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(Alliance News) - The following is a round-up of updates by London-listed companies, issued on Thursday and not separately reported by Alliance News:
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Upland Resources Ltd - London-based oil and gas company with assets in Malaysia, Tunisia and the UK North Sea - Receives exercise notion from Big Oil Ventures SDN BHD, its partner on the Sarawak licence, to exercise 6.9 million warrants that were issued in conjunction with its prospectus published on February 23. This warrant exercise has raised gross proceeds of GBP82,666.65. Chief Executive Officer Bolhassan Di says: "We are very pleased to see our partners increasing their shareholding in Upland Resources. We regard this as a strong validation of our progress to date in Sarawak."
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Ondine Biomedical Inc - Vancouver-based life sciences company, which specialises in photodisinfection therapies - Says that the Montreal Heart Institute, Canada's largest cardiology research centre, and the Hopital Fleurimont, affiliated with the University of Sherbrooke, are piloting Ondine's proprietary Steriwave nasal photo-disinfection. MHI is evaluating patient outcomes in elective cardiac surgical procedures and Hopital Fleurimont is evaluating outcomes in elective spine surgeries. CEO Carolyn Cross says: "We are very pleased to be working with the Montreal Heart Institute, an innovation leader in cardiac research and care. Steriwave offers a powerful alternative to traditional antibiotic-based nasal decolonization, which is undermined by a narrow range of efficacy, antibiotic resistance, and patient compliance issues. For patients, preventing a post-surgical infection can be the difference between life and death."
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Frontier IP Group PLC - London-based intellectual property commercialisation company - Notes portfolio company Exscientia PLC's announcement of a new collaboration with Merck KGaA, focused on the discovery of novel small molecule drug candidates across oncology, neuroinflammation and immunology. Under the terms of the deal, Exscientia will receive an upfront cash payment of USD20 million from Merck and will be eligible for discovery, development, regulatory and sales-based milestone payments of up to USD674 million in aggregate if all milestones for three initial programmes are achieved.
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Neometals Ltd - London-based sustainable battery materials producer - Says the Australian Patent Office has granted Neometals' 50% owned recycling intellectual property subsidiary, A.C.N. 630 589 507 Pty Ltd, a patent for the key process steps of its lithium-ion battery recycling process. The patent is the first to be granted out of 17 patent applications filed by ACN for this technology. The recycling technology is co-owned by Neometals' Primobius joint venture partner, SMS Group. It recovers materials contained in lithium battery production scrap and end-of-life cells that might otherwise be disposed of in land fill.
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Bluejay Mining PLC - Greenland and Finland-focused miner - Announces that it is unlikely the Dundas ilmenite deposit in North-West Greenland has enough resources to be "economic". Says the results from last year's drilling campaign on the Moriusaq West deposit did "unexpectedly" not correlate well with the historical drilling results. This created uncertainty regarding the extrapolation of the results to the eastern part of the resource at Moriusaq East, Iterlak West and Iterlak East. Concludes that the downgrade in tonnage and grade of the partial resource inventory provided by this year's mineral resource estimate have led the board and management to decide that Dundas does not present a viable commercial development opportunity for Bluejay alone. It will therefore not be proceeding with any further cash commitments to the project whilst it considers strategic and commercial alternatives.
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Light Science Technologies Holdings PLC - Derby, England-based plant monitoring solutions developer - Says it is participating in a three-year, GBP1.7 million collaboration funded by The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the UK Research and Innovation Transforming Food Production Challenge. Under the terms of the collaboration, Light Science will receive a grant of GBP209,506 over the 36-month programme. The project is for transformative reduced input potatoes. It will test out a range of regenerative cultivation methods that could reduce the environmental damage caused by producing potatoes.
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Critical Metals PLC - Cambridgeshire, England-based designer, manufacturer and supplier of critical products and services to the energy, medical and industrial sectors - Updates investors on its Phase One diamond drilling programme at the Molulu copper and cobalt asset in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The diamond drilling programme consists of 1000 metres of drilling the oxide zone, and is designed to identify other potential targets and increase the mineral resource. CEO Russell Fryer says: "It has been a very successful start to our drilling programme with a high grade interception of copper mineralisation of 13.02% on our first hole. Further work is needed to fully understand the potential of our ore body, which has been accelerated by our decision to bring in a second drill rig this week."
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By Holly Beveridge, Alliance News reporter
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