AGM RNS4 Jun 2020 16:21
Result of Annual General Meeting and Completion of Placing
Hemogenyx Pharmaceuticals plc is pleased to announce that, at the Annual General Meeting ("AGM") held earlier today, all resolutions were duly passed. The numbers of votes for each resolution are presented at the end of this announcement.
Completion of Placing
Following the shareholders' vote at the AGM to authorise the Directors to allot shares for cash, the Conditional Placing announced on 12 May 2020 to raise Β£2,500,000 (before expenses) at 7p per share has now become unconditional. Accordingly, 35,714,286 new ordinary shares of 1p each (the "Placing Shares") will now be allotted. An application has been made for the Placing Shares to be admitted to the Official List of the UK Listing Authority by way of a Standard Listing ("Admission") and it is expected that Admission will become effective and that dealing in the Placing Shares will commence on or around 5 June 2020. The Placing Shares will rank pari passu with the existing ordinary shares of the Company.
Operational Update
As it has not been possible to open up the AGM to shareholder discussion in the normal way a brief update on operations and developments is provided below.
As announced on 2 June 2020, the Company has agreed a three-month extension of the collaboration with a leading global pharmaceutical company ("GlobalCo") for the successful preclinical development of the Company's lead candidate bi-specific CDX antibody. This collaboration complements the Company's own development work that is currently being undertaken. The Directors are pleased to have agreed this extension which shows GlobalCo's continuing commitment to the project despite delays created by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis which has seen the industry as a whole focussing on treatments for COVID-19 while being hampered by laboratory shutdowns over recent months.
The fundraising will also enable the Company to progress its own work on COVID-19 and other viruses considerably more intensively. The Company had already been developing treatments to be deployed against other viral pathogens prior to the onset of COVID-19. The Company's ApbHC mice have been developed in part as a discovery platform for the development of such treatments. The Directors believe, for example, that the ApbHC could potentially be used as a tool for the rapid discovery and/or isolation of human antibodies against previously unknown viruses such as the novel coronavirus or other natural or engineered human-specific pathogens, referred to in biodefence circles as "Disease X".
The funds raised will also be used to advance IND-enabling studies for HEMO-CAR-T, the Company's product candidate which is being developed for the treatment of blood cancers such as AML (acute myeloid leukaemia), particularly with the aim of creating a "tuneable and controllable drug" which would greatly enhance the safety and versatility of HEMO-CAR-T cells in relation to blood can