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Date: Friday 29 Aug 2008

LONDON (ShareCast) - Gene therapy group Oxford Biomedica has parted company with its chief executive after less than two months at the helm.

Former chief medical officer Mike McDonald replaced Alan Kingsman as boss at the beginning of July, but the share price collapsed just two week later following the failure of a final stage clinical trial of its renal cancer treatment TroVax.

The firm, which gave no reason for the departure, said today it is evaluating the interim data with its partner, French drug giant Sanofi-Aventis.

John Dawson, who was only appointed as non-executive director on 1 August, has been made acting CEO.

The group’s pre-tax loss for the six months ended 30 June has narrowed to £2m from £10.3m in 2007 as the TroVax development collaboration with Sanofi-Aventis boosted revenue to £13.4m from £2m.

Net cash at 30 June was £27m versus £42.5m in 2007. “Our restructuring initiative aims to extend our cash for operations through the first half of 2010, by focusing our efforts on three development programmes that may provide the greatest return in the near term,” said the company.

Oxford recently rejected an indicative approach from tiny US firm GeneThera as “not credible”.

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