Business
Product Sale
Product Sale.
About this update from Avacta Group Plc
[{"type":"text","content":"\n RNS Number : 7795Y Avacta Group PLC 04 January 2011 \n \n\n \nAvacta Group plc\nFirst Optim Sale into the USA Market \nLeading biopharmaceutical company takes delivery of first unit in the USA\nAvacta Group plc (\"Avacta\" or the \"Company\"), which provides innovative, high value proprietary technologies and services to the pharmaceutical and diagnostics markets, announces that it has made its first sale and installation of an Optim system in the USA, the major world market for the product. For competitive reasons, the customer does not wish to be named.\nOptim is a sophisticated bench-top laboratory instrument and has been developed to accelerate and reduce the cost of drug development through the very early stage analysis of drug compounds. This early analysis ensures that the best candidate drug compounds for development and optimum processing conditions are identified. \n \nMoreover, in the critical stages of pre-formulation, stability testing and formulation of biopharmaceutical drugs, Optim is capable of delivering vital information ten times faster than any other known approach whilst using sample sizes less than a hundredth of that currently needed. This quantum leap in efficiency and reduction in the amount of precious sample that is used, allows drug developers to gain a much greater insight into their products at an earlier stage of development. This in turn should lead to a significant reduction in failure rate of drug compounds thus reducing the overall costs of bringing new drugs to market. Optim is priced at around £100,000 per instrument and employs a single-use sample holder which it is expected will lead to significant recurring consumables revenues. \n \nAlastair Smith, Chief Executive commented:\n \n\"North America represents about 50% of the world market for Optim and this first sale to another of the top ten pharma companies is great news. We have now sold nine Optim units with five installed that are generating recurring revenues. In the last few months we have generated around thirty serious leads in the USA and we have also agreed to put units into two US Universities; Kansas and Colorado, both of which work closely with the biopharmaceutical sector and are highly influential in the US biotech market. We are working to appoint a US distributor shortly and I expect all of thi...