Oxford BioDynamics Plc (OBD) has announced the granting of 10,665,020 options over its ordinary shares to certain Group employees, including 10,150,020 options to Chief Executive Officer, Dr Jon Burrows. These options were granted under the Company's 2016 Employee Share Option Plan with an exercise price of 9p per share. One-third of the options granted to Dr. Burrows will vest and become exercisable on each of 23 March 2025, 23 March 2026, and 23 March 2027. Vested options will remain exercisable up to and including the tenth anniversary of the date of grant.
Following this grant, Dr. Jon Burrows holds options over Ordinary Shares and is interested in Ordinary Shares as follows: Total number of options over Ordinary Shares - 12,773,734, Ordinary Shares held - 1,088,888, which represents 0.35% of the current issued share capital. The Grant of Options constitutes a related party transaction pursuant to AIM Rule 13. The independent directors of the Company consider, having consulted with the Company's nominated adviser, Shore Capital and Corporate Limited, that the Grant of Options is fair and reasonable insofar as the Company's shareholders are concerned.
Oxford BioDynamics Plc (AIM: OBD) is a global biotechnology company, advancing personalized healthcare by developing and commercializing precision medicine tests for life-changing diseases. It has two commercially available products: the EpiSwitch® PSE (EpiSwitch Prostate Screening test) and EpiSwitch® CiRT (Checkpoint Inhibitor Response Test) blood tests. The Company's product portfolio is based on a proprietary 3D genomic biomarker platform, EpiSwitch®, which can build molecular diagnostic classifiers for the prediction of response to therapy, patient prognosis, disease diagnosis and subtyping, and residual disease monitoring, in a wide range of indications, including oncology, neurology, inflammation, hepatology, and animal health.
In March 2021, the Company launched the first commercially available microarray kit for high-resolution 3D genome profiling and biomarker discovery, the EpiSwitch Explorer Array Kit, which is available for purchase by the life science research community. OBD has participated in more than 40 partnerships with big pharma and leading institutions including Pfizer, EMD Serono, Genentech, Roche, Biogen, Mayo Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma. The Company has created a valuable technology portfolio, including biomarker arrays, molecular diagnostic tests, bioinformatic tools for 3D genomics, and an expertly curated 3D genome knowledge base comprising hundreds of millions of data points from over 15,000 samples in more than 30 human diseases.
OBD's group headquarters and research, product development, and UK clinical laboratories are in Oxford, UK. It also has a commercial office in Gaithersburg, MD, USA, and a clinical laboratory in Frederick, MD, USA, and a reference laboratory in Penang, Malaysia. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange's AIM, with ticker OBD. For more information, please visit the Company's website, www.oxfordbiodynamics.com.