Cannabis-based pain treatment firm Oxford Cannabinoid Technologies to list in London

A cannabis-based pain treatment company, controlled by Neil Mahapatra and Gavin Sathianathan, will start trading on the London Stock Exchange on Friday (21).

Oxford Cannabinoid Technologies (OCT), backed by Snoop Dogg and Imperial Brands, raised £16.5 million in a placing that values the company at about £50 million recently, reported The Times.

After the listing, almost 21 per cent of the company will be owned by Kingsley Capital Partners, controlled by Mahapatra, OCT’s co-founder and executive chairman, and eight per cent by Sathianathan, is co-founder, and his wife, the report added.

Imperial Brands will have a holding of almost 11 per cent, while Casa Verde will own just over two per cent. Snoop Dogg, a partner with Casa Verde, had an investment of $10m in the company.

Bishrut Mukherjee and Karan Dharam Wadhera are directors in the firm.

The business was founded in 2017 to develop prescription medicines derived from cannabis and has a research partnership with Oxford University. Casa Verde, the cannabis-focused venture capital firm that counts Dogg, the rapper, among its partners, invested $10m in 2018. Imperial Brands, the tobacco group, invested in the same funding round, The Times report added.

Cairn Financial Advisers and States Bridge Capital are advising on the listing, which will be a standard rather than a premium listing, the report said.

The company said that it aimed to commercialise its first drug by 2027 and intended to 'develop a portfolio of four drug candidates for approval as licensed pain medicines'. It estimated that the 'addressable pain market' was worth at least £42.5 billion globally.

OCT’s leading drug candidate — OCT461201 — is being developed as a solid oral medicine that is in pre-clinical testing. It aims to carry out early stage clinical trials to treat irritable bowel syndrome and post-herpetic neuralgia, a complication of shingles, The Times report added.

In February GW Pharmaceuticals, the British company that was the first to secure regulatory approval for a cannabis-based treatment in America, was bought for $7.2 billion by Jazz, a larger rival.

It developed Epidiolex, a treatment for epilepsy using cannabidiol, a part of the plant that does not make you high, and had sales of more than $500m of the drug last year.