Business
Affimer On-line Catalogue Launch
Affimer On-line Catalogue Launch.
About this update from Avacta Group Plc
[{"type":"text","content":"\n \nRNS Number : 9209S Avacta Group PLC 30 September 2014 \n\n30 September 2014\nAvacta Group plc\n(\"Avacta\" or the \"Group\")\n \nAffimer On-line Catalogue Launch\n \nAvacta 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. \n \nIn 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.\n \nAffimers 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.\n \nOver the coming months and years the Group intends to grow the catalogue ...