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Yourgene Health Enters Three-Year £5M Term Loan Facility

NEW YORK ─ Molecular diagnostics firm Yourgene Health on Wednesday announced it has entered into a new three-year £5 million ($6.8 million) term loan facility with Santa Clara, California-based Silicon Valley Bank.

Manchester, UK-based Yourgene said the term loan will provide it with non-dilutive funding to pursue future accretive growth opportunities including potential licensing and merger and acquisition activities, allowing for faster deal execution and lower transaction costs.

The loan is repayable over three years with an interest-only period until April 2022 after which interest is payable at a commercially competitive rate, Yourgene said.

Loan covenants are based on a "target trailing quarterly revenue basis" compared to internal forecasts, the firm said in a statement.

While the revenue target for testing purposes excludes revenues from COVID-19 testing and sequencing services under the UK National Microbiology Framework, delivery against the covenant target includes revenues realized from those sources, Yourgene said.

The financing comes when Yourgene's international expansion plans are "underpinned by its broad range of capabilities in molecular diagnostics," Nooman Haque, head of life sciences and healthcare at Silicon Valley Bank for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, said in a statement.

On Tuesday, Yourgene announced that it has partnered with Cardiff, Wales-based EKF Diagnostics to offer noninvasive prenatal and other genomic testing services in the US.

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