Drugs discovery firm aims for partnership deals to increase shareholder value
Manchester-based drugs discovery firm, C4X Discovery Holdings, said it is poised for a year of partnership deals to provide value for its shareholders, in its annual results statement today.
The firm is involved in disease areas such as inflammation, neurodegeneration, immune-oncology/oncology and additional opportunistic areas such as addiction and diabetes.
Today’s results showed the firm achieved zero revenues in the year to July 31, 2019, compared with £7.064m previously driven entirely by its Indivior licensing agreement in 2018.
The loss before tax of £13.622m grew from a pre-tax loss of £2.526m the previous year.
R&D expenses increased 51% to £10.585m, up from £6.992m in 2018, reflecting the company’s planned increase in drug discovery investment and continued development of lead drug candidates.
The company managed to raise £17.7m in two tranches, including £10.1m from new and existing investors in October 2018, and £7.6m in November 2019, through a placing, subscription by directors and open offer.
C4X reported continued progress across its proprietary portfolio of 11 drug discovery programmes, including a partnering process for its oral NRF-2 activator programme launched with discussions to date confirming commercial interest for NRF-2 in Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) and Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH).
Following the end of the reporting period, Indivior awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) HEAL grant to take C4XD’s Orexin-1 antagonist candidate, C4X-3256, into a Phase 1 clinical trial for the treatment of opioid use disorder.
It has four new synergistic strategic partnerships to expand core state-of-the-art target identification platform, drug design capabilities and drug discovery portfolio, a lead target identified in Horizon Discovery collaboration nearing progression into a C4XD drug discovery programme, while Dr Robin Carr is to head the newly-formed C4XD Drug Discovery Advisory Network to identify new technologies and act as the company’s ambassadors within the biotech and pharmaceutical industry.
Chief executive Dr Clive Dix, said: “2019 was a year of building out the C4X Discovery portfolio and advancing our drug discovery programmes to create a sustainable pipeline of potential revenue-generating assets.
“As momentum continues to build across our key programmes, we remain confident in our business strategy with partner discussions to date confirming commercial interest for our NRF-2 programme.
“This follows our already out-licensed Orexin-1 programme which is progressing to clinical studies with Indivior.
“Now, in 2020, we will continue to advance the next wave of potential out-licensing candidates and to drive forward partnering deals to create value for our shareholders.”
He added: “With the business in a strong position, we are excited by our future prospects as we focus on building our pioneering drug discovery company towards sustainability.”
