On Apr. 12, 1996, Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals announced an initial public offering of 2,000,000 shares of its Common Stock at a price of $10 per share.

Ribozyme, headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, was founded to capitalize on the broad potential of ribozymes for use in the development of human therapeutics and other areas and in the identification of gene function developed by Thomas Robert Cech who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman, for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA.

In 2003, Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals renamed itself Sirna Therapeutics.  In 2006, Merck paid $1.1 billion for Sirna, or $13 a share—a 102% premium over Sirna’s prevailing share price.