Eikon prices its IPO, seeking to raise $318m

Eikon Therapeutics, former MSD head of R&D Roger Perlmutter's new project, is hoping to raise up to $318 million from a Nasdaq listing, in another signal of building confidence in the biopharma sector.

The South San Francisco start-up is offering 17.6 million shares at a price range of $16 to $18, which would give the company a valuation at the top end of more than $900 million. The IPO follows around $1 billion in private rounds raised by Eikon, most recently a $351 million Series D last year.

There has been a flurry of new biotech IPOs in the last few weeks, with SpyGlass Pharma, AgomAb Therapeutics, and Veradermics also filing since the start of the year, and Aktis Oncology getting its listing over the line. That activity, coupled with strong gains by the Nasdaq overall at the end of 2025, has led to speculation that the biotech IPO window may be reopening after a lacklustre 2024 and 2025.

Eikon has garnered significant levels of attention since it launched in 2019, thanks to the involvement of chief executive Perlmutter, who was in charge of MSD's R&D throughout the development and launch of cancer immunotherapy drug Keytruda (pembrolizumab), the big pharma's most successful product with sales set to reach around $32 billion in 2025.

The start-up's pipeline has developed quickly since it emerged from stealth in 2021, with four candidates now in clinical trials that will need plenty of cash to bring through further development.

Its lead candidate is EIK1001, an in-licensed TLR 7/8 dual-agonist in international phase 2/3 testing for advanced melanoma and stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in combination with Keytruda, with data from both studies due to emerge later this year.

Following after are two in-licensed PARP inhibitors in phase 1/2 testing, EIK1003 and EIK1004, which are designed to inhibit PARP1 without activity against PARP2. That profile could allow them to match the efficacy of current drugs in the class, like AstraZeneca and MSD's Lynparza (olaparib), used to treat a range of solid tumours, whilst avoiding haematological side effects.

From its in-house pipeline, which draws on a drug discovery engine built around super-resolution microscopy and machine learning, Eikon is testing WRN helicase inhibitor EIK1005 in phase 1/2 for tumours with high levels of microsatellite instability mutations (MSI-high), with androgen receptor antagonist EIK1006 for prostate cancer due to start human testing this year.

Eiko plans to list on the Nasdaq under the EIKN symbol.