E therapeutics : Final Results for the Year Ended 31 January 2021

e-therapeutics plc

("e-therapeutics" or "the Company" or "the Group")

Final Results for the Year Ended 31 January 2021

Oxford, UK, 13 May 2021 - e-therapeutics plc (AIM: ETX), the drug discovery company, announces its final audited results for the year ended 31 January 2021.

Operational Highlights

Management and Board restructure

• On 11 February 2020, Ali Mortazavi was appointed Executive Chairman in a management restructure that saw Ray Barlow stepping down as Chief Executive Officer and Steve Medlicott stepping down as Chief Financial Officer
• From 12 October 2020, Ali Mortazavi was appointed as Chief Executive Officer
• Post year end, Trevor Jones, who has been an independent Non-Executive Director since 2015, was appointed Non-Executive Chairman and post period, Karl Keegan was appointed Chief Financial Officer in March 2021

Expansion into RNA interference (RNAi)

• In May 2020, the Company announced expansion into RNAi as a therapeutic modality having designed a novel GalNAc small interfering RNA (siRNA) that will leverage expertise in network biology and, post period, filed a patent application and commenced experiments to characterise the platform. The Company expects to offer this proprietary platform to potential partners in 2021-22

Collaboration with Galapagos NV ("Galapagos")

• In June 2020, the Company announced a collaboration with Galapagos to identify new therapeutic approaches to modulate a specific mechanism involved in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis ("IPF"). Significant progression has been made on this collaboration during the year and post period, this collaboration has achieved two success-based milestones. The Company remains in business development discussions for both network-driven and functional genomics technologies with multiple potential partners

Scientific Advisory Board ("SAB") launched

• During the year, a SAB was created. Headed by Dr Paul Burke, with members Dr Bill Harte and Professor John Mattick, who all have considerable industry experience and will provide strategic advice and insight on transforming the drug discovery process

COVID-19 project

• In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Company initiated a project to identify approved and known drugs, both alone and as synergistic combinations, that could rapidly be repositioned for the treatment of COVID-19
• Compounds identified through the Company's network-driven discovery platform have been tested by Wuxi App Tec in cell-based assays and show potent anti-inflammatory and antiviral activity. This activity is expected to be generically applicable, raising the prospect of utility against both existing and new emergent strains of coronavirus

Financial highlights

During the year the Company strengthened its financial position raising total gross funds of £13.2m.

• Completed equity fundraises of £1.6m and £11.6m in February and July 2020 respectively to scale the Group's business model with focus on further developing the Group's informatics platform capabilities, building and populating an internal pipeline of high conviction early assets and expanding the team to support the scale-up
• Revenues of £0.3m (FY20: £0.5m)

• Cash at 31 January 2021 of £13.0m (FY20: £3.8m)
• Cash increase in the year of £9.2m (FY20: £(2.1)m)
• R&D spend £2.7m (FY20: £2.1m)
• Operating loss of £4.5m (FY20: loss of £2.9m)
• R&D tax credit of £0.8m (FY20: £0.6m)

Ali Mortazavi, Chief Executive Officer of e-therapeutics, commented: "Our ambition is to transform the drug discovery process. The successful fundraises during the year enable the next stage of growth and value creation for the Company and we have begun to build momentum as we move forward with our strategy delivering scientific progress and current and prospective partnerships and collaborations. Ending the year in a secure financial position will enable us to make significant progress in the year ahead and beyond."

The information contained within this announcement is deemed by the Company to constitute inside information as stipulated under the Market Abuse Regulations (EU) No. 596/2014 as it forms part of UK domestic law by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 ('MAR'). Upon the publication of this announcement via Regulatory Information Service ('RIS'), this inside information is now considered to be in the public domain.

	-Ends-
Enquiries:
e-therapeutics plc	Tel: [phone]
Ali Mortazavi, CEO	www.etherapeutics.co.uk
Karl Keegan, CFO
SP Angel Corporate Finance LLP	Tel: [phone]

Nominated Adviser and Broker

Matthew Johnson/Caroline Rowe (Corporate Finance)

Vadim Alexandre/Rob Rees (Corporate Broking)

About e-therapeutics plc

e-therapeutics plc is an Oxford, UK-based company with a powerful computer-based approach to drug discovery, founded on its industry-leading expertise in network biology to fully capture disease complexity. The Company combines network science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, statistics and big data with expertise in drug discovery and development to transform the search for new medicines and intervention strategies.

e-therapeutics has developed an in silico laboratory that enables the rapid screening of millions of compounds and the identification of small subsets that are enriched for highly active hits. Its proprietary platform also has novel applications in functional genomics, being able to analyse complex genetic datasets, provide a deep understanding of pathological mechanisms and distil actionable insights for the discovery of novel drugs, biomarkers and diagnostics.

e-therapeutics has deployed and validated its disease-agnostic drug discovery platform both in house and with partners, including Novo Nordisk, Galapagos NV and a US-based, top 5 pharmaceutical company.

Chairman's statement

During the financial year ended 31 January 2021, we have seen good momentum in growing shareholder value, leveraging the funds raised to deliver scientific progress and building upon current and prospective partnerships and collaborations. The Company has ended the period in a secure financial position which will enable it to make significant progress in the year ahead and beyond.

In my first statement as Chairman, I am pleased to report that the Company is now well positioned for future success. Over the last 12 months e-therapeutics has made significant progress across the business and raised significant funding to support its strategy for value creation. The proceeds have facilitated a number of initiatives, with a particular focus on expanding the Company's computational platform capabilities, internal asset pipeline prospects and success in securing partnerships and collaborations. In light of the recent uncertainty arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been quick to adapt to the changing circumstances and there has been minimal impact on our business. Indeed, for our Company, the situation has opened up new opportunities. The speed at which the Company has reacted to changing circumstances and the support it has offered its employees is a credit to the leadership of CEO, Ali Mortazavi and the Executive Team.

e-therapeutics' ambition is to transform the drug discovery process. We are leveraging our computational platform and network biology expertise to accelerate the identification and development of effective therapies, in particular through the synergy between our computational approaches and our recently added proprietary RNAi technology platform.

Our goal is to establish e-therapeutics as the leading platform in computational biology:

1. To win commercial deals and achieve industrial validation of our informatics Platform
2. Establish a validated RNAi platform
3. Develop high-conviction internal assets
4. Develop the Company to a sufficient scale through platform development and recruitment
5. Provide guidance, development and feedback to people to enable them to fulfil their role

The period has seen significant delivery against this strategy with the following notable achievements:

• The Company announced a collaboration with Galapagos to identify new therapeutic approaches to modulate a specific mechanism involved in Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) and potentially other fibrotic indications. In addition, the Company has existing partnerships with Novo Nordisk and this partnership on Type- 2 diabetes has been extended with the potential to progress to a larger discovery project. The Company expansion into RNA interference (RNAi) and the establishment of a proprietary siRNA platform with siRNA as the drug modality of choice for our internal pipeline was a key achievement during 2020.
• Significant progress has been made on our GaINAc siRNA platform and we have recently filed a patent application relating to specific hepatocyte targeting for liver gene silencing which will provide a competitive advantage in developing our RNAi therapeutic pipeline.
• In addition to its partnerships/collaborations, the Company intends to extract and retain further value from its platform by building an in-house pipeline of assets to provide out-licensing opportunities, through a data-driven and flexible partnering strategy at the right value inflection points. The Company has developed a proprietary disease-agnostic platform to produce valuable disease biology insights and potential drug targets and candidates.
• In December 2020, the Company announced it had deployed its network biology platform to identify clinical stage compounds that either singly or in combination could be repurposed rapidly to treat COVID-19 and it has generated very encouraging results.
• Innovations continue to be made to our core platform technologies including increased automation and in the area of target identification. Significant headway has been made in recruiting further skilled people to the team.
• In order to support and develop our people, the appointment of our Chief People Officer has resulted in new initiatives, regular interactive learning and cross-team collaboration sessions as well as the implementation of a new HR framework.

Strengthened financial position

During the period under review, the Board and management have continued to implement robust financial control. A particular achievement during the period was the Board's commitment to strengthen the financial position of the Company by securing new investors and raising funds to enable the Company's next stage of growth and value creation.

I am delighted that in the most recent fund raise we welcomed new institutional shareholders and retail shareholders, through a specific Retail Offer via PrimaryBid. As a result, the overall size and shape of

our shareholder base has significantly changed. I should like to thank all our new and existing shareholders for their continued support.

The funds raised in the period gives the Company sufficient working capital for at least 12 months and with an element of discretionary spend.

Board and Executive Team

In February 2020, we announced a restructuring of the Board and Executive Team resulting in the appointment of Ali Mortazavi as Executive Chairman. In addition, Michael Bretherton was appointed Non-Executive Director. Subsequently in October 2020, Ali Mortazavi was also appointed Chief Executive of the Company in addition to his role as Chairman. Post period in March 2021, a further reorganisation of the Board resulted in my appointment to the role of Independent Non-Executive Chairman with Ali Mortazavi continuing in his role as Chief Executive Officer.

The Company continued to build its Executive competencies with the appointments of Laura Roca- Alonso as Chief Business officer, Stephanie Maley as Chief People Officer and, post period, the appointment of Karl Keegan as Chief Financial Officer.

I should like to thank our dedicated staff for their very significant contribution to the Company and for their continued diligence, agility and commitment throughout this difficult time. In my opinion, the Board restructuring has denoted a turning point in the leadership and direction of e-therapeutics and we are now in a strong position under the leadership of Ali Mortazavi to execute on our strategy. I warmly welcome all the new appointments to our company. I am delighted to have been appointed as Chairman and I now look forward to completing the search for an additional Non- Executive Director to strengthen the Board further and to support the Company's future success.

Professor Trevor Jones CBE

Independent Non-Executive Chairman

12 May 2021

Chief Executive Officer's statement

Prior to investing and becoming the CEO, I conducted detailed due diligence into the full range of computational approaches in drug discovery. I was struck by the Company's "biology first" approach and the interest its network biology capabilities were receiving from large biopharmaceutical companies.

I am pleased to report my first set of full year results for e-therapeutics as CEO. We have begun to build momentum as we move forward with our strategy, accelerated by our substantial new investment completed last year. Despite some of the most challenging conditions that we have all seen in our lifetimes, this year has been a pivotal and successful year for e-therapeutics. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every individual in very different and sometimes tragic ways but, out of necessity, it has also opened up opportunities for businesses such as ours.

e-therapeutics' expertise in network biology and drug development, coupled with our nascent RNAi platform, gives us a synergistic competitive advantage through effective drug discovery target identification and a rapid and validated development path. This expertise underpins many of the operational highlights for the Company this year. Our collaboration agreement with Galapagos in IPF, with potential in other fibrotic conditions and our type-2 diabetes agreement with Novo Nordisk are validation of our platform, highlighting the ability of our network approach and expertise to go beyond pure in silico predictions and identify potentially clinically viable interventions with supporting laboratory data.

The significant progress made on our GaINAc siRNA platform will enable us to benchmark it against those of competitor RNAi companies. In parallel, we have also established a dedicated group to leverage our computational network biology discovery platform specifically at target genes in hepatocytes, which are amenable to GaINAc delivery. We believe that the combination of these elements will enable us to offer an attractive business development proposition to potential collaborators.

e-therapeutics' computational platform is capable of discovering novel drug targets and active small molecules and of uncovering new biological mechanisms and genetic insights. In our COVID-19 project launched this year, we have deployed that capability to investigate known compounds in a novel context and have uncovered new mechanisms that mitigate infection-induced hyperinflammation as well as discovering a potent anti-viral strategy.

The most significant challenge for the Company was having sufficient capital to allow us to realise opportunities and I am very pleased that we were able to secure the financing to execute on our strategy and business model.

Strategy

e-therapeutics' ambition is to transform the drug discovery process, leveraging its computational network biology platform (drug discovery) to find novel targets to address mechanisms underpinning complex disease. The business model incorporates out- licensing of targets and compounds in addition to the development of an in-house pipeline of RNAi therapeutics.

Drug discovery - computational network driven biology platform

The Company was, and is, one of the few purely "biology first" computational companies that I have come across, in contrast to competitors who are primarily focused on computational approaches to small molecule chemistry. This approach starts with a biological question such as "which processes in COVID-19 disease might it make most sense to address?" One answer could be "hyperinflammation". From a knowledge of just some of the proteins involved we are able to use our proprietary platform and data resources to construct bespoke network models that capture the full complexity of this process and predict missing information. These models are analysed using our cutting- edge network analytics which leverage network science, network statistics and ML/AI approaches to derive new drug targets, biological mechanisms and active small molecules, as well as providing genetic support for target choices.

Establishing world leading hepatocyte expertise, generating novel hepatocyte expressed targets and a focus on expanding our collaborations

The platform is disease agnostic and the Company has completed multiple in-house and partnered projects in diverse disease areas such as fibrosis, type-2 diabetes, CNS and oncology indications, to name but a few. I believe that e-therapeutics is addressing the most critical unmet need in drug discovery/development - the modelling and interpretation of complex human biology. Biological functions are controlled by networks of genes and proteins and we construct in silico models of these functions to interpret human biology/disease states. We believe that the Company has the most complete datasets, predictive AI/ ML algorithms and the most experienced computational biologists, informaticians and data scientists in the field of network biology and these assets provide an important barrier to entry for competitors.

Informatics and drug development

Historically, the Company has operated a hybrid partnership/collaboration model and the use of small molecules as a drug modality for its internal pipeline. However, the time, costs and time to value inflection in small molecule drug development makes this difficult for a small company to prosecute.

By way of example, even after our in-house computational methods have generated a biological hypothesis, target, active chemical matter and an indication to pursue, it typically takes 3-4 years and c.US$3-5m to create a lead compound to take into IND enabling studies. In addition, a further 2 years would most likely be needed to generate human phase 1 data where potential partnership discussions could begin. Clearly, these timelines and costs in addition to the additional centralised overheads are hugely capital intensive and at most, we would only be able to prosecute one high conviction candidate.

As such, small molecule drug development now forms part of the Company's partnership/ collaboration strategy and we will endeavour to structure transactions where we have some upside economics/ opt- ins with biopharmaceutical collaborators who use e-therapeutics' network driven computational biology platform but who wish to develop small molecules in the clinic independently and at their own cost.

RNAi platform the new drug modality of choice for our internal pipeline

One of the key achievements of the year has been to establish RNAi as the drug modality of choice for our internal pipeline. Importantly, this is not a choice that many companies can easily make and we have deep in-house expertise in this field which we believe gives us a competitive advantage. It is fair