Following on from hugely successful presentations in Dublin and Manchester, the Proactive Investors Big Top will be pitched in London on Thursday, May 10 to showcase four of our very best growth companies.
Joining us at our One2One Forum at the Chesterfield Hotel from 6pm will be Silence Therapeutics (LON:SLN), Gemfields (LON:GEM), Plethora Solutions (LON:PLE) and Digital Learning Marketplace (LON:DLM).
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It is an eclectic mix from all corners of the small-cap market.
However, each has a very exciting story to tell – and they are stories you can’t afford to miss.
The recent news from Silence Therapeutics lifted the share price more than 10 per cent on the day as company revealed a renegotiated deal with Pfizer could mean it will potentially receive higher stage payments for its technology.
The biotech sub-licenses its technology to a mid-cap called Quark and said earlier this week that its share of potential royalties could now reach US$120 million following the licence amendment against a possible US$95 million under the previous terms.
Silence’s expertise is the development and delivery of targeted, systemic RNA interference (RNAi) therapeutics for the treatment of serious diseases.
This “gene silencing” is a way of controlling or shutting down some of the 40,000 genes in the human body and copying the body's own method of fighting a virus.
The interesting thing here, and a fact that appears to have escaped the market to date, that this is one of a number of landmark agreements Silence has with Big Pharma.
Sparkling Gemfields is transforming the way coloured stones find their way from the mine to the market and it is doing it in an ethical and, more to the point, very profitable way.
And this is reflected in the company’s share price, which has risen almost 140 per cent in the past year alone.
Its main interest is emeralds, and in particular those mined from its Kagem property in Tanzania.
However, it also has amethyst and ruby mines within its portfolio of companies plus some sapphire and other coloured gemstone prospects spread across Zambia, Madagascar and Mozambique.
Under chief executive Ian Harebottle, the cost of production has come down, while the prices achieved for the gemstones have risen strongly.
A keen eye for the way the Kagem product is marketed and auctioned has ensured the price of these stones continues to hold up incredibly well.
The last six months has seen a 77 per cent spike in the value of Plethora Solutions as the drug developer’s story has begun to gain some traction in the market.
The signs are similarly encouraging for PSD502, a potentially breakthrough treatment for premature ejaculation.
Plethora said recently it was delighted by the initial response to its first regulatory submissions as the Rapporteur in Spain and Co-Rapporteur here in the UK received an 88-page briefing package.
The package is a summary of the complete dossier. It was reviewed by the agencies prior to the meetings and the company answered questions on its contents during those meetings.
Dr Mike Wyllie, the company’s chief scientific officer, added: "The pre-submission meeting is the first opportunity regulators have had to review information which will be submitted on PSD502 in the full dossier.
“We are delighted by the response from the two agencies involved in the review and consider this is as a reflection of the quality of our programme.
"We believe PSD502 will be an effective treatment for this area of great unmet medical need which affects at least one in four sexually active men, and that PSD502 will meet the needs of patients and their partners and quickly establish itself as the market leader."
Plethora is on track to file the full dossier at some point in the first half, and the European regulatory approval process generally takes between a year and 18 months.
In the meantime, the group is expected to turn its attention to finding a partner to sell the PSD502 when it receives the green light.
The City broker Daniel Stewart used the recent update on the approval process to hike its valuation of Plethora to 15.7 pence, which suggests plenty of upside on the current price of 5.6 pence.
Last, but certainly not least, is an exciting story from the world of education – though this is not education in the classroom setting.
Digital Learning Marketplace will deliver innovative and engaging methods of learning, such as serious games, which are proven to improve learning outcomes exponentially.
These serious games are at the cutting edge of education and appeal to the PlayStation and X-Box generation by replicating the experience.
Their interactivity helps students assimilate more information, more quickly, and transfer knowledge by ‘doing’ it.
And the beauty of these serious games is they can be run on computers in the workplace, or on mobile devices.
“By allowing people to actively participate in this way, it bumps recall and retention rates from around 10 per cent (using traditional learning methods) to 60-70 per cent,” chief executive Andy Hasoon revealed in a recent interview with Proactive Investors.
And of course this Digital Learning Marketplace will utilise all the modern methods of communication such as smartphones and the ubiquitous tablet PCs, which traditional e-learning appears to have overlooked.
DLM has teamed up with some big hitters in the education space such as FTSE 100 listed Pearson, one of the world’s biggest educational publishers, and the prestigious Ashridge Business School in putting together the Digital Learning Marketplace.
Boss Hasoon burnished his credentials as the creator and driving force behind the 50 Lessons video database, which was sold to Skillsoft, the market leader in e-learning courseware.
In Hasoon’s own words, DLM is his attempt to build something “even bigger and more robust” than his previous enterprise.
It also represents an opportunity to consolidate a fragmented but potentially major new marketplace.
Computer-based e-learning has shown that technology can be harnessed to bring the classroom into the workplace.
And while it has created a market worth £472 million, this is barely a drop in the ocean compared with the £19.4 billion spent annually on training by the employers here in the UK.
“The Digital Learning Marketplace will be a one stop shop, it will be the Amazon for learning,” Hasoon said.
“It is being built with technology licensed to us from Pearson. Pearson is big in education, but it is mainly in primary and secondary (school) education which is 93 per cent of their revenues.
“So Pearson realise they are missing a trick and they need innovation partners to help them get a bigger share of this £19 billion UK market for corporate training and a slug of the massive global market, through these initiatives we are helping them achieve this goal."