ANN ARBOR ? Esperion Therapeutics raised another $189.9 million in a stock offering Tuesday afternoon and investors unloaded shares Wednesday to take profits driving the share price down by 15 percent at the closing bell.

Considering that Esperion?s year-to-date return is a whopping 154 percent, at a time when the broader biotech industry retreats, it?s not surprising investors cashed in, experts said, giving the drug development company a wild roller-coaster ride.

The Ann Arbor-based company makes what many industry analysts contend could be another blockbuster drug for Roger Newton, Esperion Chief Scientific Officer. A decade ago, Newton was on the team that developed the multi-billion-dollar winner cholesterol drug Lipitor.

Now Esperion wants to cash-in on another promising drug, ETC-1002, an oral treatment for reducing bad cholesterol, which can be used alongside commonly-prescribed statins and produce better medical results. Phase 2 trials showed patients taking ETC-1002 and statins reduced their bad cholesterol levels by an additional 17-to 24-percent compared to patients taking statins alone. The new drug aims to lower bad cholesterol without the side effects – including muscle weakness – that some patients experience with Lipitor and other statin drugs.

After the Phase 2 results were in, Esperion announced plans to take the drug to phase 3 trails, a very expensive process. Esperion on Tuesday sold more than two million common shares at a price of $100 each. The company also sold an additional 262,500 shares at that price as part of an over-allotment program. Overall, the offering resulted in $189.9 million in net proceeds to the company.

The original Esperion first went public in 2000 raising $138 million on Wall Street. Four years later, the company was acquired by big pharma player Pfizer for $1.3 billion. But during a Pfizer consolidation, the New Jersey company closed its Ann Arbor labs and stopped working on the drugs that Esperion had been developing.

In 2008, Newton raised $22 million to buy back the intellectual property from Pfizer and re-launched the new Esperion.