Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—(Philadelphia Business Journal – May 13, 2024 - Written By: John George) - Medicus Pharma Ltd. completed a $5.2 million financing last week as a precursor to a possible initial public offering of its stock in the U.S. later this year.

"We think the IPO market is opening up and we've been well received as a good candidate to do a listing," said Dr. Raza Bokhari, founder and CEO of Medicus Pharma.

James P. Quinlan, the company's chief financial officer, believes investors are coming back to the high-risk, high-reward life sciences sector.

"The biotech freeze is thawing significantly," Quinlan said. "The market is pretty hot right now so we are going to follow our bankers' lead, and they believe this is a good time frame."

Bokhari would not commit to the timing of a U.S. stock market listing other than to say the idea is actively being explored.

Domiciled in Toronto, Medicus is led by a management team based in Conshohocken. The company is already traded on the TSVX Stock Exchange in Canada. Its business strategy is to identify, acquire and then advance "relatively de-risked" clinical stage assets through clinical development and commercialization stages.

Medicus (TSXV: MDCX) was launched in October through a combination of Interactive Capital Partners Corp., a publicly traded shell company in Canada, and SkinJect Inc., a University of Pittsburgh spinout.

SkinJect, which now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of Medicus, is developing a dissolvable micro-needle patch — also called SkinJect — to treat a common type of skin cancer. 

"It's a special asset," Bokhari said. "It addresses a novel unmet need to treat basal cell carcinomas of the skin, or more appropriately, non-melanoma skin diseases."

About 2 million biopsy-confirmed patients are diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma, which accounts for nearly 80% of all skin cancer cases. Basal cell carcinoma is most often treated with Mohs surgery to remove all of the cancer, layer by layer, along with some of the healthy tissue around it.

The potential market size for treating basal cell carcinomas is estimated at $20 billion annually, according to Medicus. Bokhari said if SkinJect can get approved and used in patients who are not suitable or desirable candidates for surgery it would present a $2 billion revenue opportunity for the company.

SkinJect is a less invasive and less painful treatment that uses the array of micro-needles on a tiny patch that is worn over the carcinoma site and used to deliver a known chemotherapy agent, doxorubicin, directly at the site of the cancer to eradicate tumor cells.

"We think it is actually a cure for the cancer," Bokhari said of the experimental treatment, which is in mid-stage clinical testing.

SkinJect, which is designed to be administered over three office visits, was invented by Dr. Louis Falo, chairman of the department of dermatology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the co-founder of the original SkinJect company that was folded into Medicus.

Falo remains actively involved in the clinical development of SkinJect and is a minority stakeholder in Medicus.

Bokhari, a physician-turned-entrepreneur, is also the managing partner of the Philadelphia private equity firm RBx Capital and board chairman of Bensalem-based Parkway Clinical Laboratories, a national toxicology testing and medication monitoring services provider. 

He was previously the executive chairman and CEO of FSD Pharma (NASDAQ: HUGE), where he shifted the company's focus from medicinal cannabis to clinical-stage pharmaceutical research and development. Bokhari's tenure as head of FSD Pharma ended in controversy with the company's board terminated his contract during the summer of 2021 following a dispute with the founders over the direction of the company. Bokhari filed a lawsuit against FSD for wrongful termination, and the litigation is still active.

In addition to Bokhari and Quinlan, the Medicus management team includes Carolyn Bonner, who previously served as president and CEO of Parkway Clinical Laboratories, and

Dr. Ed Brennan, the company's chief medical officer and a former Wyeth and GSK executive who was with Bokhari at FSD.

The company's most recent C-suite hire is Erica Monaco, who joined Medicus in March as its chief operating officer after eight years at Woodburn, Massachusetts-based BioFrontera. Monaco spent nearly two years as CEO of BioFrontera, which develops drugs for dermatological conditions, and played a key role in the company's $18 million IPO in 2021.

"I have had a passion for dermatology for the past decade and I've been building relationships in that space," said Monaco, when asked about what attracted her to Medicus. "I resigned from my prior role in January and started looking for the next pathway for me."

Monaco said she read about SkinJect and was intrigued by the potential of a skin patch that could be administered in a doctor's office.

"It's groundbreaking," she said. "I just want to be part of this, so I basically hunted [Bokhari] down. We have some mutual connections."

Bokhari and Monaco ended up meeting face-to-face in San Francisco at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January. Less than two months later, she was added to the Medicus team.

Overall, the company has 12 employees.

The Medicus board of directors, in addition to Bokhari, includes Dr. Larry Kaiser, managing director of the Philadelphia health care consulting firm Alvarez and Marsal and the former CEO of Temple University Health System, and Robert J. Ciaruffoli, co-founder of the Philadelphia angel investor network Broad Street Angels.

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