Roquefort Therapeutics PLC reported an increased loss for 2022 as costs rose in several areas, with the year including a successful acquisition, and said it expects to meet its targets for the current year.

Roquefort is a London-based biotech company focuses on developing medicines for hard-to-treat cancers.

The company made a pretax loss of £1.6 million in 2022, compared with £917,433 the previous year. It also reported no revenue for last year, down from £719 in 2021.

Roquefort said administrative expenses increased to £1.3 million from £252,392 over the same periods. Research and development expenditure increased to £319,315 from £698. However the cost of goods sold decreased to zero from £10,069 while costs associated with an acquisition decreased to zero from £224,744.

The company did not declare a dividend for 2022, unchanged from the prior year.

Operational highlights from last year included Roquefort’s acquisition of cancer-focused biotech firm Oncogeni Ltd for £5.5 million in September. The company said this added four fully funded drug development programmes to its pre-clinical portfolio, and reported ‘significant cost advantages’ from gaining access to Oncogeni’s ‘state of the art’ laboratory in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Roquefort also said that this year its Midkine antibody programmes successfully demonstrated in vivo safety in pre-clinical development studies, and progressed into efficacy studies.

Roquefort said it expects to meet clinical readiness targets for one of its development programmes in the second half of this year. It also announced its strategic goal ‘to take advantage of the paradigm shift that 90% of successful biotech programs are acquired’.

Chief Executive Officer Ajan Reginald said: ‘In summary, in the first six months of 2023, we have successfully integrated Oncogeni to form a material oncology group, accelerated the cancer programs to meet critical R&D milestones on-time and on-budget and demonstrated our business model of realising value through licensing transactions.

‘This has established the strategic and commercial foundation from which the group will deliver shareholder value in 2023-4.’

Shares in Roquefort were suspended from trading on May 2 due to the delayed publication of its 2022 results. They were valued at 6.81 pence in London on Monday.

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