Affimer On-line Catalogue Launch

RNS Number : 9209S

Avacta Group PLC

30 September 2014

 

30 September 2014

Avacta Group plc

("Avacta" or the "Group")

Affimer On-line Catalogue Launch

Avacta Group plc (AIM: AVCT), the global provider of proprietary diagnostic tools, consumables and reagents for human and animal healthcare, announces that Avacta Life Sciences has launched its on-line catalogue of Affimer reagents. There are currently 40 products in the Affimer catalogue.

In May of this year, Avacta raised £10m through a placing of ordinary shares with support from existing shareholders as well as new investors. This money was raised to accelerate the commercialisation of Affimers by investing in the scale up of product development, production and commercial operations. The sale of Affimer reagents through an on-line catalogue is one of the major revenue opportunities for Affimers set out at the time of the placing.  A further revenue opportunity is to provide bespoke Affimer reagents for life sciences customers in academia and industry by screening Avacta's library of Affimers.  The Company is in the process of expanding its business development teams for the US and European markets to deliver this service to market.

Affimers are engineered alternatives to antibodies and have been designed to address many of the negative performance issues currently experienced with antibodies; namely, the time taken to generate a new antibody, specificity and batch to batch variation which can limit their application in many circumstances. Furthermore, there are many targets to which antibodies simply cannot be developed for a range of reasons. The discovery of one such set of targets, referred to as "ubiquitylation" which is an important pathway in many diseases, resulted in the award of the Nobel prize for chemistry over a decade ago and yet, despite the importance of this area of research in drug development and diagnostics, the major antibody companies have struggled to generate antibodies that bind to these targets. The on-line catalogue has a number of Affimers that bind to targets involved in ubiquitylation as well as Affimers that replace some common workhorse antibodies, both representing prime revenue generating targets.

Over the coming months and years the Group intends to grow the catalogue to provide a comprehensive and powerful toolkit for the detection of disease, discovery and validation of new disease biomarkers and drug targets and a range of other applications across life sciences research and industrial development.

Alastair Smith, Chief Executive of Avacta said: "We are very excited about the new online catalogue that makes Affimers available to our customers off the shelf for the first time.

The launch of the catalogue with this initial product set is a demonstration of our capability to deliver Affimers on a commercial basis and is an important first part of the execution of our much wider plan.  The processes we have put in place are capable of delivering a vast range of Affimers to add to our catalogue over time.

Our capabilities now enable us to access the market with bespoke Affimers for customers where we are seeing very strong interest in our technologies from major customers."

Enquiries:

Avacta Group plc Alastair Smith, Chief Executive Officer Tim Sykes, Chief Financial Officer	Tel:  [phone] www.avacta.com
Numis Securities Limited     Michael Meade / Freddie Barnfield - Nominated Adviser James Black - Corporate Broking	Tel:  [phone] www.numiscorp.com
Media Enquiries Walbrook PR Ltd Anna Dunphy / Mike Wort	Tel: [phone] [e-mail]

About Avacta Group plc - www.avacta.com

Avacta Group plc is a global provider of innovative technologies, consumables and reagents for the life science markets, from drug discovery to diagnostics. Avacta operates through three divisions:

Avacta Analytical www.avactaanalytical.com	High throughput analysis instrument, Optim, to help reduce the cost and risk of drug development.
Avacta Animal Health www.avactaanimalhealth.com	Veterinary diagnostics reference laboratory and diagnostic kit provider.
Avacta Life Sciences www.avactalifesciences.com	Novel non-antibody affinity reagents called Affimers, with a wide range of Life Science applications in diagnostics, drug and biomarker discover and biotech research and development.

 

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