By Donald Zuhn ---
Last Friday, NimbleGen Systems, Inc. announced that it had filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock. According to NimbleGen's press release, neither the number of shares nor the offering price had yet been determined. MarketWatch and Forbes.com, however, have reported that NimbleGen is looking to raise $75 million in the IPO. MarketWatch reported also noted that NimbleGen is seeking to list its shares on the Nasdaq Global Market under the symbol "NMBL." According to a Forbes.com report, NimbleGen's prospectus indicates that the company has incurred net losses each year since its inception in 1999, and as of end of 2006 had accumulated a deficit of about $44.5 million.
NimbleGen is a Madison, Wisconsin-based biotech company focusing on the manufacture and use of high-density DNA microarrays for applications other than differential gene expression analysis. In particular, NimbleGen's microarrays are useful for analyses of human genomic DNA copy number variation, transcription regulation and chromatin structure, DNA methylation, and DNase hypersensitivity, and rapid microbial resequencing and SNP detection.
NimbleGen's patent portfolio includes U.S. Patent No. 7,037,659, directed to an apparatus for constructing DNA probes, and U.S. Patent No. 7,157,229, directed to a prepatterned substrate for optical synthesis of DNA probes. NimbleGen's portfolio also appears to include at least thirteen U.S. patent application publications, all of which list Francesco Cerrina as an inventor. Dr. Cerrina, who is a named inventor on both the '659 and '229 patents, is a member of NimbleGen's Board of Directors and its Scientific Advisory Board.
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