BioWorld International Correspondent

PARIS - Hybrigenics SA completed an initial public offering on the Alternext market of the Euronext Paris stock exchange.

The Paris-based company successfully offered 708,269 new shares with attached warrants at a price of €8.70 per share, raising a gross total of €6.16 million (US$23.8 million). The free float is now 7.25 percent of the company's paid-up capital and the operation gives Hybrigenics a market capitalization of €87.9 million. Trading in the new shares and warrants began Dec. 21.

All orders were fully executed and the final allocation of the offering was as follows:

• 579,400 shares with attached warrants were taken up by institutional investors as part of the global placement (81.8 percent of the total).

• 128,869 shares with attached warrants went to private investors as part of the open price offering (18.2 percent).

Each warrant attached to a new share will allow its bearer to buy three new Hybrigenics shares at a price of €10.50 per share between Dec. 20 and June 20, 2009. Should all warrants be exercised, an additional €22.3 million would be raised over that 18-month period.

Hybrigenics' CEO, Rémi Delansorne, said the company was both "pleased and proud" at the success of its IPO, "especially given the extremely tough market conditions in general and for the biotechnology sector in particular."

He added that it confirmed investors' confidence in the future of inecalcitol, a drug candidate that Hybrigenics is testing in a Phase II clinical trial for the treatment of hormone-resistant prostate cancer.

To ensure the success of the IPO, Hybrigenics decided in November to alter the terms, reducing the number and nature of the securities offered and extending the subscription period by two days.

It was then that the company decided in favor of an issue of shares with attached warrants rather than shares alone. Even then, the company had hoped to raise €7.5 million immediately, but the offer price was fixed at the low end of the €8.70 to €10.10 per share indicative price range.

The company hopes that the progressive exercise of the warrants attached to the new shares will provide it with additional funds for a Phase III trial of inecalcitol that is scheduled to begin by mid-2009, when the warrants expire.

Inecalcitol is a synthetic analogue of vitamin D to which Hybrigenics acquired worldwide exclusive rights in February 2006 under a licensing agreement signed with Theramex, a Monaco-based subsidiary of Merck KGaA, of Darmstadt, Germany, the University of Gent and the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Hybrigenics has rights to all clinical indications and plans to develop an oral formulation of the drug for the treatment of various cancers.

As well as pushing ahead with the clinical development of inecalcitol, the company plans to use the funds it has raised to step up its research effort in the regulation of the protein degradation process involved in cancer, and in particular the optimization of its patented ubiquitin-specific protease inhibitors.

In addition, the company plans to speed up the expansion of its services business, especially in the U.S., which already accounts for more than 20 percent of Hybrigenics' revenues.