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And then there were three: After Editas ($EDIT) and Intellia ($NTLA) went public this year, CRISPR has brought up the rear with its IPO. But the biotech will need to gear up for a tough market that has seen its rivals’ stock fall hard in the intervening months, and the ongoing patent saga on who “owns” the gene editing tech.

Switzerland and Cambridge, MA-based CRISPR Therapeutics priced its IPO at $14 a pop for 4 million shares, bringing home $56 million. This is less than the $94.4 million raised by Editas in February and the $108 million from Intellia Therapeutics in May.

Bayer, however, did buy 2.5 million shares itself at $14, bumping up another $35 million to the biotech, which will trade on the Nasdaq this week under the ticker $CRSP.

The biotech booked around $2 million in sales for the year ending June 30, 2016, although it made an operating loss of nearly $30 million in the first half of 2016.

It has already set up a JV with Bayer to create CRISPR spinoff Casebia Therapeutics as well as a collab with Vertex Pharmaceuticals ($VRTX). Bayer’s venture arm, before the offering, owned around 8% of the biotech, with Celgene ($CELG) and Glaxo’s ($GSK) venture businesses owning 12.4% and 9.7% respectively.

Caribou Biosciences, which raised $30 million in a Series B financing round back in May, remains one of the last big CRISPR biotechs to not go public.

CRISPR science has generated a lot of interest from the media over the past two years with noises increasingly linking it to potential “cures” for conditions such as sickle cell disease and a new, potentially better way of fighting certain cancers.

SOURCE

http://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/crispr-therapeutics-raises-a-56m-ipo-but-patent-battles-potential-stock-drops-loom?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal&mrkid=993697&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWlRsa01UY3labUl5WlRVeCIsInQiOiJWbjR3MTdTQTdCXC9yelIzSCtNMXVZdEFQZWZyelRZcFpUWmV0WlNRc2dkR2dRaFhNaTJBdlpyOUZqXC9rd1NIdm84MjhWbkZ0dnVPMDFjcjVQelZweTVVV215TUZwZ0JTZTliY1NNMWMzVEdVPSJ9