NEW YORK – Bellicum Pharmaceuticals on Monday announced a $35 million private placement of equity securities with two biotechnology specialist investment funds and said it will use the funds to further develop its autologous CAR T-cell therapies BPX-601 and BPX-603.
Through the private placement, expected to close Dec. 7, Houston-based Bellicum will issue pre-funded warrants to buy as many as 20,559,210 common stock shares as well as accompanying warrants to buy up to 2,055,920 shares of common stock. Each pre-funded warrant to purchase common stock is being sold in conjunction with a warrant to purchase one-tenth of a share of common stock at a combined unit price of $1.70.
The common stock warrants will be immediately exercisable at $1.69 per share with an expiration date seven years after being issued. The immediate exercise price of the pre-funded warrants will be $0.0001 per share. MTS Securities is Bellicum's exclusive placement agent in the financing.
Bellicum said it will use the proceeds from the offering to support clinical trials for BPX-601 and BPX-603, for additional R&D, and as working capital.
The company developed BPX-601 and BPX-603 using its "GoCAR-T" platform, which Bellicum believes can overcome the limits of current CAR T-cell therapies and overpower suppressive tumor microenvironments by enhancing T-cell proliferation, functional persistence, and host immunity.
The firm is developing BPX-601 as an autologous cell therapy for pancreatic and metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and BPX-603 as an autologous "dual-switch" cell therapy for HER2-positive solid tumors such as breast, endometrial, ovarian, gastric, and colorectal cancers.
In addition to announcing the private placement on Monday, Bellicum shared updates from ongoing clinical trials of both agents. In a Phase I/II trial of BPX-601 in advanced pancreatic and prostate cancers expressing high levels of prostate stem cell antigen (PSCA), investigators observed no dose-limiting toxicities in the first cohort of mCRPC patients, and one patient experienced a partial response.
In an ongoing Phase I/II trial for BPX-603, the firm also reported that it had not observed any dose-limiting toxicities among the first HER2-positive solid tumor patients treated. Bellicum plans to report results from a cohort of patients treated with the second dose level during a medical conference in 2022.
Shares of Bellicum were down 10 percent at $1.52 in late morning trade on the Nasdaq.