- NAV falls 6.5 per cent to £45.5mn (81.8p)
- Cash and listed stake in Exscientia currently worth £6.2mn (11.1p)
- Progress on multiple investee companies
Shares in Edinburgh-based Frontier IP (FIPP:41.5p), a technology investment company that provides commercialisation services to university spin-outs in return for ‘free equity’ stakes, dipped 10 per cent post annual results. The fall was caused by an unexpected 6.5 per cent (£3.1mn) reversal in net asset value (NAV) after the group booked a £2.2mn unrealised loss on its 17 per cent stake in The Vaccine Group (TVG).
TVG is creating a range of vaccines based on a novel herpes virus-based platform to prevent the spread of economically damaging diseases in livestock. The company now has eight vaccine candidates approaching proof of principle. Its most advanced projects are for pigs. During the year, TVG successfully developed a vaccine candidate for streptococcus suis, a bacterial disease carried by pigs that causes productivity losses as well as meningitis and other symptoms in humans. The project was funded by the UK and Chinese governments.