Seres Theraputics (NASDAQ:MCRB) IPO Nearly 3X’d On 1st Trading Day

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Wall Street seems to believe in the promise human feces will yield new medical treatments in the near future.

Shares of Seres Theraputics (serestherapeutics.com) (NASDAQ:MCRB), a company trying to create new medicines from the bacteria in the human gut, nearly 3X’d in their 1st day of trading Friday, giving the company a 1st-day market cap of $1.9-B.

Goldman, Sachs & Co. and BofA Merrill Lynch acted as joint book-running managers for the offering, and Leerink Partners and Canaccord Genuity Inc. acted as lead managers for the offering.

Shares of Seres Therapeutics nearly tripled in their first day of trading.

Seres does not have any revenue or products on the market.

Its most promising candidate is a pill in mid-stage trials to treat Clostridium difficile, a type of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. That is a bad infection that spreads in hospitals among patients who have been treated with antibiotics that tend to wipe out both the healthy and harmful bacteria in their guts. Tough cases of C. diff. are sometimes treated with fecal transplants to recolonize patients with beneficial gut flora.

Seres’ experimental therapy, which is in mid-stage human trials, would replace the stool transfer with a pill that’s derived from helpful human bacteria.

Here is how it was described in the press it last year: Seres’10-milligram pill, called Ecobiotics, combines 5 to 15 purified bacterial strains into a 2- 3-pill, 1cs-a-day dose that appears to restore the equilibrium of the microbiome, the collection of organisms that live inside humans, and the health of the gut.

The Cambridge, Mass. based company priced its shares at 18, at the high end of the expected range Thursday night. By the end of trading Friday, Seres shares were at 50.88.

Representatives of the company were not available for comment.

The microbiome is a new frontier for the drug industry.

Scientists are just beginning to understand how the living colony of trillions of bacteria in and on our bodies affects our health. Startups are eager to figure out how to manipulate the microbiome for beneficial treatments.

The makeup of human microbiomes has shifted over the years, as changes in diet and the use of antibiotics affect the mix of bugs living on us. The changes begin early: Babies delivered through C-sections have a different bacterial makeup than those delivered through vaginal births.

There are far more questions than answers about how to manipulate the microbiome safely and beneficially.

If Wall Street’s reaction is a gauge, the future of using bacteria for medicine could be a huge business.

Have a terrific weekend.

HeffX-LTN

Paul Ebeling

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