Silence Therapeutics places 9.5m shares and plans share consolidation

Silence Therapeutics, a biotechnology company, has placed 9.5m new ordinary shares at 200p each and announced plans for a share consolidation.

The placing raised net funds of £18.7m, which will be used to support the development of the RNAi platform, to broaden its skills from its pre-clinical research to include clinical and commercial expertise and to partially fund a research programme in pancreatic cancer.

It said these broader skills will be used to add a further indication in its Atu027 product and to bring drugs targeting non-cancer indications into the clinic.

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The company also intends to consolidate the exisitng ordinary shares on the basis of one consolidated share for every 50 existing shares held, in order to improve the marketability of the shares. Where existing shares have a value of 0.1p each, the new shares will have a value of 5.0p each.

Ali Mortazavi, Director of Corporate Strategy, said: "This capital raise is a significant milestone for Silence Therapeutics and a strong vote of confidence by existing and new institutional shareholders in the company's technologies."

The company added that whilst it has "sufficient cash resources for its near term needs and retains discretion over a substantial part of its development and other expenditure", the board believes that the group "requires and would benefit from additional finance to enable it to accelerate its product strategy".

The share price fell 3.95% to 4.25p by 09:55.

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