Protein degrader developer Lycia raises nearly $318m in upsized Nasdaq IPO

Lycia Therapeutics, a South San Francisco developer of protein-degrading drugs, raised nearly $318 million in an upsized Nasdaq initial public offering priced on 22 October 2026 ¹. Its shares begin trading on Friday under the ticker LYCA ¹.

The offering

Lycia sold about 3 million more shares than it had planned ¹. Two days earlier its filing had set out 14.7 million shares at $16 to $18 each, which it expected to bring in $227.8 million in net proceeds at the midpoint ². The final raise therefore came in well above the size the company first sought ¹².

Before listing, Lycia had raised $267 million in venture capital, according to BioPharma Dive ¹. Fierce Biotech traces that history through a $50 million launch in 2020, a $70 million Series B in 2021, a $106.6 million Series C in 2024 and a $75 million round in June, leaving $148.1 million in cash going into the second half of 2026 ². Versant Ventures held around 19% before the IPO, making it the largest shareholder ¹. Eli Lilly paid $35 million upfront in a 2021 collaboration on pain and immune diseases ¹. The company has 31 full-time employees and is led by chief executive Aetna Wun Trombley, previously chief operating officer of NGM Biopharmaceuticals ².

What the money funds

Lycia's drugs, which it calls LYTACs, are built to capture harmful proteins outside cells and pull them inside for destruction ¹. The lead programme, LCA-0061, aims to remove immunoglobulin E in food allergy and other allergic conditions, and the company estimates it needs around $80 million to take it through Phase 2 ². It has earmarked a further $70 million for a follow-on allergy degrader, LCA-0062, and $90 million for a mid-stage study of LCA-0321 in Graves' disease ². LCA-0061 and LCA-0321 are in Phase 1, with data expected in 2027 ¹.

Lycia positions LCA-0061 against IgE blockers such as Xolair, arguing in its filing that those drugs inhibit IgE without removing it and are limited by weight-based dosing ². The company describes early Phase 1 data as showing reductions in total and free IgE with no safety signals or dose-limiting toxicities ².

What it means for the market

The listing adds to an active year for biotech flotations. BioPharma Dive counts more than two dozen drugmaker IPOs in 2026 and reports that about two-thirds of them have raised more than $250 million ¹. Like many of this year's issuers, Lycia sold more stock than it first planned, a sign that public investors are still willing to fund early-stage platform companies at scale ¹.

For investors in targeted protein degradation, the deal extends a field in which Arvinas, Kymera Therapeutics and Parabilis Medicines are already public and newer startups are still being formed ¹. US regulators approved the first PROTAC medicine, Veppanu, for breast cancer in May ¹. Lycia's approach targets proteins outside the cell, which sets it apart from degraders that act within it ¹.

Caveats

Lycia's pipeline is early. Its claims about LCA-0061 rest on preliminary results from an ongoing Phase 1 trial, as described by the company ². The first meaningful data from LCA-0061 and LCA-0321 are not due until 2027, and LCA-0062 could produce topline data as early as the second half of that year ¹.