BioCentury
ARTICLE | Finance

Ebb & Flow

December 13, 1999 8:00 AM UTC

Tularik (TLRK) priced its keenly watched IPO on Friday, raising $97.3 million through the sale of 6.95 million shares at $14. The deal did not disappoint on any fronts: the share number was upped by 700,000, it priced $1 above the high end of its range, and the shares were bid up $6.125 (44 percent) to $20.125 on the company's first trading day, valuing the company at $846.5 million (see B17). TLRK traded 4.6 million shares on Friday.

Comps in TLRK's valuation range include seasoned companies like Protein Design Labs (PDLI, $915 million), ImClone (IMCL, $875 million), Incyte (INCY, $819 million) and Transkaryotic (TKTX, $808 million). PDLI has an FDA-approved product on the market, INCY has a mature revenue stream from sales of its genomic databases, while IMCL and TKTX each have programs in Phase III development. By comparsion, TLRK has one in-licensed product in the clinic, its lometrexol for cancer, which is expected to enter Phase II next year. Meanwhile, its core gene regulation technology is in preclinical development...