Avexa axes board

Shareholders in Avexa today voted resoundingly in favour of ousting existing chairman and director Nathan Drona along with all but one member of the company’s entire board.

Steven Crowley and Bruce Hewett were voted in as two new directors, joining Avexa non-executive director and Ryder Capital principal and founder David Bottomley, the only existing board member to survive the coup.

The moves follows a petition by shareholders unhappy at the company’s decision in May to cease development of its HIV drug apcicitabine (ATC), which it justified by citing low levels of interest amongst major pharmaceutical companies, as well as a number of clinical and commercial uncertainties.

In late May shareholders received a Notice of Meeting letter signed by ‘Shareholders that invested in Avexa for ATC’ arguing for the program’s reinstatement and the removal of Drona, arguing that the recent success of Merck’s Isentress HIV drug demonstrated the market potential for ATC. The management team lead by Drona responded by stressing that the two products are very different with Isentress acting as an integrase inhibitor, while ATC is a nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI). A key difference, they argued, is that Integrase inhibitors have been shown to have significantly less harmful side effects over the long term and would therefore be significantly more competitive than ATC.