The biotech developer, an Oxford University spinout, has hired securities brokerage Stifel to assist in its initial public offering.
UK-based biotechnology developer Oxford Biodynamics (OBD), a spinout of Oxford University, plans to list on the London Stock Exchange’s Aim on December 6 2016.
OBD has conditionally secured £7.1m ($8.9m), before expenses, by issuing approximately 4.5 million shares at £1.58 each. It hopes to place an additional 8.16 million shares to raise a total of approximately £20m in proceeds. The company has hired securities brokerage Stifel to assist.
OBD spun out of Oxford University in 2007 with the goal of developing and commercialising a new generation of biomarkers – medical signs that can be objectively and accurately measured, as opposed to symptoms that patients can feel, but external observers cannot verify – for cancer and other diseases.
Pharmaceutical companies use biomarker technology to diagnose diseases and test their products, as they improve the likelihood of a drug reaching the regulatory approval stage from 8.4% to 25.9%, according to OBD.
OBD’s main revenue source is a platform called Episwitch, used to discover, evaluate, validate and monitor biomarkers known as chromosome conformation signatures.
These signatures enable clinicians to analyse changes in the regulation of a patient’s generic material or genome well before the results of these changes show up as obvious abnormalities.
At present the two biggest shareholders in OBD are chief executive Christian Hoyer Millar, who owns a 20.6% stake, and Vulpes Life Sciences, a fund managed by Stephen Diggle, non-executive director of OBD, which owns 15.8%.
Funds managed by asset manager Odey own 10.2%, while Oxford University’s chancellor – currently Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong – as well as unnamed masters and scholars of the university collectively hold 9.3%.
In July 2015 OBD raised more than $7m from unnamed investors to speed up the commercialisation of EpiSwitch. Two Odey-managed funds, Odey European and Odey Swan, acquired a “significant stake” in the company in 2014, five years after OBD secured about $4m in a funding round.
OBD completed a $3.2m rights issue in 2011 that was underwritten by Artradis Testudo Fund, a hedge fund managed by Stephen Diggle, and investment vehicle Cubana Investment.
Christian Hoyer Millar, chief executive of Oxford Biodynamics, said: “We are delighted to be joining Aim at such a pivotal time in the company’s development. The successful IPO is another significant milestone for Oxford Biodynamics, and we wouldn’t have been able to achieve this without the dedicated hard work of all our employees.
“By further strengthening our balance sheet, we are now ideally positioned to accelerate our growth strategy at a time where we believe that there are significant opportunities for the Episwitch platform in helping the pharmaceutical industry improve R&D productivity, and the success rate of clinical trials.
“I would like to thank all of our existing shareholders for their continued support, and welcome our new shareholders to the group. As a company, we move forward with a great deal of enthusiasm and confidence in delivering on our strategy to establish Oxford Biodynamics as the leading epigenetic biomarker platform of choice for the pharma and biotech industry.”
