Regulus Therapeutics’ 2012 IPO appeared to be difficult to get done. The company slashed its offering price to $4 from a target range of $10 to $12 and boosted the number of shares offered to 11.25 million from 4.5 million shares. In the end, insiders purchased more than 70 percent the deal.

Regulus CEO Kleanthis Xanthopoulos, who noted the company was the first life sciences company to file confidentially under the JOBS Act, offered a rosy view of going public with the new law. The JOBS Act, passed in 2012, was designed to provide easier and less risky access to the IPO market for emerging growth companies.

The IPO is the most difficult financing event in a company’s entire corporate life, said Xanthopoulos at the Deloitte Recap Allicense Meeting in San Francisco April 30. At the same time, he said that it’s the cheapest capital in terms of equity financing. “It gives you a platform to access capital through all different [types] of securities. The highest appreciation of value happens in the public markets,” he said.

With soaring public markets, there has been an increasing number of therapeutics developers seeking to take their companies public during the second quarter of 2013. While most life sciences companies have been taking advantage of confidential filings for emerging growth companies under the JOBS Act, several companies have publicly added themselves to the queue, set terms, and completed their offerings. As a group, those companies are up 18.4 percent on average compared to their offering prices.

Of the ten companies that have gone public so far this year in the United States, however, only three managed to price their offerings in their initial target ranges. In the most recent IPO, Insys Therapeutics sold 4 million shares at $8 a share, raising $32 million. It did so, however, by slashing its offering price in half from the initial target price range of $16 to $18, and raising just 47 percent of what it had originally hoped. The company, that markets drugs based on opioids and synthetic marijuana for cancer pain, booked sales of $15 million in 2012.

Certainly the IPO is not an exit opportunity for a company’s backers. An analysis of biotech IPOs by the investment bank Lazard finds that over the past four years, insiders participated in 71 percent of the offerings and accounted for 42.7 percent of the proceeds of the offering. That compared with just insider participation in just 6 percent of offerings in the boom years of 1998 to 2000, which accounted for 23.5 percent of the proceeds; and insider participation in 29 percent of offerings during the “IPO window” of 2003 to 2007, which accounted for 20 percent of the proceeds.

But despite the high rate of insider participation today, there are benefits to becoming a public company, says Xanthopoulos. He has taken two companies public during the past ten years, Anadys Pharmaceuticals in 2004, and more recently, Regulus in October 2012. Insiders, none of which were venture capitalists, accounted for 70 percent of the $80 million raised by Regulus in its IPO and a concurrent equity investment by AstraZeneca.

Xanthopoulos said he saw multiple benefits arising from the JOBS Act for his company. At the time it was preparing to go public, it was in negotiations with two potential partners that involved equity positions and participation in the IPO—both of which materialized, and it was able to do so without public disclosure.