Drug discovery company e-therapeutics has told investors that it enjoyed a "landmark year" despite losses widening from £4.5m to £9.6m.
In results for the year ended January 31, 2022, the Newcastle firm said the losses were mainly attributable to increased research and development expenditure of £6.1m and higher administration costs as it grew.
During the period e-therapeutics said it had made progress across a number of its R&D programmes, including development of its RNAi therapeutics platform, and had filed eleven patents to protect its intellectual property.
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Progress was also made across several partnerships the firm has built including a post-period agreement with US-based iTeos Therapeutics to perform immuno-oncology research and milestones were achieved in e-therapeutics work with European partner Galapagos NV.
The growing business increased its headcount from 25 to 35 and strengthened its financial position by raising £22.5m before expenses, saying it had secured institutional blue chip support for its strategy.
Revenue increased from £300,000 to £500,000 during the year - mainly due to partial recognition of upfront payments from the Galapagos partnership.
Ali Mortazavi, chief executive officer of e-therapeutics, said: "I am extremely pleased with the progress the company has made in 2021 in all aspects of the business. We are excited to partner with iTeos to help identify highly differentiated immuno-oncology medicines for patients. This collaboration provides further validation of the value of our network-driven, disease agnostic computational platform.
"At the same time, we have again shown the value of our computational platform with the successful completion of our collaboration with Galapagos where we met every success milestone. Importantly, the same computational tools that are used in these collaborations have been successfully migrated to our hepatocyte-focused computational platform and applied to proprietary hepatocyte datasets.
"In October 2021, the company achieved a major milestone, announcing positive headline results from in vivo studies confirming that our proprietary GaINAc-siRNA platform is competitive relative to peer platforms. This is a material step in the company's ultimate goal of developing an in-house RNAi pipeline with future scope for early-stage partnering. Eleven patent applications have been filed to protect these innovations.
"We believe that e-therapeutics offers a differentiated strategy, with the ability to silence any gene in the liver with extremely rapid pre-clinical timelines, coupled with powerful computational capabilities, including in better understanding human hepatocyte biology. Importantly, the execution of our strategy is well underway and two hepatocyte targets are currently in pre-clinical research, with further feasibility work being conducted across multiple other computationally generated targets."
