary high-throughput system to identify small molecules that can activate or disable GPCRs, unlocking them to drug development.

If the program generates revenues that exceed its research and development and commercialization costs — a rare thing in biotechnology — Vulcan and the state's Life Sciences Discovery Fund would get a percentage "in the midteens" on the first $1.5 billion of net proceeds, the company said. Vulcan also receives five-year warrants to purchase 400,000 shares of Omeros common stock at prices between $20 and $40 per share.

Omeros also said it will pay about $10.6 million in cash and stock to acquire GPCR-assessment technology from Patobios Limited, a Canadian company.

I take it this is what the call on Monday is about. Good for them that they're paying Patobios off as I had subsequently read that they did owe Patobios royalties on any potential milestone payments and I believe royalties on any of the GPCR drugs. But, now it looks like they could end up owing Vulcan and the Life Sciences Discovery Fund royalties (no idea off-hand what R&D and commercialization costs are expected to be in total ultimately for the GPCR program so no idea how likely OMER is to owe royalties here), in addition to obviously still needing to partner with big pharma at some point and further diluting their economic intake from the GPCRs. But, I guess they needed some funding.

Separately, I will say I was digging around before and came across what might be viewed as a competing orphan GPCR program from CGEN. See: http://www.cgen.com/Content.aspx?Page=gpcr_ligands . And CGEN is partnered with MRK on this program. So, perhaps CGEN is ahead of OMER as it pertains to orphan GPCRs. Although, I'm not certain if CGEN's program pertains to novel GPCRs or if it pertains to novel ways to hit existing GPCRs, so there could be some differences.