Dallas biotech Lantern Pharma looks to IPO to fund cancer drug development

Dallas-based biotech Lantern Pharma plans to raise $25 million through an initial public offering to fund development of its cancer drugs.

In a regulatory filing Tuesday, the clinical stage firm said it will sell 1.6 million shares at a price range of $15 to $17. That would give the company a market value of $108 million. It plans to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LTRN.

Lantern Pharma, founded in 2013, has drugs in clinical trials for prostate and lung cancer and another in preclinical studies aimed at ovarian, liver and thyroid cancers.

It has licensed the prostate cancer drug to Oncology Venture A/S, a European biotechnology company that’s managing an active Phase II clinical trial, according to the regulatory filing. The company also said it intends to seek Food and Drug Administration approval this year for a future Phase II trial on its lung cancer drug.

The company uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and genomic data to streamline the development process and identify patients likely to benefit from targeted therapies. It works with drugs abandoned in other trials, as well as new compounds it developed.

Lantern Pharma, a graduate of Dallas health care startup accelerator Health Wildcatters, said in its filing that it posted losses of $2.4 million in 2019 and $1.7 million in 2018. It has generated no revenue but raised $5.5 million in previous funding rounds, according to investment tracking website Crunchbase.

“Drug development is expensive, challenging and is often beleaguered by protracted timelines,” the company’s filing said. “In cancer drug development, this has led to costs that exceed, on average, over $1 billion to develop an approved drug, and a timeline that can range from 10 to 15 years.”

Lantern Pharma said advances in genomics and data-driven biology, along with increased patient data-sharing, large-scale cloud computing and globalization of cancer research, will lead to “a new era of cancer drug development.”

This month, the company received a $108,500 loan under the government’s Paycheck Protection Program to keep its employees on the payroll. It had seven employees at the end of 2019.