Ananda Developments Plc (AQSE:ANA) finance director Jeremy Sturgess-Smith joined Proactive's Stephen Gunnioin from LSX USA Congress in Boston, where the company is connecting with potential partners and healthcare investors.
Proactive: Hello, you're watching Proactive. I'm joined by Ananda Developments' finance director, Jeremy Sturgess-Smith. Jeremy, you're joining us from the LSX conference in Boston. Tell us more about the conference and what you're doing there.
Jeremy Sturgess-Smith: Hi Stephen, yeah, so it's called the LSX USA Congress. LSX are a group that run a number of events across the world, specifically for biotech companies like Ananda. So it's a chance for us to meet with and get on the radar of a number of large pharmaceutical companies for partnering purposes. And also in front of some large and established healthcare investors. I'll be giving a 12-minute presentation at the conference later today, which will be made available online shortly after the conference. So I will be able to share that with everyone in due course.
Proactive: You talked about healthcare investors and you're just fresh out of a £2.15 million fundraise, well supported by your chairman, Charles Morgan. Tell us a little bit more about the fundraise and how you plan to apply those funds.
Jeremy Sturgess-Smith: He really has. He's put his money where his mouth is once again. We are very grateful to Charlie for all the support he's given us over the years, especially being the cornerstone in this fundraise. He has put us in an excellent position to progress on all of our goals over the next 12 to 18 months. Also, as part of this, there is a conditional capitalization of all of his currently unsecured debt, which is going to clean off our balance sheet very significantly. This leaves us with only about £650,000 of convertible loan notes as debt on our balance sheet, which really does give us a great platform to progress on. And, as you mentioned, we've got a broker auction open at the moment through the Winterfloods platform. That closes on Friday night, and we're offering up £100,000 of extra shares to retail shareholders on exactly the same terms as the investors in this recently closed round.
Proactive: So, Jeremy, tell us how you're going to use those funds to take MRX1 forward?
Jeremy Sturgess-Smith: We’ll use those funds mainly to actually manufacture the drugs for both of our Phase 2 studies. That’s something we hope to crack on with later this year and into next year. We'll also be running a Phase 1 pharmacokinetic study. That study will give us a lot of dosage information on MRX1, so we can understand exactly how much and when to give patients and trial participants MRX1 within the trials, and then for the following trials.
Proactive: So plans for the next six months, then, Jeremy?
Jeremy Sturgess-Smith: The next six months will be focused very much on moving MRX1 through the pretrial regulatory pathways. That includes an ethics submission to the MHRA and finalizing the last details on pre-manufacturing work before we commence a manufacturing batch. I will also be communicating a lot with some partners in Australia. Australia has one of the foremost Phase 1 study ecosystems in the world, and that is our preferred destination for the pharmacokinetic study.