GI Innovation, a Korean developer of allergy drugs and immunotherapy, said Tuesday it has submitted a registration statement to the Financial Services Commission and initiated the initial public offering (IPO) procedure.

The company plans to offer 2 million depository receipts at 16,000-21,000 won ($13-17) per share to raise a maximum of 42 billion won.

GI Innovation will conduct book building for institutional investors from Feb. 21-22 to determine the final IPO price, receive general subscriptions from Feb. 27-27, and go public in March.

NH Investment & Securities, Hana Financial Investment, and Samsung Securities will co-lead the process.

“We decided to list the company to carry out our long-term R&D roadmap stably without a hitch,” GI Innovation CEO Rhee Byung-geon said. 

The company will use the funds for ongoing clinical trials of GI-101 (immunotherapy) and GI-301 (allergy treatment) and the development of follow-up pipelines such as GI-102 (immunotherapy), GI-108 (cancer metabolism drug), and GI-305 (allergy treatment), he said.

Established in 2017, GI Innovation is a bio-venture that researches and develops next-generation immunotherapies based on fusion proteins.

GI-SMARTTM, the company’s core technology, is a screening system that can discover optimal dual fusion protein candidates at an early stage.

GI Innovation has made two out-licensing deals for the products in the pre-clinical stage. The company licensed out GI-101, an immunotherapy candidate, to Simcere Pharmaceutical Group, a Chinese pharmaceutical company, in 2019, for a maximum of $750 million, and GI-301, its anti-allergy candidate, to Yuhan Corp. for a maximum of $1.2 billion in 2020.

A phase 1 and 2 study of GI-101 is ongoing in Korea and the U.S., and a phase 1 study of GI-301, in Korea.