MORRISVILLE – Liquidia Technologies has enjoyed success in R&D, but now can it find success for the bottom line?
Liquidia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill spinout launched in 2004 to commercialize a unique 3D PRINT tech developed by “superstar scientists” Joe DeSimone of UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State and Ed Samulski, has taken the latest step in what one writer called “a license to print money.” The Morrisville-based company has filed for a $57.5 million initial public offering.
The late stage clinical biopharmaceutical and nanotechnology company uses technology co-opted from semiconductor manufacturing to engineer precise production of uniform drug particles designed to improve the safety, efficacy and performance of a wide range of therapies. It has two lead products in development, a treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension, or PAH, and LIQ865, a non-opiod anesthetic, for treating local post-operative pain.
Liquidia’s pipeline
The technology, Particle Replication in Non-wetting Templates (PRINT), uses a technique invented in DeSimone’s UNC-CH lab to make engineered nano and micro particles of precise size, shape, and chemistry by squeezing them into molds. (You can see the process in this YouTube video)
The company’s technology was revolutionary enough to land a $10 million investment from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2011. More recently, Liquidia raised $25 million in private equity in February. Its eye-treatment spinout, Envisia, raised $25 million in 2013 and an additional $16.5 million in 2016.
It also had help from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, which enabled an industrial fellow to join the company and included both Liquidia and Envisia in meetings with investors, such as the 2012 Research Triangle Fly-in and an NC Biotech event in New York in 2013.
“This technology has the potential to help countless people, maybe save millions of lives,” DeSimone told a UNC Spotlight reporter at the time of the Gates Foundation investment. “To have the Gates Foundation back our work is a heartening vindication of UNC’s effort to become a world leader in launching university-born ideas for the good of society.”
But Liquidia has yet to find financial success. According to US Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Liquidia had a net loss of $27.5 million in the first quarter of this year and $925,97- in revenue.
DeSimone, a serial inventor, holder of numerous scientific awards and entrepreneur who now is CEO of 3D tech firm Carbon in San Francisco, discussed the medical applications of the PRINT tech in this Ted Talk video:
For more see:
Triangle biopharma, nanotech firm Liquidia files for IPO, seeking $57.5M
Citing tech, product potential, former QuintilesIMS exec joins Liquidia as president, CFO
Exclusive: Wearing two caps is next challenge for Liquidia-Envisia leadership
