RepliCel Life Sciences, a clinical stage regenerative medicine company focused on the development of autologous cell therapies, has announced that its Board of Directors has authorized a plan to downsize all non-critical programs and staff in an effort to preserve capital to focus on the following three essential priorities pending a major financing or corporate transaction: (1) continued protection of intellectual property, (2) assembling of data from the RCT-01 and RCS-01 clinical trials expected near year-end 2016, and (3) the completion of a licensing/co-development transaction related to one of the four products the Company has in development.

"Over the past few weeks I have worked with management and the board of directors to put forward and authorize a plan in which we have reduced the monthly expenses by almost 60%," said R. Lee Buckler, RepliCel's president and CEO. "With this reduced burn rate, we now require much less capital to get us to milestones which represent material value inflection points and we are confident we will be able to finance the company to critical milestones expected to lead to a licensing transaction."

Concurrent with this announcement, the company has closed a non-brokered private placement of 1,887,625 shares at a price of $0.20 per share for gross proceeds of $377,525. There were no warrants attached to the financing. Five investors participated in the financing including board chairman and former CEO, David Hall. Mr. Hall's participation constituted a "related party transaction" within the meaning of Multilateral Instrument 61-101 Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions (MI 61-101), however was exempt from the valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 by virtue of the exemptions contained in Sections 5.5(a) and 5.7(a) of MI 61-101, in that the fair market value of the shares purchased by Hall did not exceed 25% of the company's market capitalization and the company's shares are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange.