Pioneer in fight against major diseases in £7m share placing
Manchester-based biotech company C4X Discovery Holdings – a pioneer in the battle against rheumatoid arthritis and Parkinson’s disease – is set to raise about £7m with a share placing, putting 22% of its capital up for grabs.
The move has been prompted by the continuing increase in global licensing of pre-clinical stage assets with the number of deals greater than $10m increasing from 50 in 2012 to 78 in 2015 and the value of upfront payments increasing by 289%.
The AIM-listed firm’s chief executive Clive Dix said cash raised would be “used to support the execution of its strategy of becoming the world’s most productive, self-sustaining drug discovery engine”.
C4X Discovery aims to do this by exploiting its cutting-edge proprietary technologies to design and create best-in-class small-molecule candidates targeting a range of high value therapeutic areas.
The company’s goal is to drive returns through early-stage revenue-generating licensing deals for its high value pre-clinical asset portfolio with the pharmaceutical industry.
C4XD said it aims to “provide a highly valuable and differentiated approach to drug discovery through its enhanced DNA-based target identification and candidate molecule generation capabilities, generating differentiated candidates across multiple disease areas”.
The company’s innovative DNA-based target identification platform (Taxonomy3, which targets rheumatoid arthritis) utilises human genetic datasets to identify novel patient-specific targets leading to greater discovery productivity and increased probability of clinical success.
