NEW YORK – Salarius Pharmaceuticals on Friday announced a registered direct offering of 9,339,436 shares of its common stock at a purchase price of $.25 per share, expecting to raise approximately $2.3 million in gross proceeds.
The undisclosed investors will also have the option to purchase up to 7,004,578 shares of common stock at an exercise price of $.3399. The warrants can be exercised six months after the issuance date and expire five-and-a-half years from the issuance date.
The direct offering is expected to close April 26, 2022. Ladenburg Thalmann is acting as the exclusive placement agent for the offering.
Houston-based Salarius will use the proceeds to advance clinical and preclinical development of its product candidates and for other general corporate purposes. The company's lead candidate is the LSD1 inhibitor SP-2577, or seclidemstat, which it is studying in combination with topotecan and cyclophosphamide in a Phase I/II trial in relapsed or refractory sarcomas, including Ewing sarcoma, myxoid liposarcoma, and other FET-rearranged soft tissue sarcomas. Seclidemstat is also being studied in an investigator-initiated trial in combination with azacitidine for the treatment of patients with myelodysplastic syndromes or chronic myelomonocytic leukemia.
The company's preclinical pipeline includes two oncology drugs: a targeted protein degrader, SP-3164, being explored in blood cancers that is expected to enter the clinic next year, and a second-generation LSD1 inhibitor that is in the discovery phase.
Last September, Salarius received a $2.7 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas to support seclidemstat's development and the company's operations. The firm also raised $23 million in a public offering of common stock in March 2021.