RE: Begging bowl due out in 202028 Jun 2019 00:28
Ronald Mcdonald going to have to report you for misleading de-ramping information.
R&D spend for the year of £3.7m (2018: £5.0m) was £1.3m lower than the prior year. The last remaining clinical trial, ETS2101, ended in August 2018 and this, combined with reduced spend on the self-funded assets, accounted for the majority of the reduction in R&D spend.
Administrative costs in the year of £1.5m (2018: £1.7m) continue to decline, primarily due to a reduction in people costs.
Year end cash and cash equivalents were £5.9m (2018: £9.6m). The cash reduction for the year as a whole was £3.7m (2018: £4.4m). After adjusting for the R&D tax credit of £1.4m (2018: £3.0m) the underlying cash burn of £5.1m was in line with the operating loss. This compares with an underlying cash burn in the prior year of £7.4m.
In the second half of the year, the cash reduction of £1.7m was the lowest half yearly burn rate since 2011. It is important to be aware that whilst we are continually looking at all costs, we have continued and will continue to invest in both core NDD platform functionality and the self-funded assets. The decision to increase investment in the platform was made over two years ago and this is evidenced by the advances we have made over the last 12 months in patient-specific segmentation, our proprietary database expansion and the recent C4X Discovery collaboration.
Notwithstanding the fact that we will continue to invest within both the platform and the self-funded assets, we anticipate a further, more modest, reduction in operating loss in the current year.
We are anticipating claiming an R&D tax credit of £1.1m for the current financial year. Combined with our year end cash position and based on the second half cash consumption exit rate, we maintain our expectation that we will have sufficient cash to continue core operations into late 2020. However, as always, this will need to be evaluated if we wish to invest in further experimental validation of new NDD-derived programmes or later stage preclinical work.