Shoot­ing for PhI­II, Spero tees up a new lead an­tibi­ot­ic in-li­censed cheap as it lines up $86M IPO

Late last week Spero Ther­a­peu­tics threw its S-1 in­to the IPO ring as the biotech queue for jump­ing in­to the pub­lic are­na was grow­ing longer by the day.

Spero got start­ed with some seed fund­ing from At­las Ven­ture and a high-pro­file part­ner­ship with Roche, but that pact end­ed last year with­out near­ly as much fan­fare as it was orig­i­nal­ly an­nounced.

The biotech’s lead an­tibi­ot­ic is SPR994, an oral for­mu­la­tion of the car­bapenum-class an­tibi­ot­ic tebipen­em, which Spero in-li­censed from Mei­ji Sei­ka with a very mod­est up­front of $600,000, with up to $3 mil­lion in mile­stones. The Japan­ese com­pa­ny won an ap­proval for this an­tibi­ot­ic in 2009 and hand­ed over da­ta on 1200 pa­tients. The ther­a­py is sold as Orapen­em.

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