Senior Management Appointment and Options Grant

RNS Number : 4811A

e-Therapeutics plc

02 June 2021

 

e-therapeutics plc

("e-therapeutics" or "the Company")

Senior Management Appointment and Grant of Options

Oxford, 2 June 2021 - e-therapeutics plc (AIM: ETX), the drug discovery company, is pleased to announce the appointment of Alison Gallafent as Head of Intellectual Property for the Company, and a grant of options to certain members of the senior management.

Alison Gallafent is a UK Chartered Patent Attorney and European Patent Attorney, who brings considerable intellectual property expertise to e-therapeutics, with over 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.  

Alison has previously worked as in-house Patent Counsel for a range of pharmaceutical companies, such as Merck and Co., Glaxo Wellcome, PLIVA and more recently as Head of IP at Silence Therapeutics plc. She has also held senior patent attorney roles in several leading international law firms and has successfully represented many international pharmaceutical companies in high profile and pivotal patent cases before the European Patent Office.

Alison also brings a wealth of knowledge of the siRNA patent landscape to the Company, and how to strategically operate in this field. 

Alison Gallafent, Head of Intellectual Property, said: "I am delighted to be joining the e-therapeutics team.  I am very excited to be part of the process of creating meaningful Intellectual Property assets for the Company at this stage of its development, based on using the Company's computational biology drug discovery platform to develop clinically validated siRNA drugs."

Ali Mortazavi, Chief Executive Officer, commented: "We are delighted to welcome Alison to e- therapeutics at this point in the Company's evolution. The combination of her broad industry and RNAi expertise will be a major addition to the team."

Grant of Options

As part of the Company's Long Term Incentive Plan, the Board has granted options over 500,000 and 1,250,000 ordinary shares of 0.1 pence each respectively to Alison Gallafent and Karl Keegan, Chief Financial Officer, who joined the Company in March 2021.  

The options granted have an exercise price of £0.12, vest after three years and expire 10 years from the date of grant. Vesting or exercise of the options is not dependent on performance criteria.

Following this grant of options, the total number of ordinary shares under option is 25,772,836, representing 6.13 per cent. of the Company's issued share capital.

-Ends-

Enquiries:

e-therapeutics plc	Tel: [phone]
Ali Mortazavi, CEO	www.etherapeutics.co.uk
Karl Keegan, CFO
SP Angel Corporate Finance LLP
Nominated Adviser and Broker	Tel: [phone]
Matthew Johnson/Caroline Rowe (Corporate Finance)
Vadim Alexandre/Rob Rees (Corporate Broking)

About e-therapeutics plc

e-therapeutics plc is an Oxford, UK-based company with a powerful computer-based approach to drug discovery, founded on its industry-leading expertise in network biology to fully capture disease complexity. The Company combines network science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, statistics and big data with expertise in drug discovery and development to transform the search for new medicines and intervention strategies.

e-therapeutics has developed an in silico laboratory that enables the rapid screening of millions of compounds and the identification of small subsets that are enriched for highly active hits. Its proprietary platform also has novel applications in functional genomics, being able to analyse complex genetic datasets, provide a deep understanding of pathological mechanisms and distil actionable insights for the discovery of novel drugs, biomarkers and diagnostics.

e-therapeutics has deployed and validated its disease-agnostic drug discovery platform both in house and with partners, including Novo Nordisk, Galapagos NV and a US-based, top 5 pharmaceutical company.

The information contained within this announcement is deemed by the Company to constitute inside information as stipulated under the Market Abuse Regulations (EU) No. 596/2014 ('MAR') which has been incorporated into UK law by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018.  Upon the publication of this announcement via Regulatory Information Service ('RIS'), this inside is now considered to be in the public domain.

1	Details of the person discharging managerial responsibilities/person closely associated
a)	Name	1.  Karl Keegan 2.  Alison Gallafent
2	Reason for the notification
a)	Position/status	1.  Chief Financial Officer 2.  Head of Intellectual Property
b)	Initial notification/ Amendment	Initial notification
3	Details of the issuer, emission allowance market participant, auction platform, auctioneer or auction monitor
a)	Name	e-therapeutics plc
b)	LEI	21380049RHSSJXWKYT18
4	Details of the transaction(s): section to be repeated for (i) each type of instrument; (ii) each type of transaction; (iii) each date; and (iv) each place where transactions have been conducted
a)	Description of the financial instrument, type of instrument Identification code	Ordinary Shares of 0.1 pence ISIN: GB00B2823H99
b)	Nature of the transaction	Issue of options
c)	Price(s) and volume(s)	1.  1,250,000 options over ordinary shares at an exercise price of 12 pence each 2.  500,000 options over ordinary shares at an exercise price of 12 pence each
d)	Aggregated information - Aggregated volume - Price	1,750,000 options 12 pence each
e)	Date of the transaction	2 June 2021
f)	Place of the transaction	Outside a trading venue

 

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