ReNeuron's full-year results disappoint

ReNeuron Group, a UK-based stem cell company, suffered a decline in its share price on Thursday after posting an increase in pre-tax losses for the year ended March 31st. Loss before tax widened from £6.64m to £6.8m year-on-year (y/y), while revenues rose from £0.029m to £0.04m, representing royalty income from the group's non-therapeutic licensing activities.Research and development (R&D) costs increased from £3.76m to £4.87m, while general and admin costs fell from £3.1m to £2.1m y/y, primarily as a result of the group ceasing to incur legal fees in connection with an intellectual property dispute with a competitor business, which settled in January 2011. Basic losses per share came in at 1.0p compared to 1.3p the year previous.Chairman Bryan Morton said: "During the period under review, our therapeutic programmes have continued to progress well. We are encouraged by the recently presented interim data from the PISCES clinical trial of our ReN001 therapeutic candidate for stroke and we remain on track to file an application, later this year, to commence clinical development of our ReN009 therapeutic candidate for critical limb ischaemia. The pre-clinical development of our ReN003 therapeutic candidate for retinitis pigmentosa also progresses to plan."We are actively pursuing a range of future funding sources, including potentially non-dilutive sources such as grants. We are also exploring the potential to reduce longer term funding requirements by the partnering of certain of our stem cell technologies and therapeutic programmes to commercial development partners in due course. Early discussions with interested parties have commenced in this regard." The group had cash and cash equivalents totalling £4.0m as at March 31st (2011: £9.7m). The share price fell 3.61% to 4.00p by 14:22.NR