Nasdaq threatens to delist Miragen for low stock price

BOULDER  — The Nasdaq is threatening to kick Miragen Therapeutics Inc. (Nasdaq: MGEN) off the public markets if it doesn’t improve its stock price, right after the company kicked off a possible $5 million private stock offering deal with a cancer nonprofit.

The Boulder oncology drugmaker disclosed that the second-largest stock market in the United States sent a letter to the company earlier this week saying that its stock price was below $1 per share for the past 30 trading days, the threshold that companies must meet to stay listed.

Miragen has until April 27, 2020, to maintain a stock price above $1 per share for 10 straight business days or be subject to delisting.

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In an interview, Miragen CEO Bill Marshall painted the Nasdaq warning as a standard notice, and the company is evaluating its options to raise the stock price outside of what the market does, including a potential reverse stock split to reduce its shares outstanding.

“We’ve had a depression in the stock, and we were monitoring things, so we anticipated we would get a notice about this,” he said.

Marshall said he can’t predict the markets when asked how confident he is in Miragen reaching compliance by next April. However, the company is “hopeful” that it can avoid delisting by communicating with investors, he said.

The company also said it closed a $1.5 million private stock offering deal with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Inc., a New York nonprofit. Miragen agreed to sell up to $5 million in stock to the Society in separate milestone-based rounds through the end of 2021. If that figure is realized, the nonprofit would be Miragen’s largest institutional stockholder by monetary value, more than doubling Atlas Venture Advisors Inc.’s $2.12 million stake, according to Nasdaq research.

One of Miragen’s main drug candidates is Cobomarsen, which is thought to block certain genomic reactions that encourage the creation and survival of cancer cells. It is currently in three separate Phase I clinical trials and one Phase II trial with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Marshall said the agreement was made out of the nonprofit’s program to support research into blood cancers, particularly those that haven’t seen a lot of study. The milestone payments are mostly set by progress in clinical trials.

Miragen’s stock rose almost 14 percent in early trading Friday, currently standing at 74 cents per share as of 12:30 p.m. Mountain Time.