Bay Area biotech CymaBay Ther­a­peu­tics is look­ing to start the year with more cash in its pock­ets.

CymaBay an­nounced on Tues­day that it is plan­ning to sell 10,000,000 shares of com­mon stock at $7.00 per share. If all goes well, the sale is ex­pect­ed to bring in around $85 mil­lion, with the of­fer­ing clos­ing on Jan. 26.

CymaBay plans to use the funds for the de­vel­op­ment of one of its pri­ma­ry can­di­dates, se­ladel­par, a per­ox­i­some pro­lif­er­a­tor-ac­ti­vat­ed re­cep­tor. Se­ladel­par was once test­ed for non­al­co­holic steato­hep­ati­tis (NASH), but is now po­si­tioned sole­ly to treat pa­tients with pri­ma­ry bil­iary cholan­gi­tis (PBC), an au­toim­mune dis­ease in the liv­er. CymaBay al­so plans to use some funds for oth­er gen­er­al pur­pos­es that were not spec­i­fied.”

The drug has al­ready re­ceived a break­through ther­a­py des­ig­na­tion from the FDA in PBC and is in a Phase III study that has been on­go­ing since 2021, with re­sults due lat­er this year.

The news seemed to have been wel­comed by Wall Street, as its stock price $CBAY has risen al­most 9% since open­ing to­day. End­points News reached out to CymaBay for more in­for­ma­tion on the bump but did not re­ceive a re­sponse by press time.

CymaBay’s raise al­so fol­lows a li­cens­ing agree­ment for se­ladel­par. Ear­li­er this month, the biotech en­tered a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Japan-based Kak­en Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal to de­vel­op and com­mer­cial­ize the drug in Japan. Kak­en made a $34 mil­lion up­front pay­ment to CymaBay, with po­ten­tial mile­stone pay­ments reach­ing an es­ti­mat­ed $128.4 mil­lion along with oth­er sales mile­stones and 20% in roy­al­ties.

How­ev­er, CymaBay’s jour­ney has not been smooth over the past few years. In a 2019 NASH read­out, se­ladel­par re­port­ed­ly per­formed worse than place­bo, send­ing its stock price in­to a tail­spin. The drug was lat­er placed on a clin­i­cal hold due to po­ten­tial safe­ty is­sues — push­ing CymaBay to shut­ter some tri­als — and even af­ter the hold was lift­ed CymaBay chose to fo­cus on PBC. It dis­played more pos­i­tive re­sults in that in­di­ca­tion lat­er that year.

Roche announced another leadership shuffle Thursday morning – the head of global product strategy, Teresa Graham, will take over as CEO of Roche Pharmaceuticals in March while the company’s corporate executive committee will make a spot for Levi Garraway, CMO and executive VP of global product development.

Thomas Schinecker will take over the top spot as Roche group CEO in March, leaving his spot as head of diagnostics.

Following a promise last year to go “big and fast in breast cancer,” Gilead has secured a win for Trodelvy in the most common form.

The drug was approved to treat HR-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer patients who’ve already received endocrine-based therapy and at least two other systemic therapies for metastatic cancer, Gilead announced on Friday.

Trodelvy won its first indication in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer back in 2020, and has since added urothelial cancer to the list. HR-positive HER2-negative breast cancer accounts for roughly 70% of new breast cancer cases worldwide per year, according to senior VP of oncology clinical development Bill Grossman, and many patients develop resistance to endocrine-based therapies or worsen on chemotherapy.