A clinical-stage biotech company based in Houston has announced the closing of its $15.25 million IPO.
Coya Therapeutics, now trading under the ticker COYA, announced this week that its IPO — previously disclosed in December — has closed its initial public offering of 3,050,000 shares of its common stock and accompanying warrants to purchase up to 1,525,000 shares of common stock, per a news release.
The company is developing proprietary therapies to enhance the function of regulatory T cells to target systemic inflammation and neuroinflammation.
According to the company, the net proceeds from the offering — which was estimated to be at around $13.2 million, per a release — will go toward advancing its programs in preclinical studies into clinical trials — as well as to advance its discovery and candidate selection stage programs and other scaling purposes.
In 2021, Coya Therapeutics announced that it had merged with Nicoya Health Inc. and raised $10 million in its series A. The round was led by Florida-based Allele Capital Partners LLC. Howard Berman, founder and board of directors for imaware, was named the CEO of Coya, as well as a member of the company's board of directors, alongside the merger and series A announcement.
Coya's therapeutics uses innovative work from Dr. Stanley H. Appel, co-director of Houston Methodist Neurological Institute and Chair of the Stanley H. Appel Department of Neurology at Houston Methodist Hospital. The researcher has created a way to "isolate dysfunctional Tregs from a patient, convert them to a highly functional and neuroprotective condition, and expand these cells into the billions for intravenous reinfusion back to the patient," says Berman in a 2022 news release. This revolutionary work overcomes previous limitations in the field.
"Patients with neurodegenerative diseases are in desperate need of transformative therapeutic options; harnessing the neuroprotective effects of Treg cell therapy shows great potential in unlocking a new treatment paradigm and may enable us to revolutionize care for patients with devastating neurodegenerative diseases," Appel said last February. "We have successfully demonstrated, in a phase 1 trial, the safety and tolerability of autologous infusions of expanded Tregs in ALS patients, with the potential of slowing or halting disease progression. Ongoing studies provide a transformative framework for advanced clinical trials in ALS and other neurodegenerative disorders."