CEL-SCI Plans To Raise $5 Million
CEL-SCI Corporation (NYSE AMEX: CVM), a Vienna, VA late stage cancer immunotherapy company, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with one institutional investor to sell 12.5 million units, with each unit consisting of one of the Company’s common shares and 0.67 warrants to purchase one share of common stock, for gross proceeds of approximately $5.0 million, before deducting placement agent fees and estimated offering expenses, in a “registered direct” offering. The investor has agreed to purchase the units at a purchase price of $0.40 per unit. The warrants, which represent the right to acquire an aggregate of up to 8.375 million common shares, will be exercisable at any time on or after 181 days from the Closing Date and prior to the 5-year anniversary at an exercise price of $0.50 per share, which was above the closing price of the Company’s common shares on the NYSE AMEX Market on June 23, 2009. Chardan Capital Markets, LLC acted as placement agent for the offering.
The transaction is expected to close on or about June 29, 2009, subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions.
Geert Kersten, Chief Executive Officer of CEL-SCI said: “We are planning to use this money to achieve a number of major milestones, key among them are the acceleration of our H1N1 swine flu work and the validation of our manufacturing facility for contract manufacturing services and to produce our cancer drug Multikine for the planned Phase III clinical trial.”
CEL-SCI has also filed a provisional U.S. patent application covering its L.E.A.P.S. immune therapy drugs (vaccines) for the prevention/treatment of H1N1, swine, bird flu, Influenza A and/or evolving mutants or variants of these viruses. Some experts believe that by the next flu season the swine flu virus will have evolved and/or combined with other viruses to create a much more lethal new virus. That is what happened in the case of the Spanish flu pandemic. CEL-SCI’s efforts to fight this virus are focused on using conserved epitopes from essential proteins to be found in the A influenza virus for H1N1, H1N5, swine, bird flu and Spanish influenza to create an effective vaccine/treatment that could potentially fight such a mutant virus.
“By filing this provisional patent in the U.S., we are preserving our rights to file patents on these inventions and for their use world-wide either as an injected vaccine before a person is infected or exposed or as a therapeutic vaccine for treatment,” said Kersten
Experimental work has been initiated on these various methods of use and applications for the A influenza vaccines. These L.E.A.P.S. vaccines, when used individually or together, are expected to induce antigen specific immune response(s) which, based on other L.E.A.P.S. animal tests in multiple disease models will hopefully lead to a protective immune response.
