WASHINGTON -- British Bio-technology Group plc announcedMonday that it has raised $65 million by selling 11.1 million ofnew preferred ordinary shares, priced at about $5.80 per share,to investors in the United States, Europe and Japan.

The Oxford, England, company said it expected this fourthprivate placement to be the final round of private financingbefore it goes public in 1992 or 1993.

BBT is developing products for inflammation, virology andvascular diseases.

Sixty-two percent of the new equity was contributed by U.K.investors, making Kleinwort Benson Investment Managementand several insurance companies, particularly NationalProvident Institution, major shareholders, according to BBTspokeswoman Dr. June Grindley. Thirty percent was raisedfrom U.S. investors, including John Hancock, Worldwide SpecialPortfolio NV, Spears Benzack Salomon Farrell, and OSGFinancial Corp., she said.

The placement was handled by Kleinwort Benson in the UnitedKingdom and Japan, and by Goldman Sachs in the United States.

The funding will allow BBT to further develop potentialproducts before licensing them, Grindley said. She said BBThopes to get its BB-94 anti-cancer agent into clinical trials bynext year. BBT also will use the funding to get its p24-VLPpost-infection HIV immunotherapeutic vaccine, now in Phase Iclinicals, through Phase II trials, she said.

Other products in the pipeline are a disease-modifying anti-arthritic agent, a platelet activating factor antagonist fortreating asthma and acute endotoxic shock, a protein-engineered form of tissue plasminogen activator and an agentfor lowering blood cholesterol.

The new placement comprises about 39 percent of BBT's totaloutstanding shares. Seventy-three percent of the new shareswere purchased by new investors.

Previous investors in BBT include U.S. pharmaceuticalmanufacturers Johnson & Johnson Development Corp. andSmithKline Beecham plc, as well as Chugai Pharmaceutical Co.Ltd. and Japan Tobacco Inc. (JTI) of Japan. "We havecollaborated with SmithKline, Johnson & Johnson and JTI, andwe are certainly in discussions with Chugai," Grindley said."But none of the latest equity investments came with anythought of agreements or entering into any collaborations. Allthe investment was purely equity investment."

-- Kris Herbst BioWorld Washington Bureau

(c) 1997 American Health Consultants. All rights reserved.