Breaking Wall Street Market News & Reports

CGEN announced that it has reached an investment agreement with private investment firm,  Baize Investments (Israel) Ltd in innovative medical technologies to receive $5,000,000 in research-and-development funding. Under the terms of the contract, which is in support of Compugen’s recently announced pipeline program, Baize Investments acquired a financial interest in five designated Compugen-discovered molecules. Baize also was issued a warrant to purchase 500,000 Compugen shares at an exercise price of $6.00 per share, expiring June 30, 2013. Alternatively, until June 30, 2013, Baize has the option to waive any payments from the molecules and instead receive 833,334 shares.

In biotechnology, CGEN shares advanced 4.5% with intraday high of $5.03 whereas the intraday low touched $4.88. It traded at a volume of 0.27 million shares as against it’s daily average volume of 0.11 million shares. The 52-wk range was $3.04-$5.32. It had market cap of 162.70 million shares with a beta of 1.75.

Baize Investments’ monetary concern in the five designated molecules consists of the right to receive from Compugen up to 10% of certain future payments received by Compugen from third parties in the event of the successful licensing out for development and/or commercialization of such designated Compugen molecules.

At present, all five molecules are engaged in active research in the Company’s Pipeline Program, with their current status ranging from in silico selection to post animal model validation. The financial terms for the investor were established based on the assumption that any out-licensing of the designated molecules would be undertaken no later than IND filing.

The Chairman of CGEN, Martin Gerstel, stated that, “This arrangement is an excellent example of how we can financially leverage our unique predictive product candidate discovery infrastructure to provide an increasing number of novel and attractive product candidates for potential licensing. The funds received by Compugen pursuant to the agreement being announced today will allow us to pursue more aggressively our ambitious objectives for the Pipeline Program during the next few years.”

Further he added that, “In view of their long-term interest in the activities of the Company, we are very pleased to have Baize Investments and Mr. Murray Goldman join the Compugen team in this very meaningful endeavor.”

On the other hand, the Chairman of Baize Investments was pleased to become a financial partner in advancing these exciting product candidates, all of which have the potential to address significant unmet medical needs.