AZN AstraZeneca PLC

By Matt Grossman 

Vaccitech PLC, a British company that co-invented the AstraZeneca PLC Covid-19 vaccine, closed its first day of trading with shares down 17%.

American depositary shares of the company, an offshoot of University of Oxford research efforts, closed Friday at $14.10, compared with their initial public offering price of $17 a share.

Vaccitech came to prominence over the past year because of its Covid-19 vaccine work. Its vaccine, marketed by AstraZeneca, has been one of a handful of shots invented at blistering speed to combat the pandemic, relative to the typically plodding pace of pharmaceutical development.

More recently, however, the vaccine has experienced a rocky world-wide rollout amid safety concerns and production challenges.

Vaccitech was co-founded five years ago by two University of Oxford professors, Adrian Hill and Sarah Gilbert. Its technology focuses on priming the body's immune system to fight disease.

The company's approach, which uses an adenovirus vector encoded with the target antigen, can be used in vaccines to prevent diseases caused by infections, such as Covid-19. It can also harness the immune system to treat illnesses such as cancer, Vaccitech said.

In addition to its work on Covid-19, the company is developing a vaccine for shingles and a treatment for prostate cancer, among other therapeutic and prophylactic projects.

In 2020, Vaccitech's revenue was $4.8 million. The company spent $14.4 million on research and development, and it recorded a net loss attributable to shareholders of $17.7 million. In a regulatory filing, Vaccitech said it expects to continue incurring significant losses for the foreseeable future, citing development expenses.

In the IPO, Vaccitech issued 6.5 million shares, raising total gross proceeds of $110.5 million. The shares are trading on the Nasdaq Global Market under ticker symbol "VACC."

Some investors went into the listing with concerns about the bumpy path of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, and in particular blood clots that have affected a small number of people postvaccination, investors said. The vaccine has yet to be approved in the U.S., where in March AstraZeneca found itself in a spat with regulators over the precise way it had stated the vaccine's efficacy statistics.

The European Union, meanwhile, is suing AstraZeneca, saying that the company hasn't delivered nearly as many doses as it had promised.

An even bigger factor that weighed on Vaccitech was the recent downdraft in biotechnology valuations broadly, investors said.

Vaccitech Chief Executive Bill Enright said Friday in an interview that the prospects for clinical-stage treatments for prostate cancer, hepatitis B and human papillomavirus were the biggest focus of investor interest. He said the company is monitoring the blood-clotting issues for any potential impact on other Vaccitech projects using the same technology.

"I think people recognize that the safety events we've seen are very rare and don't see a significant impact on our existing portfolio," Mr. Enright said.

Jenny Strasburg contributed to this article.

Write to Matt Grossman at matt.grossman@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 30, 2021 16:29 ET (20:29 GMT)

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