As U.S. legislators wrangled over raising the debt ceiling, Horizon Pharma priced its initial public offering just below its $10 to $12 per share target range to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Market. It was the only life sciences IPO in the United States during a hot July that saw 14 companies go public. Horizon, which develops drugs to relieve the pain of arthritis and other inflammatory diseases, sold 5.5 million shares at $9 per share, raising $50 million to support its programs.

The Northbrook, Illinois pharmaceutical has yet to make a profit. It received U.S. marketing approval in April for Duexis, a combination of ibuprofen and famotidine, approved to relieve rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis pain. The drug is designed to reduce the incidence of upper gastrointestinal ulcers that can result from taking ibuprofen alone. Horizon will use most of the proceeds from its offering to launch Duexis, which it plans to do in the fourth quarter of this year. The pharma also plans to submit a new drug application for its second arthritis drug, Lodotra, a low-dose prednisone, before the end of the third quarter. It is already approved in Europe and marketed there by distribution partners Merck and Mundipharma.

Wall Street had a mixed reaction to the offering. While investors in IPOs from retailers Teavana and Dunkin’ Donuts saw their shares rocket more than 50 percent, Horizon’s shares barely moved. Trading under the symbol HZNP, they rose 15 cents during their first trading day and ended the week just a penny above their initial price. The company has granted underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 825,000 shares at the initial public offering price to cover overallotments, if any. Stifel Nicolaus Weisel, Cowen and Company, and JMP Securities were joint bookrunners for the offering.

Besides Horizon’s IPO, the last week of July was fairly quiet for life sciences companies. Enerkem raised another $30 million, bringing to $90 million the total amount of capital the Canadian waste-to-biofuels and chemicals company has raised so far this year. The recent funding was a mix of equity and debt. New investors, The Westly Group, Fondaction CSN, and Quince Associates joined existing investors, Valero Energy, Waste Management, Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures, and Cycle Capital in the equity financing, all of whom had participated in the $60 million round earlier in the year.

Enerkem’s technology can convert any type waste into chemical-grade syngas, which is used to create advanced ethanol, bio-acetates, and other intermediate chemicals. The company, which currently operates two facilities in Quebec, began construction of a municipal waste-to-biofuels plant in Alberta in 2010. It expects to break ground on a similar facility in Mississippi this year for which it is receiving financial support from the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy.

Renewable chemicals company Metabolix signed a joint development agreement with Korean firm CJ CheilJedang to advance production technology and assess investment options for the commercialization of renewable C4 chemicals via fermentation. The C4 chemicals, a $3 billion market that is growing 4 percent per year, are used in a wide range of applications including engineering plastics, fabrics and fibers, personal care products, and semiconductors.

As part of their agreement, CJ will contribute fermentation assets and expertise to produce pilot quantities of dried whole fermentation broth containing raw C4 chemicals. Metabolix will continue the development of microbial strains and the scale-up of its proprietary recovery process to produce high-purity C4 chemicals.

CJ BIO, a division of CJ CheilJedang, is a global leader in bio-fermentation based R&D and manufacturing with a range of amino acids, including lysine, as well as nucleotides. CJ BIO operates large-scale fermentation facilities in China, Indonesia and Brazil. These sites, as well as new potential sites, will be analyzed as production bases for renewable C4 chemicals based on the Metabolix technology.

Metabolix also has a joint venture with Archer Daniels Midland involving the development and commercialization of bioplastics. It is also developing platform technology that can produce biochemicals from any type of feedstock.

Finally, Codexis, another renewable fuels and chemicals company, is teaming up with Chemtex, a division of Italian chemical company M&G Group, in a broad collaboration to develop and produce detergent alcohols from cellulosic biomass for use in the household products market. Detergent alcohols are surfactants that stabilize mixtures of oil and water, a $6 billion worldwide market. Widely used in laundry detergents, shampoos and other consumer products, they are currently made from non-sustainable palm kernel and petroleum sources.

The companies will use Chemtex’s Proesa pretreatment technology and Codexis’ CodeEvolver directed evolution technology to enable cost-effective production of detergent alcohols from cellulosic feedstocks. The companies will develop a technology package suitable for use with a wide variety of feedstocks.

Under the terms of the agreement, Codexis will have exclusive rights to PROESA technology for the production of detergent alcohols. The parties expect that their combined process will initially be piloted at Chemtex's R&D facility in Rivalta, Italy.

“With this collaboration, Codexis has a fully integrated production process for converting cellulosic biomass to marketable, sustainable detergent alcohols," says Alan Shaw, president and CEO of Codexis. Burrill & Company, the publisher of The Burrill Report, is an investor in Codexis.