COVID-19 drug developer Atea Pharmaceuticals files for IPO (NASDAQ:GILD)

Atea Pharmaceuticals has filed for its initial public offering.

It’s a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on antiviral therapeutics to improve the lives of patients suffering from life-threatening viral infections.

“Leveraging our deep understanding of antiviral drug development, nucleoside biology, and medicinal chemistry, we have built a proprietary purine nucleotide prodrug platform to develop novel product candidates to treat single stranded ribonucleic acid, or ssRNA, viruses, which are a prevalent cause of severe viral diseases,” the company says.

And its lead candidate, AT-527, is a novel antiviral for treating patients infected with SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19.

The offering comes via JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Evercore ISI and William Blair.

There’s a placeholder registration for $100M in shares. It’s expecting that its shares will trade on Nasdaq Global Market under the symbol AVIR.

It acknowledges competition from various companies working on the treatment of COVID-19, including Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ:GILD), Fujifilm Pharma, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics/Merck (NYSE:MRK), Regeneron (NASDAQ:REGN), Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY), and others including Moderna, Inovio, Vir Biotechnology, Biogen, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, BioNTech, CanSino Biologics, AbbVie, Sanofi Pasteur, AstraZeneca, and Translate Bio.

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