Retroscreen infected with $56m

Retroscreen Virology, a life sciences spin-out of Queen Mary University of London, has raised a conditional £33.6m ($56m) before expenses and £32.8m after expenses ($54.71m). The company placed 12,923,077 ordinary shares at £2.60 ($4.33) each, which were purchased by both existing and new investors.

Retroscreen is working on the next generation of antiviral drugs and vaccines. It plans to use the money to accelerate its biomarker discovery programme focused on flu and asthma. It will also refine its asthma model and advance it to product validation use, and expand research and development.

The placing is conditional to approval by a shareholder meeting on September 1, 2014.

Retroscreenwas founded in 1988 and first traded on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market under the symbol Rvg in 2012. It has a market cap of £175.12m ($292.13m). The new ordinary shares were priced at a discount of 18.8% compared to the closing middle market price of £3.20 ($5.33) on August 13, 2014. New shares will rank pari passu with exisiting ordinary shares upon admission. They will make up 19.1% of the new total issued ordinary share capital.

The company has also announced it will rebrand to hVivo by the fourth quarter 2014, taking the name from its technology platform, hVivo human challenge models.

Kym Denny, chief executive at Retroscreen, said: “We are delighted to have raised these funds through both existing and new shareholders, together with the tremendous support and encouragement we have received. We are at an exciting inflection point for Retroscreen where having established and proven the hVivo human challenge model with our clients over the past couple of years, we now have the capability, capacity and funds to build on this and accelerate Retroscreen’s own research and development programme, leveraging our hVivo platform as a powerful tool in biomarker discovery and in the development of new disease models.”