NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Premaitha Health said today that it has secured another $5 million loan from Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Under the agreement, Thermo Fisher will grant Premaitha a secured loan facility of $5 million. Premaitha will draw down $4 million of the loan immediately as working capital to support its commercial growth strategies and the remainder against performance milestones that will be reviewed every quarter.
The annual interest on the loan is 6 percent and is payable quarterly in arrears, or it can be converted into loan principal. The loan is repayable on Dec. 14, 2023, but Premaitha has the option to repay it sooner.
Premaitha will also issue Thermo Fisher warrants over 28,938,797 new ordinary shares, exercisable at 10.725 pence, which is a 10 percent premium over Premaitha's closing share price on July 10. The company will issue a second tranche of warrants over new ordinary shares on March 1, 2018, or earlier if it starts drawing on the second part of the loan.
Premaitha CEO Stephen Little said in a statement that he sees Thermo Fisher's continued backing of the company as further validation of its noninvasive prenatal testing technologies and their global potential. "This additional funding, combined with our existing liquid resources, will enable Premaitha to accelerate the scale-up of the business and meet its goal of becoming operating cashflow self-sufficient by the end of the current financial year," he said.
The new loan facility follows an earlier one with similar terms, announced in December 2015 and extended in September 2016.
Premaitha's Iona and Sage prenatal screening tests run on Thermo Fisher's DNA sequencing instruments.