Drug discovery company e-therapeutics is looking to accelerate the next stage of its growth on the back of a £13.5m fundraise.
The company, a Newcastle University spin-out with bases in Newcastle and Oxford, uses biological data to discover life-transforming medicines. Earlier this year it told investors that it enjoyed a “landmark year” by progressing a number of its research and development programmes.
Now the company has announced a fundraise of £13.5m through a subscription for new ordinary shares by funds managed by M&G Investment Management Limited, an institutional investor and an existing shareholder of the company. The firm said the fundraise will provide it with the opportunity to ramp up growth through a number of new initiatives, including the creation of a new template for drug discovery. It said new initiatives to accelerate growth will also see it create new jobs.
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At the same time, however, the firm has announced six month results which show a fall in revenues and widening losses. Ali Mortazavi, chief executive officer of e-therapeutics, said: “I am pleased to announce the fundraise of £13.5m and excited by the prospect of being able to accelerate the development of our in-house RNAi pipeline through enhanced investment in our therapeutic programmes, hepatocyte datasets and computational capabilities.
“This successful fundraise underlines ETX’s position at the intersection of computational approaches to drug discovery and genetic medicine, using RNA interference as our drug modality of choice. We are grateful for the support of our shareholders and look forward to delivering value from our platform technologies.”
Michael Stiasny, head of UK Equities at M&G Investments, said: “With the potential to re-shape the conventional drug discovery model, siRNA based therapies represent an extremely exciting new modality in medicine. We believe that e-therapeutics has a unique platform and strategically attractive IP in this space, combined with a strong computational edge, and are delighted to be increasing our long-term support for the company.”
The firm announced interim results for the six months ended July 31 20222 in which revenues dropped from £400,000 to £300,000 and operating losses widened from £3.5m to £4.6m. The firm’s cash and cash equivalents stood at £21.8m and headcount grew from 35 to 39.
Mr Mortazavi added: “In the space of two years ETX is now uniquely positioned at the intersection of computational approaches to drug discovery and using RNAi as the drug modality of choice. This intersection provides the advantage of being able to combine the target differentiation and speed enabled by computation with the prosecution of therapeutic hypotheses in arguably the fastest timelines and at the lowest cost of development available in the industry.
“We will continue to build on this progress, further enhancing our computational platform to advance precision discovery and invest in our ideas to prosecute multiple high confidence novel candidates in our in-house pipeline.”
