Rare skin dis­ease biotech eyes $16 mil­lion IPO as tri­al re­sults come in and cash runs out

Armed with the first clin­i­cal re­sults on its lead drug, a re­pur­posed Duchenne can­di­date with a con­tro­ver­sial past, and vir­tu­al­ly no mon­ey, Proces­sa Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals $PC­SA is look­ing to go pub­lic and raise $16 mil­lion.

The Hanover, MD-based biotech has two as­sets. In 2018, they spent $8 mil­lion li­cens­ing PCS-499, an ana­log of the 35-year-old blood flow drug pen­tox­i­fylline they are try­ing to ap­ply to a rare skin con­di­tion called necro­bio­sis lipoidi­ca. And this year, they li­censed HT-100 from Akashi Ther­a­peu­tics. That’s the Duchenne mus­cu­lar dy­s­tro­phy drug whose clin­i­cal tri­als were halt­ed for about a year in 2016 af­ter a pa­tient died. Those tri­als re­sumed in 2017. Proces­sa said they will try to use it in rare adult fi­brot­ic re­lat­ed dis­eases such as fo­cal seg­men­tal glomeru­loscle­ro­sis and id­io­path­ic pul­monary fi­bro­sis.

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