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Finance Watch: Summit Raises $500m For Shift From Anti-Infectives To Oncology

Proceeds Will Repay Debt, Fund Phase III Trials

 
• By Mandy Jackson

Public Company Edition: Summit initiated the big rights offering earlier this year as promised in December when it licensed Akeso’s PD-1/VEGF bispecific. Also, Teva sold $2.49bn in sustainability-linked notes to pay down debt, while MorphoSys, Novavax and others restructured and cut jobs.

Finance Watch Public Company
• Source: Alamy

Following the failure of its antibiotic ridinilazole in Clostridium difficile infection in December 2021, Summit Therapeutics plc executed a pivot from anti-infectives to oncology a year later when it agreed to license Akeso Inc.’s PD-1/VEGF-targeting bispecific. It said at the time that it would initiate a large rights offering in early 2023 to fund the Phase III non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) clinical trial program for the asset and closed that offering on 3 March, raising $500m.

Menlo Park, CA-based Summit will use most of the $499.5m in gross proceeds to repay $420m in notes issued to CEO Bob Duggan and co-CEO and president Maky Zanganeh, who owned 78.1% and 6%, respectively, of the company’s common stock before the offering

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