Avacta Secures Funding Award

RNS Number : 5190I

Avacta Group PLC

02 June 2014

 



2 June 2014

Avacta Group plc

("Avacta" or the "Group")

Avacta secures funding award to develop Affimers for therapeutic out-licensing

Avacta Group plc (AIM: AVCT), the global provider of proprietary diagnostic tools, consumables and reagents for human and animal healthcare, is pleased to announce that it has secured a Smart Award from the UK's innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, to support its activities in developing the Affimer technology for therapeutic out-licensing.

The Smart Award will contribute towards the development of the data pack to support licensing of Affimers as therapeutic agents.  The award will support the development of a high affinity Affimer targeting a key biological pathway involved in several human cancers. Targeting this pathway will allow the creation of a biotherapeutic to meet increasing demand for new drugs for the treatment of cancer. Over the next 18 months, the program of work will include lead identification, assessment of developability criteria for manufacturing and a preclinical target validation study.

To this end Avacta has established Promexus to generate a data pack which will assist in securing the best value commercial partnerships and licensing opportunities in therapeutics. Dr Amrik Basran will be leading this activity in a recently established laboratory at the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst, located on the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) R&D site. Amrik has over 10 years' experience of both the biotech and pharma industries. Before joining Promexus, he worked for GSK where he acted as Head of Topical Delivery (Biopharm Discovery Unit), supporting the development of biotherapeutics across the GSK portfolio. Amrik was Director of Protein Biosciences at Domantis, before the company was acquired by GSK in 2006 for £230 million and prior to this had spent six years as a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Biotechnology, Cambridge University.

Avacta announced the first therapeutic licensing deal to Blueberry Therapeutics in October 2013 to use Affimers in the development of new therapies for the treatment of multi-drug resistant bacterial infections.

Alastair Smith, Chief Executive of Avacta said: "We believe that there is a significant opportunity to generate value for shareholders through out-licensing of the Affimer technology in the therapeutic space. This was confirmed by the recently reported strong interest which we received in Affimers from drug developers at the Protein and Antibody Engineering Summit in Boston last week. In order to secure high value license deals with upfront payments we need to generate data showing that Affimers are suitable in terms of properties like immunogenicity, clearance times, ease of manufacturing scale up and topical delivery. This is the focus for Promexus and the recently granted Smart award is a great validation of the potential of Affimers in this application as well as a financial assistance."

Amrik Basran, Chief Scientific Officer of Promexus commented: "This Smart award will certainly help us to generate the key data on the technology showing that Affimers have great potential to be developed as a therapeutic platform. In this Technology Strategy Board funded project we're focusing on cancer targets as model systems where there is still a high unmet medical need.  We believe the intrinsic properties of the Affimer scaffold may bring some additional benefits, primarily due to its small size and stability, which may give greater clinical efficacy to patients compared to current biological therapeutics such as monoclonal antibodies. It's great to see that the Technology Strategy Board could also see both the scientific and commercial potential of the technology and provide this financial support to a new UK based biotechnology opportunity."

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 Mike Wort / Anna Dunphy	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, diagnostic kits and newly launched in-clinic blood analyser, Sensipod.
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.

Affimers

Affimers are Avacta's proprietary affinity reagent platform based on a small, human protease inhibitor, Stefin A. Affimers' ability to bind tightly and specifically to a chosen target will be exploited by Avacta Life Sciences as reagents and tools for general life sciences research and development. There are also potential applications for Affimers as therapeutic agents and, whilst Avacta is not intending to take therapeutic Affimers forward into the clinic and to market itself, the company intends to work proactively to create value through out-licensing opportunities.

Avacta joined AIM in August 2006 and is based in Wetherby, England.

Editor's Notes:

The Technology Strategy Board is the UK's innovation agency. Its goal is to accelerate economic growth by stimulating and supporting business-led innovation. Sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Technology Strategy Board brings together business, research and the public sector, supporting and accelerating the development of innovative products and services to meet market needs, tackle major societal challenges and help build the future economy. For more information please visit www.innovateuk.org.

Smart: Managed by the Technology Strategy Board, the Smart scheme offers funding to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to engage in R&D projects in the strategically important areas of science, engineering and technology, from which successful new products, processes and services could emerge. http://www.innovateuk.org/deliveringinnovation/smart.ashx

 

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