NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Skyline Medical announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to take up to a 25 percent equity stake in partner Helomics.
Under the terms of the deal, Skyline will acquire preferred stock convertible into 20 percent of Helomics' outstanding common shares in exchange for 1.1 million newly issued Skyline shares. Skyline also has the right to convert a previously issued $500,000 loan to privately held Helomics into a 5 percent stake.
During early Wednesday morning trading on the Nasdaq, shares of Skyline rose nearly 5 percent to $1.20
"Our strategic growth plan is to invest in, and partner with, leading edge players in emerging areas of the healthcare industry to secure additional income streams and grow the value of Skyline," Skyline CEO Carl Schwartz said in a statement. "Helomics' ability to offer data collection, analysis, and actionable insights to biopharma companies as they develop new cancer treatments positions it as a highly-valuable partner to the fast-growing precision medicine sector."
Last month, Skyline partnered with Helomics to develop new personalized cancer diagnostics using the Helomics D-Chip platform, which uses artificial intelligence-powered bioinformatics to find insights from the data to help disease diagnosis, produce new diagnostics and therapies, perform improved clinical trials, and help inform programs that seek to find new purposes for existing medications.
According to Skyline, that alliance has now been expanded to include next-generation sequencing technology licensed from Illumina. Specifically, Skyline and Helomics will also use Illumina's MiSeqDx platform to perform gene sequencing of tumor specimens from cancer patients in order to generate data for the D-Chip platform.
"Licensing the NGS platform is expected to drive commercial traction for both the D-Chip platform and the additional CRO services offered by the Skyline-Helomics joint venture," Schwartz added. "We fully expect the NGS platform to drive revenue from new partnerships early in 2018."