Scancell Holdings PLC (LON:SCLP) said it made strong progress as a business in the year to the end of April, 2020.
The developer of immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer and infectious disease revealed in its full-year results that it ended the reporting period with £3.58mln cash, down from £4.56mln at the end of April 2019.
Since then, it has completed a £15mln fund-raising to fund its Phase 1/2 clinical trial for Modi-1 and the Phase 2 clinical trial for SCIB1, while it is currently in the process of raising up to £33mln to allow it to extend the utility of its Moditope, ImmunoBody and AvidiMab/TaG antibody products and platforms to accelerate and broaden its development pipeline of new potential novel therapies.
The company said the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic adversely affected the last six weeks of its financial year and as expected, has continued to have an impact on the company since the financial year-end, with some delays in some research activities including work on Modi-2 and Modi-3, while progress on antibodies being slower than originally planned.
The company is not yet revenue earning and thus is loss-making. The loss before taxation was little changed at £6.77mln compared to a loss of £6.71mln the year before.
"The COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenging time for many, and in order to use our expertise and resources to help in the global response, we initiated a research programme to develop a DNA vaccine for COVID-19, in collaboration with a consortium of scientists at the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University.
"The vaccine aims to induce both durable T cell responses and virus neutralising antibodies, which we believe will give a more potent and long-lasting response than other vaccines in development, ultimately leading to better protection,” Cliff Holloway, the chief executive officer of Scancell said in the results statement.