Full Press Release Details
LEXINGTON, Mass. and AMSTERDAM, June 16, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- uniQure N.V. (NASDAQ: QURE), a leading gene therapy company advancing transformative therapies for patients with severe medical needs, today announced the grant of inducement equity awards to Jeannette Potts, the Company’s newly hired Chief Legal and Compliance Officer, and other newly hired employees.
The inducement awards to Ms. Potts consist of a non-qualified option to purchase 81,300 ordinary shares of the Company and 47,100 restricted share units. The option has an exercise price of $20.18 per share, which is equal to the closing price of the Company’s ordinary shares as reported by Nasdaq on June 13, 2023 (the “Grant Date”). The option has a ten-year term and will vest over four years, with 25% of the underlying shares vesting on the first anniversary of the Grant Date and an additional 6.25% of the shares vesting in approximately equal quarterly installments over the twelve successive quarters thereafter. The restricted share units vest in three approximately equal annual installments beginning on June 13, 2024.
The Company also granted equity awards to 24 other employees as a material inducement to commencing their employment. In the aggregate, those employees received 66,400 restricted share units and options to purchase 65,500 ordinary shares of the Company. Each option has an exercise price of $20.18 per share, the closing price per ordinary share as reported by Nasdaq on the Grand Date. Each option has a ten-year term and will vest over four years, with 25% of the original number of shares vesting on the first anniversary of the Grant Date and an additional 6.25% of the shares vesting in approximately equal quarterly installments over the twelve successive quarters thereafter. The restricted share units vest in three approximately equal annual installments beginning on June 13, 2024.
The aforementioned equity awards were approved by the Company’s board of directors on June 13, 2023 and were issued to newly hired employees as a material inducement to commencing their employment with the Company in accordance with and under Nasdaq Listing Rule 5635(c)(4).
uniQure is delivering on the promise of gene therapy – single treatments with potentially curative results. The recent approvals of our gene therapy for hemophilia B – an historic achievement based on more than a decade of research and clinical development – represents a major milestone in the field of genomic medicine and ushers in a new treatment approach for patients living with hemophilia. We are now leveraging our modular and validated technology platform to advance a pipeline of proprietary gene therapies for the treatment of patients with Huntington's disease, refractory temporal lobe epilepsy, ALS, Fabry disease, and other severe diseases. www.uniQure.com