Dundalk’s Diaceutics to list on London Stock Exchange with £53m market cap

19 Mar 2019

Peter Keeling, CEO, Diaceutics. Image: Diaceutics

Louth company on a mission to give cancer patients access to improved healthcare.

Dundalk medtech player Diaceutics is to list on the London Stock Exchange’s junior market, AIM (Alternative Investment Market), and is expected to raise £17m on day one.

The company is listing this Thursday (21 March) with a market cap expected to be at around £53m.

‘We are giving patients a higher likelihood of getting better by supporting access to the right test to determine the right treatment at the right time’
– PETER KEELING

The company is expected to raise £17m conditionally through a placing of 22,368,427 shares at £0.76 per share.

Anticipated proceeds of around £15.2m have been earmarked for various purposes, including acquiring additional datasets (£5.5m), developing the company’s Nexus software-as-a-service platform (£3m), developing international markets (£2.5m), paying down existing debt facilities (£3m) and strengthening the company’s balance sheet (£1.2m).

Life-saving therapies

Dundalk-based Diaceutics is a diagnostics and data company that currently provides services to 20 of the 30 largest global pharmaceutical companies. The core focus is to ensure patients get access to potentially life-saving therapies.

Diaceutics was founded in 2005 by Peter and Ryan Keeling, and last April it raised €4.3m in financing from WhiteRock Capital Partners and Silicon Valley Bank.

The company’s technology helps cancer patients get biomarker testing and therefore potentially gain access to the right drug for their specific condition.

“Diaceutics was founded out of a desire to get more patients access to improved healthcare,” Peter Keeling explained.

“We are giving patients a higher likelihood of getting better by supporting access to the right test to determine the right treatment at the right time. This announcement today will help us in our mission to continue this great work.”

Last year, 42pc of all FDA drug approvals were for precision medicine therapies, representing 25 approvals in total. Precision medicine drugs are tailored to patients expressing specific molecular or genetic biomarkers, which are identified with a diagnostic test. Ineffective testing, accompanied by persistent challenges throughout the current diagnostic testing market, can therefore significantly reduce access to new, more effective drugs.

To address this, Diaceutics has amassed a set of data from more than 2,500 laboratories, including 3.5m longitudinal patient records, insurance claims data for 50m patients, and 58m testing event data points from 35 countries. As part of this data collection, it has accumulated a global proprietary database of individual laboratories’ capabilities across the industry.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com