Avacta Group Share News (AVCT)

LONDON (Alliance News) - Avacta Group Thursday said it has achieved certain technical milestones towards commercial progress regarding its commercialisation of Affirmer reagents for life sciences research.

Affimer reagents are engineered alternatives to antibodies designed to address many of the negative performance issues currently experienced with antibodies, including the time taken to generate new antibodies, specificity and batch to batch variation.

The biotechnology company said that testing had confirmed the process of finding an Affirmer that binds to a new target is as rapid as expected, taking around six weeks from receipt of the target to the supply of a characterised Affirmer.

The company said the success rate of its screening process to date has also been high, while data being generated confirms that Affirmers perform well in key applications with good specificity and assay performance.

Avacta said its development of microarrays for drug and biomarker discovery is also progressing well.

The company said its near term targets are to continue to drive early commercial traction for Affirmer reagents and grow its catalogue of Affirmer reagents by screening internally selected targets.

Avacta shares were up 2.8% to 1.16 pence Thursday.

By Tom McIvor; tommcivor@alliancenews.com; @TomMcIvor1

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