Premier African Minerals (LON:PREM) – SPECULATIVE BUY*: Loan note conversion
Market Cap: £5.4m; Current Price: 0.8p
Notice of exercise for £0.5m of unsecured convertible loan notes
- Premier African Minerals has received notice of exercise from Darwin Capital Limited to convert £500,000 of unsecured convertible loan notes. Prem has issues 81,572,190 shares at a price of 0.613p per share.
- The funds raised from the issue of loan notes has been used to fund the re-opening of underground operations at RHA Tungsten Project and general working capital purposes.
- Prem has also announces that first ore from the underground operation was delivered on 20th October and ore is now being delivered on a daily basis now from historic workings to build up a stockpile.
NORTHLAND CAPITAL PARTNERS VIEW: As expected Premier African Minerals has issued shares to Darwin as part of the additional financing (announced 09/10/15). It is important to mention that because RHA remains responsible for the full repayment of the true cost of debt incurred by Prem to develop the RHA Tungsten Mine that the effective cost of any equity placed from conversion of the loan notes, the dilution or repayment cost of the debt is passed on to RHA rather than Prem.
ValiRx Plc (LON:VAL) Collaboration agreement
Market Cap: £10m; Current Price: 26p
ValiRx partners with Pharmatest Services in new three year agreement
- ValiRx announced that it has signed a three-year collaboration agreement with Pharmatest of Turku, Finland for the development of further products and compounds from ValiRx's proprietary platform technology, Gene inactivation by chromatin engineering (GeneICE).
- Pharmatest Services Ltd is a contract research organisation that offers pre-clinical efficacy and other testing services for the pharmaceutical industry in the fields of oncology and skeletal diseases.
- ValiRx's GeneICE technology enables the selective silencing of 'rebellious' or inappropriately active genes, which can contribute to many diseases, including cancer.
- In preliminary studies GeneICE products have been shown to be effective in prostate, ovarian, pancreatic, lung and other cancer cell lines.
- Under the agreement, Pharmatest is responsible for designing GeneICE constructs in both isolation and in collaboration with ValiRx. The GeneICE constructs are then used for subsequent efficacy testing, using novel and more traditional techniques, in various cancer model systems developed by Pharmatest and its collaborators.
- No additional payment will be made by ValiRx to Pharmatest for providing the services under this agreement with the exception of a small proportion of any upfront and milestone payments, or other licensing income that ValiRx may receive on products developed under this agreement and during the life of the intellectual property right patent.
NORTHLAND CAPITAL PARTNERS VIEW: ValiRx takes a low-risk approach to cancer drug development: by outsourcing much of its drug development work to contract research organisations the Company has flexibility in quickly terminating any struggling research programmes. Today’s agreement with Pharmatest further supports this strategy. Moreover, the agreement is on favourable commercial terms to ValiRx, requiring no immediate payments to Pharmatest for providing services.