Kardigan has sewn up its IPO plans, with the cardiovascular biotech expecting to bring in a cozy $320 million from its planned Nasdaq listing.
The Bay Area company is planning to offer 23.3 million shares priced between $14 and $16 apiece, according to a June 11 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Should the final price fall in the middle of this range, the IPO would rake in net proceeds of $320.3 million—rising to $369.1 million should underwriters fully take up their option to buy an additional 3.5 million shares at the same price.
Kardigan is led by CEO Tassos Gianakakos, who previously headed up the cardiovascular disease biotech MyoKardia for seven years. Fellow MyoKardia veterans Jay Edelberg, M.D., Ph.D., and Bob McDowell, Ph.D., are also co-founders and serve as chief medical officer and chief scientific advisor, respectively.
MyoKardia’s biggest achievement was mavacamten, a myosin inhibitor that persuaded Bristol Myers Squibb to buy the biotech for $13.1 billion in 2020. BMS secured approval for the drug as Camzyos two years later, and the therapy brought in $1.07 billion in sales for the Big Pharma last year.
Kardigan’s lead asset, danicamtiv, also has its origins at MyoKardia. According to today’s filing, Kardigan plans to spend between $80 million and $90 million of the IPO proceeds to fund the cardiac myosin activator through its ongoing a phase 2b/3 program in genetic dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition where faulty genes can disrupt proteins in heart muscle, hindering the ability to pump blood around the body.
Another $80-90 million will be set aside to fund ataciguat, a soluble guanylate cyclase activator licensed from Sanofi and the Mayo Clinic that is currently in a phase 2b trial aimed at slowing the progression of calcific aortic valve stenosis (CAVS). The idea is that ataciguat can target valvular interstitial cells to slow the buildup of calcium on the aortic valve leaflets, which otherwise causes them to stiffen and narrow in CAVS patients.
Part of that sum will be used to push ataciguat into phase 3, according to the filing.
Then there’s the $40-50 million needed to fund tonlamarsen, a liver-directed antisense oligonucleotide licensed from Ionis Pharmaceuticals that is currently being tested in a phase 2 trial. The hope is that by targeting hepatic angiotensinogen, tonlamarsen can help regulate blood pressure for patients who had recently been hospitalized for hypertension.
A previous phase 2 readout recently showed that tonlamarsen reduced a key biomarker for hypertension, while missing the study’s other goal of significantly reducing blood pressure.
Finally, between $50 million and $60 million will be set aside for R&D activities, according to this morning’s filing.
This pipeline has already garnered interest from investors—Kardigan launched with a $300 million series A back in January 2025 and followed that up with a further $254 million 10 months ago. The biotech entered March with $287.1 million still in the bank, according to yesterday’s filing, but the company will need plenty more cash to fuel its ambition to take these drugs to market itself.
CEO Gianakakos has previously told Fierce that Kardigan’s dream is to emulate in cardiovascular disease what Gilead Sciences and Vertex Pharmaceuticals have achieved in HIV and cystic fibrosis, respectively.
“[Vertex] focused on the disease and not on a drug. And when you’re wired to say, ‘We’re going to cure cystic fibrosis,’ you keep going. Today, they are covering almost all of the forms of cystic fibrosis,” Gianakakos told Fierce back in January. “You can say the same about Gilead and HIV.”
Kardigan is planning to list on the Nasdaq during a red-hot time for biotech IPOs that saw Parabilis break an industry record yesterday with an upsized $670 million offering. That listing came after obesity-focused Kailera briefly set another benchmark with a $625 million IPO in April.
