C4XD.L Share News (C4XD)

LONDON (Alliance News) - C4X Discovery Holdings PLC Monday posted a widened loss for its first half due to costs related to its listing on AIM last October, and said that it has made "significant progress" since its initial public offering.

The drug discovery technologies firm posted a pretax loss of GBP1.1 million for the half year to end-January, widened from a pretax loss of GBP379,000 a year before, as it suffered a reduction in revenue, much of which is derived from collaboration agreements, to GBP173,000 from GBP431,000 and a step-up in operating expenses including costs related to its initial public offering.

C4X said the increase in research and development costs was as a result in an increase in activity and headcount following its listing.

The company raised GBP11.0 million before expenses at its initial public offering, and said that this funding will allow it to progress its two leading programmes to the clinical development stage.

C4X's technology is used to generate 3D structures for drug molecules quickly. Its lead programme is targeting the Orexin-1 receptor for the treatment of addictions. To date no drug candidate targeting Orexin-1 has progressed into clinician development, due to the difficulty of finding a candidate that only targets that receptor and not the very similar Orexin-2 receptor, which does not have the same function.

The company's programme has identified multiple lead compounds, it said, which have a high selectivity for the Orexin-1 receptor over Orexin-2, to a threshold that appears to offer "sufficient differentiation to justify progressing into candidate selection and drug development".

C4X said it expects to continue to increase its spend on research and development as its programmes, including for Orexin, progress.

"The support and confidence of our collaboration partners, AstraZeneca PLC, Evotec AG and Takeda Cambridge Ltd validates the C4XD drug discovery and development platform. I am delighted with the progress made since IPO and believe the business is well positioned to deliver future value for shareholders," said Chairman Clive Dix in a statement.

Shares in C4X were untraded Monday morning at 81.00 pence.

By Hana Stewart-Smith; hanassmith@alliancenews.com; @HanaSSAllNews

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