Precision Therapeutics Inc., a South Side-based company that develops and sells tests to help doctors manage cancer treatment, plans to sell its common stock to the public through an initial offering that could raise up to $80.5 million.

In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company did not specify a price for the shares or how many would be offered. The shares would be traded on the Nasdaq exchange. The lead underwriters are Wall Street firms JP Morgan Securities and Piper Jaffray & Co.

Precision, considered to be among the most promising biotech startups in the Pittsburgh region, said it would use the proceeds from the offering to expand sales and marketing and to fund research, development and clinical studies.

The company's patented product, ChemoFx, analyzes how cancerous tumor cells react to specific drugs and drug combinations so that physicians can better determine how individual patients will respond to treatment.

Its marketing efforts to date have focused on gynecological cancers and it has completed studies supporting the use of ChemoFx in ovarian cancer. Pending clinical trials, the company also plans to market the test for breast cancer treatment.

Since its founding in 1995 by a group of University of Pittsburgh scientists, the company has been financed by angel investors and several rounds of venture capital totaling about $75 million from investment firms including Adams Capital Management, Birchmere Ventures, Draper Triangle Ventures and Quaker bioVentures.

For the first six months of the year, Precision posted a net loss of $5.64 million on sales of $926,000. It has approximately 60 employees. The chief executive, Sean McDonald, joined Precision in 2000 after founding Automated Healthcare, a successful venture that was acquired by giant pharmaceutical products distributor McKesson Corp.

Frank Demmler, adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the entrepreneurial executives team at Innovation Works, has been following Precision since its founders sought early-stage investment in the 1990s when he was on staff at The Enterprise Corp., an agency that provided assistance to entrepreneurs.

"I really think that Precision Therapeutics can be for life sciences in Pittsburgh what Dell Computer was for information technology in Austin, Texas. I'm hoping that isn't really that much of a stretch," he said. "You're talking about quality of life issues, length of life issues, the ability to really drill down to an extraordinary level to provide monitoring and treatment of patients that hasn't been available."

Mr. Demmler said Precision and a handful of other local biotech firms including RedPath Integrated Pathology, Falcon Genomics, and Nomos Corp. have the potential to develop cancer treatment technologies that "will put Pittsburgh on the life sciences map."