Wave Life Sciences brought in $230 million through an upsized public offering, extending its cash runway into 2027 as a handful of key programs advance.
“It lets everybody breathe,” CEO Paul Bolno said Tuesday on the sidelines of Chardan’s Genetic Medicines Conference in New York.
The company stated in August that it had enough cash to last into the fourth quarter of 2025. The new money gives Wave additional time to produce key human data across its pipeline.
Bolno specifically highlighted the company’s preclinical obesity program for which it can now afford to pursue a full dataset rather than just get a dribble of early Phase 1 data. And amid the growing field of obesity runner-ups, Wave said preclinical mouse models show that WVE-007 has the potential to be administered twice or maybe even once a year. The biotech expects to initiate a trial in humans in the first quarter of next year.
“You can be doing obesity as a genetic target in the same way you can be doing a rare disease,” Bolno said.
Three other programs are already in the clinic and advancing fast. The public offering came hours after encouraging Phase 2 data in nine ambulatory boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The data show that all but one of them were able to reach muscle content-adjusted dystrophin levels that were at least 5% of normal, a key benchmark of protein production. The readout sent Wave’s shares up by almost $3 per share, from $5.34 to $8.19.
The company said it expects to meet with the FDA in the first quarter to discuss an accelerated approval pathway, though Bolno did not say whether the company expects to formally ask for approval in 2025.
On a similar timeline is Wave’s Huntington’s disease program, WVE-003. The company expects regulatory feedback on accelerated approval before the end of the year, and Takeda has the option to opt-in to a split cost-sharing development plan, though the company has yet to make clear their decision, according to Bolno, who expressed interest in further developing the asset regardless of what Takeda decides.
“We’d be interested in that profile, whether Takeda opted in or not,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that Wave’s previous cash runway was until the fourth quarter of 2025, not the first.