April 15, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Liverpool, UK-based Redx Pharma announced today that it is merging its three subsidiaries into a single location at Alderley Park in Cheshire, a location formerly used by AstraZeneca . AstraZeneca left the site in 2013 for one in Cambridge.
“We have a real opportunity to create a world-class bioscience hub,” said Neil Murray, Redx’s chief executive officer, to The Financial Times. “The infrastructure AstraZeneca has left behind represents a huge opportunity to match what Oxford and Cambridge have.”
The company is abandoning its headquarters at the Royal Liverpool Hospital’s Duncan Building, which is scheduled to be demolished in 2017. That location housed Redx Oncology. Two of Redx’s subsidiaries are already at the Alderley Park location, Redx Anti-Infectives and Redx Immunology. Alderley Park is a well-known bioscience campus.
The move is expected to be completed by the end of the year. The three merged units will employ 193 people. The Liverpool-based center had 88 employees.
“Bringing our three teams together will support our ambitious growth plans,” said Murray to The Liverpool Echo, “and give the business some valuable human, scientific and logistical synergies. Alderley Park’s high specification laboratories and superlative facilities present a commercially attractive solution as we seek to provide the best infrastructure and environment for our staff.”
A company spokesperson told In-Pharma Technologist, “Redx is leasing lab space, not buying the building so the Alderley Park relocation is un-related to the recent fundraising.” This refers to a new share offering. “All staff at Redx in Liverpool will be retained—no jobs will be lost and no one is leaving the business. Alderley Park is reasonably local to Liverpool.”
Alderley Park is currently hosting about 150 life science companies. It is owned by Manchester Science Partnerships, which is investing 30 million pounds to grow office and lab capacity by 40 percent. It has created more than 500 jobs to date, with an ambitious goal of creating up to 7,000 over the next 10 years.
“These are people who understand what it takes to deliver drugs in the commercial world,” said Glenn Crocker, chief executive officer of BioCity, to the Financial Times. BioCity is a business incubator whose BioHub division supports startup companies located at Alderley.
The fundraising was announced on Mar. 24. It placed 28,571,420 new ordinary shares with new institutional investors and existing shareholders. They were priced at 35 pence per ordinary share and represented a discount of about 4.3 percent to the closing price of 36.5 pence per ordinary share the day before. It raised 10 million pounds.
Redx plans to use most of the proceeds to move the company’s pipeline, including its Porcupine program toward human clinical trials in the first quarter of 2017. Porcupine (PORC) inhibitor, is an anti-cancer pipeline candidate. It also has additional assets in immuno-oncology, infectious disease and immunology.
“We are delighted to have successfully raised these new funds with approximately half coming from new institutional investors and also with very strong support from our existing shareholders,” Murray said in a statement. “We have made excellent progress in the last 12 months, especially with our drug discovery programs, having achieved in-vivo proof of concept in a further three programs and selecting four drug candidates for progression into development. These new funds will support Redx’s continuing progress and our existing pipeline.”
