Losses widen at Derbyshire pharma firm

Losses at Derbyshire-based N4 Pharma have widened slightly for the six months ending June 30.

The firm, which is developing Nuvec®, a novel delivery system for vaccines and cancer treatments, made a deficit of £585,066 over the period, against a loss of £552,160 in 2019.

Nigel Theobald, chief executive of N4 Pharma, said: “The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic during the period has thrown up considerable challenges globally but also opportunities. Whilst continuing with our optimisation work of Nuvec® as a delivery platform technology, the immediate need to address the threat of Covid-19 encouraged us to look at more specific, product driven, applications resulting in our proof of concept work with Nuvec® loaded with the Coronavirus DNA Plasmid.

“Our subsequent in vitro success was extremely pleasing but to maximise our chances of success in any full in vivo study we now need to incorporate the findings of our optimisation work.

“This is key as we look to further our work with the Coronavirus plasmid in parallel to working with more generic DNA plasmids which may be more applicable in collaborations on multiple other vaccines. To that end, we are excited to be moving towards our most comprehensive in vivo study to date and are in the process of scoping the different aspects of the study.

“At the same time, we aim to maximise the potential uses of Nuvec® as we continue to look at other applications including assessing its ability for use in the delivery of vaccines orally. We remain fully funded for the current work programmes and I look forward to providing further updates in due course.”