Kancera Implements Rights Issue to Develop the Company´s ROR Technology

2011-07-11

Kancera is announcing today that the company has raised SEK 7.6m before issue costs in a rights issue. The capital raised will be used to further develop the company’s ROR technology to attack solid tumors.

Kancera has already reported that its ROR technology has generated ROR-1 active compounds that attack blood cancer cells in patients suffering from chronic leukemia 25 times more selectively than the chemotherapy most commonly used today to treat this disease. At Kancera’s cancer seminar in Båstad on July 7 the company reported new developments in the technology that make it possible to attack solid tumors via ROR-2 as well. Kancera’s ROR technology has thereby been expanded to include the development of new drugs aimed at pancreatic and prostate cancer.

“I am happy that Kancera’s existing ROR technology is now allowing us to efficiently develop new active compounds to attack solid tumors,” says Håkan Mellstedt, Professor at Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital, who is also one of Kancera’s co-founders.

“This is a targeted new issue that will allow us to bring forward our industrial evaluation of the possibility of using our ROR technology to treat two aggressive solid forms of cancer that are affecting more and more people today,” says Thomas Olin, CEO of Kancera AB.

About ROR
ROR consists of a family of proteins that gives cells signals for growth and survival, so-called receptors. Originally ROR were linked to fetus development, but now we know that they also play a role in the growth and spread of cancer cells. The ROR family consists of two receptors, ROR-1 and ROR-2. While ROR-1 is mainly linked to leukemia, ROR-2 is mainly linked to solid tumors. Due to the fact that ROR receptors mainly generate a survival and development signal in tumor cells, but are not active in healthy cells in adults, it is likely that a drug that targets ROR will attack a tumor much more forcefully than healthy tissue. Kancera’s founders and other researchers have also reported that blocking ROR results in certain cancer cells eliminating themselves through cellular suicide. Based on this, there is reason to assume that a ROR-targeted drug is both safer and more effective than the unselective types of chemotherapy used to treat cancer today.

About the new share issue
The new share issue was implemented based on authorization from the Annual General Meeting and consists of 1.9 million shares. The issue price is SEK 4 per share. The volume-weighted average price (VWAP) over the past 20 trading days on NASDAQ OMX First North is SEK 4.09. The new issue increases the number of shares in the company from 13,248,000 to 15,148,000. The new shares constitute around 12.5 percent of the share capital. The new issue has been subscribedfor by a group of investors that includes both new investors and existing shareholders.

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