Avacta : Affimers : Technical and Commercial Update

Avacta Group plc (AIM: AVCT), the global provider of proprietary diagnostic tools, consumables and reagents for human and animal healthcare, is pleased to provide the market with an update on important technical milestones and commercial progress of Affimers.

Affimers are an engineered alternative to antibodies. They have been designed to address many of the negative performance issues currently experienced with antibodies; namely, the time taken to generate new antibodies, specificity and batch to batch variation. Affimersare based on a small protein called stefin A that can be engineered to bind with high specificity and affinity to a wide range of protein targets thereby creating a potentially large menu of affinity reagents to address gaps in the antibody market and compete directly with existing products. Avacta is now focusing on the commercialisation of Affimers as reagents for life sciences research, and incorporated into assay products such as Affimer microarrays which provide a powerful drug and biomarker discovery tool.

The time taken to generate high quality monoclonal antibodies, up to a year in some instances, is a major issue for many end users. Having now carried out the screening process numerous times against internal targets, and the first commercial and academic customers' targets, Avacta can confirm that the process of finding an Affimer that binds to a new target is as rapid as expected, taking around six weeks from receipt of the target from the customer to the supply of a characterised Affimer. The success rate of the screening process to date has also been high. 

Affimers are being generated to both internal and customer targets and these are each being validated in the two most common applications of western blot and ELISA. The data being generated confirms that Affimers perform well in these key applications with good specificity and assay performance.

Multiple batches of the same Affimer have been produced with high levels of reproducibility and consistency confirming that Affimers do not suffer from batch to batch variation.

The development of microarrays for drug and biomarker discovery is also progressing well. Avacta's first microarray product will be a very large unbiased proteomics tool referred to as a Discovery Array comprising tens of thousands of Affimers printed on a specially prepared glass microscope slide. The high throughput production of Affimers for the arrays has been optimised and since the New Year the output rate has doubled to around two thousand Affimers per week.

Avacta's near term targets for Affimers which now focus on commercialisation and process optimisation/scale up are : 

·     Continue to drive early commercial traction for Affimer reagents through its custom Affimer service;

·     Grow its catalogue of Affimer reagents by screening internally selected targets, with a targeted on-line launch during 2014;

·     Secure first distribution partners for Affimers in key geographies;

·     Expand operations to support growth in Affimer reagent sales; and

·     Rigorously validate microarray performance with clinical, academic and commercial partners to support commercialisation which is expected to begin at the end of 2014.

Alastair Smith, Chief Executive of Avacta said:

"I am very pleased that we continue to see strong progress in Avacta Life Sciences and that this progress has accelerated in the past few months. We now have working processes to underpin early commercialisation in all areas and good scope to optimise and improve the efficiency and scale of those processes to drive growth and profitability.  It is particularly pleasing to see early revenues, and importantly to see data generated in-house and by partners that demonstrate how well Affimers are working as affinity reagents and this gives us a great deal of confidence for the future."

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