LONDON (Alliance News) - e-Therapeutics PLC Tuesday posted a widened pretax loss for its last financial year as it increased spend on its discovery and development activities and continued to progress its pipeline of drugs.
The company posted a pretax loss of GBP9.8 million in the year to end-January, compared with a pretax loss of GPBP6.1 million a year before, due to higher research and development expenditure. The company does not yet produce revenue.
e-Therapeutics has two compounds in trials, with ETS2101 in phase I trials for various forms of cancer, and ETS6103 in a phase IIb trial for major depressive disorder.
The company said it expects to report results from the ETS6103 trial towards the end of the current year, and to issue an update on the trials for ETS2101 at around the same time.
The company is also evaluating molecules through its drug discovery platform. During the year around 2,200 molecules were evaluated on an in vitro basis. It has been working to accelerate its drug discovery projects over the last year.
It plans to have analysed ten or more discovery projects by the end of the current year, and to have undertaken in-vitro testing of many thousand molecules. It will then aim to take the most promising of the compounds from this process to enter pre-investigational new drug development and testing by the end of the first half of 2016, with the most promising of these ready to enter clinical development in 2017.
"The board continues to believe that the increasing discovery output reflects the utility of using our proprietary approach to network science and chemical biology to enhance the selection of molecules likely to be attractive for further development," the company said in a statement. "With a strong balance sheet, e-Therapeutics remains fully funded for its current development plans into 2019."
Shares in e-Therapeutics are untraded Tuesday. It last closed at 39.50 pence.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; hanassmith@alliancenews.com; @HanaSSAllNews
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