Oxford Biomedica announces placing to inject £20.5m for expansion

Oxford Biomedica intends to raise approximately £20.5m by way of a conditional placing of ordinary shares to raise money for expansion of bioprocessing facilities, the company said on Friday.

The placing of up to 174,346,817 new ordinary shares at 11.75p will be conducted via an accelerated bookbuild launched today, and will represent a 5.85% discount to the 8 March closing price and a 12.45% discount on the market price at the time of announcement.

The gene and cell therapy company’s planned expansion to be funded by the proceeds will include four new GMP vector suites and the filling and finishing of suites, warehousing and office space.

John Dawson, chief executive of Oxford Biomedica, said: "This fundraise will allow us to exploit our market leading position by giving us the capacity to service this rapidly growing market that is expected to be worth $800 million annually, by 2026."

The company has developed strategic partnerships with Novartis, Bioverativ, Sanofi, GSK, Orchard Therapeutics, GC LabCell and Immune Design, giving it long term interests in gene and cell therapy.

"With the approval of the first approved gene therapy in the US, Novartis' Kymriah, we have seen an increase in business development activity and this has reinforced our belief that the market for lentiviral vectors is positioned to grow significantly over the next few years," said Dawson.

Kymriah is a pioneering CAR-T cell cancer therapy which showed an 83% overall remission rate in clinical trials in New Jersey.

Oxford Biomedica stated that it has 7 further therapies which could potentially gain approval in the next few years and estimates that it could stand to gain "in excess of $100 million over the next three years for supply of vector to Novartis in relation to Kymriah."

As of 1617 GMT, Oxford Biomedica’s shares were down 3.53% at 12.04p.