Imagion raises $3.5m to advance early cancer detection clinical program
Placement to support ongoing clinical program for MagSense Imaging agent for cancer
Company currently preparing to undertake Phase II trial in HER2+ breast cancer in the US
Special Report: Imagion Biosystems has raised $3.5 million through a heavily oversubscribed two-tranche placement to sophisticated investors and family offices as it prepares to launch a Phase II trial of its MagSense imaging technology for HER2+ breast cancer in the US.
The placement, led by CPS Capital, was priced at 1.5 cents per share with one free attaching listed option exercisable at 4 cents and expiring on December 13, 2027.
The offer price represented a 10% discount to the 10-day volume-weighted average price (VWAP) for Imagion Biosystems (ASX:IBX) shares before announcement of the capital raising.
Directors will also contribute $150,000 based on the same terms and conditions, subject to shareholder approval at an extraordinary general meeting in September.
The placement consists of two tranches including: Tranche 1 –45 million new shares to raise ~$675,000 with settlement on August 5 and allotment of new shares on August 6
Tranche 2 – The balance of shares (~$2.8m) conditional on shareholder approval at an EGM
The EGM is scheduled for September 18 with settlement of tranche 2 earmarked for September 19. Allotment of new shares under tranche 2 and new listed options under both tranches is set for September 22. Listen to more from IBX: Imagion's cancer imaging alternative Use of proceeds to advance clinical program
Funds will be used to advance Imagion's MagSense imaging technology, specifically for HER2 breast cancer and initiate the Phase I clinical programs for both prostate and ovarian cancer.
Imagion's trademarked platform aims to revolutionise cancer diagnosis by introducing molecular imaging to MRI.
The company expects to initiate its HER2 breast cancer trial in the near term with key objectives for the company including: Submission of an investigational new drug (IND) application to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Completion of drug manufacturing to support the trial
Filing of new intellectual property (IP) applications related to molecular MRI
Initiation of the trial and completion of first patient cohort
Collaborations with MRI experts to develop a quantitative MRI platform and AI-based modelling optimised for MagSense
'We are very pleased with the strong demand we saw from investors following our recently announced progress with the FDA on the IND submission for our upcoming HER2+ Breast Cancer Phase 2 clinical trial,' IBX executive chairman Robert Proulx said.
'I want to thank CPS Capital for their lead role and all the investors who have shown their support for our clinical plan.'
This article was developed in collaboration with Imagion Biosystems, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.
This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions. Sponsored
Nova Minerals has released a conceptual processing flowsheet for its 1.24Moz RPM deposit in Alaska. Sponsored
Rhythm Biosciences has announced that its second-generation ColoSTAT blood test detects colorectal cancer consistently across all stages of the disease.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


SBS Australia
6 minutes ago
- SBS Australia
'It's a long game': International student cap increase welcomed, despite housing caveat
The addition of 25,000 student enrolments for next year has been welcomed by the university sector, despite questions about how to unlock the placements. On Monday, Education Minister Jason Clare announced a National Planning Level of 295,000 international student places for 2026 to manage growth in a "sustainable" way. The government will issue a new direction for the changes, replacing Ministerial Direction 111, which acted as a de facto cap and enabled it to reduce numbers by slowing visa processing and assigning quotas for international students to each university. Clare announced two caveats for universities to gain additional placements: student housing and a focus on Southeast Asian neighbours. Education Minister Jason Clare has increased international university numbers by 9 per cent for 2026. Source: AAP / Lukas Coch Phil Honeywood, CEO of the International Education Association of Australia (IEAA), welcomed the 9 per cent increase but highlighted that the levels were still lower than during the pandemic. "Any increase in the enrolment figures from the government is very welcome ... however, it's patchy," he told SBS News. "Our English language colleges are collapsing as we speak because of the combination of high student visa fees and just a concern that the future for Australian international education is not fantastic." Regional Universities Australia CEO Alec Webb reacted to the news with "positivity", praising the fact that "no university will go backwards in 2026". "It definitely signals that Australia is still open for business, and Australia should still be a destination that is being considered for prospective international students," Webb told SBS News. New housing critical to extra placements Universities will have to demonstrate stronger engagement with Southeast Asia and progress in providing secure student accommodation for both local and international students in order to apply for an increase in their allocation. While Honeywood encouraged the pivot to closer neighbours such as Thailand and Indonesia — "great student source markets" — he expressed concern about housing backlogs. "It's taking purpose-built student accommodation companies anything up to three years to get a project approved and commence construction. So it's a long game," he said. It's a concern also expressed by Webb, who hopes universities will get clarity around housing expectations soon, as well as more information about how the 25,000 placements will be split between metro and regional universities. "Obviously, that can't be a new site build, there is an incredible amount of delay and lag associated with not only obtaining the planning permissions, but also with the actual construction itself," he said. "So we're very keen to work with the department and the government to better understand what the expectation is in regards to securing the supply of housing." SBS News has contacted Clare for comment. The focus on housing reflects the intersection between education and migration, a point exacerbated during the federal election campaign. Australia 'the least worst' option The sector has repeatedly raised concerns that the ongoing debate about international student numbers is deterring prospective students from choosing Australia, delivering a blow to the $34 billion a year industry. However, Honeywood says Australia can capitalise on recent disruption to the global market caused by Donald Trump's presidency in the United States. "Australia's been very fortunate that other countries we compete against, particularly Canada, Donald Trump's USA now and the UK are also winding back on international student recruitment," he said. "And therefore when students are thinking which country to go and study at, they're obviously seeing that Australia is in many cases the least worst when it comes to their ability to access education." From tariffs to university education, experts argue that President Donald Trumphas created global uncertainty that Australia can capitalise off. Source: AP / Evan Vucci This week's announcement outlines capacity for 2026 ahead of new legislation, subject to passing, which will establish the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. The body will oversee student caps and university allocations, balancing which courses and skills are needed and hopes to provide stability to the sector from 2027.

ABC News
36 minutes ago
- ABC News
Australia's housing market would crash if these factors aligned
An Australian property market crash may be laughable, but it's conceivable. Housing is politically sensitive because access to it influences our lives enormously. The Albanese government is attempting to ramp-up housing supply, and is offering shared equity schemes to make housing more affordable. "That's part of the issue is politically it is very difficult to introduce [new] big bang policies that may actually have some sort of impact on house prices because a lot of people are going lose out," Ben Phillips, an associate professor from ANU's Centre for Social Policy Research, says. A property price crash, of course, would make many millions of homes more affordable. But is that realistic, or even possible? Australian property prices have faced three major speed bumps over the past four decades. The share market crashed in October 1987, leading to an economic downturn, which saw the unemployment rate rise to 10.8 per cent. It hurt asset prices including property. Australia's two largest cities saw the biggest falls, with house prices falling 10 per cent in Melbourne, and roughly 9 per cent in Sydney between 1989 and 1991. In the global financial crisis of 2008, Australia's median property price fell by around 8.5 per cent over an 11-month period, according to CoreLogic. The COVID-19 pandemic, decades later, saw the unemployment rate reach 7.4 per cent in July 2020. Phillips says that "didn't really have much impact". What would likely lead to a property market correction, and potentially a crash, analysts say, is a spike in Australia's unemployment rate. The latest official data from the US shows a shock slowdown in American bosses hiring new candidates. A spike in the unemployment rate here in Australian is not inconceivable. "I think you'd need to have some sort of an event — and I don't quite know what that would be — that would lead to a lot of people losing their jobs, who are professionals and who own houses," Phillips says. Independent economist Saul Eslake has a clearer picture of what that "event" would look like. "So if, for example, Australia were to be hit by some external shock emanating, for example, from the United States or China, that prompted unemployment to rise significantly," Eslake says. Cotality's head of research, Eliza Owen, agrees. "So the unemployment rate is probably the thing that's holding [the property market] together," Owen says. "If we saw a big blowout in the unemployment rate, that's when mortgage serviceability becomes less stable, less certain. "You might have more forced sales and that would add to supply and contribute to a blowout in falling home values." While not putting any numbers around what would cause an Australian property market crash she says: "It would have to be a combination of demand shock and a large increase in unemployment." "So that probably comes from a severe economic downturn." Eslake adds that a combination of interest rate hikes and a severe cut to the migration intake would be necessary for a "demand shock" to the property market. The bottom line is that any economic or financial event would need to be deep and long-lasting, economists say, to produce a property market correction or crash. But Phillips notes that many home owners are well ahead in their mortgage repayments and have managed their finances to help ride out a financial storm. "Most people in Australia are pretty wealthy and if you're a home owner, and those are most of the people who are buying and selling houses are actually home owners — they have large amounts of equity, they've got large redraw facilities to survive during any sort of challenging financial times," he says. Phillips says this, and a chronic shortage of housing, has made Australia's housing market virtually indestructible. "And I think particularly through an environment where you've got quite low interest rates and you've got effectively a fairly fixed level of housing supply and certainly in the short term, that's probably why it's then house prices stay as strong as they have or increase increased quite strongly." Eslake argues the government and the Reserve Bank stand at the ready to respond to any economic event which poses a threat to financial markets. "I think the Reserve Bank would cut interest rates significantly," he says. In addition, he argues, the big four banks, in the event of a big endogenous economic shock, would fall over themselves to help mortgage borrowers avoid foreclosure. "Most banks will, if a mortgage customer loses his or her job, comes forward quickly enough and the bank's persuaded that there's a reasonable prospect that that person will find a job in the next six months, [the bank will] go to considerable lengths to help those customers," Eslake says. "The banks certainly don't like to have mortgagee and possession signs going up in front of their customers houses." So, is a property market crash possible? Of course. Is a correction more realistic? Yes. But you would need some combination of a drastic cut to migration, interest rate hikes, and a significant and long-term jump in white-collar unemployment with little government support. It's a tall order.

ABC News
36 minutes ago
- ABC News
US to charge some foreign travellers up to $23,000 in visa bonds
The US Department of State has prepared plans to impose bonds of up to $US15,000 ($23,000) for some tourist and business visas, according to a preview of the notice. The 12-month pilot program will give US consular officers the discretion to issue bonds to visitors from countries identified as "having high visa overstay rates," the notice to be published on Tuesday, local time, said. It added that bonds could also be applied to countries "where screening and vetting information is deemed deficient, or offering Citizenship by Investment, if the alien [applicant] obtained citizenship with no residency requirement". But the notice does not specify the countries that meet this requirement, noting "until the Pilot Program countries are selected, the Department is unable to estimate the number of visa applicants that will fall within the scope". The pilot visa program is expected to take effect in two weeks, on August 20, and last a whole year. Consular officers will have three options for visa applicants subjected to the bonds: $US5,000, $US10,000 or $US15,000, but will generally be expected to require at least $US10,000, the notice said. Travellers will get their bonds back when they depart the US in accordance with the terms of their visas. If they do not comply, the bond deposit will be forfeited. The US State Department said in the notice that the pilot program would help assess the feasibility of processing and discharging bonds for tourist and business visas. It would also "inform any future decision concerning the possible use of visa bonds to ensure nonimmigrants using these visa categories comply with the terms and conditions of their visas and timely depart the United States". Further, if the program is deemed feasible, the department said "it would serve as a critical diplomatic tool to compel other countries to address overstays by their nationals and to address deficiencies in their identity verification standards". The proposal comes as President Donald Trump's administration cracks down on immigration to the US and tightens requirements for visa applicants. He issued a travel ban in June that fully or partially blocks citizens of 12 countries from entering the US on national security grounds, mainly impacting people from the Middle East and Africa. While the State Department is currently unable to estimate the number of applicants to be impacted by the visa bond policy, many of the countries targeted by Mr Trump's travel ban also have high rates of visa overstays. This could mean Chad, Eritrea, Haiti, Myanmar and Yemen will be affected. Other countries with high overstay rates include Burundi, Djibouti and Togo, according to US Customs and Border Protection data from the 2023 fiscal year. The US Travel Association, a group that represents major tourism firms, said in a statement that the scope of the visa bond pilot "appears to be limited," potentially affecting an estimated 2,000 applicants. They will most likely be "from only a few countries with relatively low travel volume to the United States," the association said. Mr Trump's immigration policies have led some visitors to skip travel to the US, with data showing the country is suffering a sharp decline in tourism, including an 11.6 per cent decrease in overseas visitors in March. Meanwhile, the US experienced its sharpest decline in Australian visitors since the height of the COVID pandemic in March this year, with a 7 per cent drop in visitor numbers. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) has toughened its travel advice for the US multiple times this year in response to the Trump administration's increasingly harsh border controls. While DFAT has not changed the US's overall rating from green, which means "exercise normal safety precautions," it has beefed up warnings about being detained at the border and requirements to carry identification inside the country. "Check US entry, registration, transit and exit requirements," it advises Australian travellers. "Whether you're travelling on a visa or under the Visa Waiver Program, ensure you understand all relevant terms and conditions before attempting to enter the United States."