EIB agrees €25m financing to France's OSE Immunotherapeutics

France's OSE Immunotherapeutics has signed a loan agreement of up to €25 million with the European Investment Bank.

The facility is divided into three tranches, including two tranches of €10 million each and a third tranche of €5 million.

The first €10 million tranche, unconditional and which OSE will request payment before the end of May 2021, will help expand the clinical development of Tedop  in combination with a checkpoint inhibitor in additional cancer indications. 

This first tranche will also support the entry into Phase 1/2 of OSE-279, OSE’s proprietary anti-PD-1 antibody, in a niche oncology indication. The development of OSE-279 will allow OSE Immunotherapeutics to have its own proprietary anti-PD-1 antibody and leverage it across OSE’s product portfolio in combination with other drug candidates. 

The remaining two tranches of €10 million and €5 million, available upon achievement of specific clinical milestones, are planned to be used to accelerate the clinical development of the company’s other programs, in particular CD28 antagonist FR104 and new anti-ChemR23 agonist OSE-230.

This loan will carry a fixed interest of 5% per year paid annually, with a maturity of five years (each drawdown is treated separately in terms of maturity). The repayment of each tranche will therefore be made at the end of a period of five years after the date of disbursement of the said tranche. 

The loan deal is supplemented by an agreement to issue warrants to the EIB for the first two tranches of the financing, in particular 850,000 warrants for the first tranche to be issued when drawn.  Some 550,000 additional warrants could be issued if the second tranche of €10 million is drawn by OSE Immunotherapeutics.

Each warrant will give the right to subscribe to one ordinary share of OSE Immunotherapeutics at the subscription price of €0.01 and at the exercise price calculated on the basis of the volume-weighted average of the three trading days preceding the pricing (which will take place at the end of May 2021), with a discount of 2.5%. The warrants will be exercisable for a period of 12 years.