The deal
Sensorion announced a private placement financing of €35m ($38.37m) made by its existing shareholders Invus and Sonnova Partners, and Redmile Group on 3 August. As part of the deal, the new investor, Redmile, will replace Bpifrance as a board member of Sensorion. The investment is expected to extend the company’s cash reserves till the end of September 2024.
Why it matters?
The agreement means the biotech issued the existing shareholders 107,142,856 ordinary shares at a subscription price of €0.28 ($0.31). Consequently, Redmile received 17,857,143 pre-funded warrants against payment of a pre-funded amount per warrant of €0.18 ($0.20), implying ‘warrant giving right to one’ and ordinary share at an exercise price similar to subscription price less the pre-funded amount.
In line with Sensorion’s 13th resolution of the shareholders’ meeting on 24 May, the new shares price represented a discounted (3.5%) average closing share price during the five successive trade days spanning 27-28 June and 3 July. These trade days were chosen from the last 30 trading sessions at €0.2915 ($0.32).
Redmile Group, said: "We believe gene therapy is a potentially curative approach for indications with high unmet medical need."
The Paris-based hearing loss therapy biotech recently announced its plans to kick off the Phase I/II trials for its lead gene therapy candidate OTOF-GT following a clinical trial application (CTA) submission to UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). The candidate is administered as an intra-cochlear injection to treat hearing loss in patients with mutations in the OTOF gene and sensorineural prelingual non-syndromic hearing loss.
The detail
The biotech will invest the proceeds in developing its lead candidate, OTOF-GT. Nawal Ouzren, chief executive officer of Sensorion also stated how the investment will accelerate its GJB2-GT investigational new drug (IND) plans. Other company expenses and research and development opportunities will also be financed.
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