Avacta Group Regulatory News (AVCT)

6 Sep 2010 07:00

Avacta Group plc Appointment of Distributor and Further Optim Sale

Avacta Group plc ("Avacta" or the "Company"), which provides innovative, high value proprietary technologies and services to the pharmaceutical and diagnostics markets, is pleased to announce that it has appointed Isogen Life Science as distributor in Mainland Europe for the Optim 1000, its ground-breaking, ultra-low volume protein analysis system.

The Optim 1000 has been developed to accelerate and reduce the cost of critical protein analysis during pre-formulation, stability testing and formulation of biopharmaceuticals. In these critical areas of drug development the directors believe that Optim 1000 will deliver vital information tens of times faster than any other known approach using sample sizes more than a hundredth of that currently needed. This quantum leap in efficiency allows drug developers to gain much greater insight into their products at an earlier stage of development which could lead to a significant reduction in later stage failure and thus the overall costs of bringing a drug to market. Optim 1000 comprises a bench-top instrument and a single-use sample holder which it is expected will lead to significant recurring consumables revenues.

Isogen Life Science (ISL), headquartered in De Meern in the Netherlands, is a well established and respected distributor of instruments, reagents and consumables in the areas of cell biology, molecular biology and biochemistry. Accordingly, ISL has strong relationships with a large number of biopharmaceutical and biotech customers throughout Europe. Avacta chose Isogen as its European distributor for Optim because of this strong track record in sales into the biopharmaceutical development area and because of the strong commitment to high quality customer support.

ISL has placed an initial order for an Optim 1000 to be placed within a European biopharmaceutical research organisation thereby taking the total number of Optim unit sales todate to five. In the past few months Avacta has progressed a number of potential orders which are expected to reach fruition in the near future as the capital equipment market appears to be recovering from recession. This, combined with the added sales potential of ISL in Europe, gives the Directors confidence of achieving their sales target for the current financial year.

Alastair Smith, Chief Executive, Avacta Group plc, commented:

"Isogen Life Science impressed us with their in-depth knowledge of our marketplace. Moreover, they demonstrated a clear and comprehensive understanding of the value that Optim can deliver in its different application areas. ISL has shown resounding past success in deploying instrumentation and reagents within Avacta's target markets of Northern and Southern Europe and we are confident that they have the customer relationships to accelerate sales of Optim this year. The Avacta sales team will now focus on the UK market and on broadening our sales efforts into other key markets such as the United States through direct activity and through further partners.

"Naturally we are delighted that the appointment of Isogen has been accompanied by an order and we look forward to working with them in the future to fully capitalize on the market opportunity for Optim in Europe. "

6th September 2010

For further information, please contact:

Avacta Group plc Tel: 0844 414 0452 Alastair Smith, Chief Executive Officer www.avacta.com Tim Sykes, Chief Financial Officer Broker Tel: 020 7101 7070 XCAP Securities Limited www.xcapgroup.com John Grant/Karen Kelly/David Newton Tel: 020 7383 5100 Nominated Adviser www.grantthornton.co.uk Grant Thornton Corporate Finance Philip Secrett/Colin Aaronson Financial PR Tel: 020 7417 8989 Haggie Financial LLP Nicholas Nelson Notes to Editors:About Avacta

Avacta was spun-out from the University of Leeds in 2004 by its current management team as a biophysics company, with the aim of combining the disciplines of physics and biology to develop innovative technologies and expert technical services to address unmet needs in the biopharmaceutical and healthcare sectors.

Avacta has a core bio-analytical technology development programme addressing the needs of the biopharmaceutical sector to fully characterise their new products at the earliest stage in their development to reduce the risk of late stage failure.

High end analytical instruments and leading edge contract research services are being provided to the biopharmaceutical and healthcare/personal-care materials sectors through the Group's biotech support division, Avacta Analytical. High value solutions for rapid, point of care diagnostics based on these core bio-analytical technologies, with a near term focus on veterinary diagnostics, are being delivered through Avacta Animal Health. Longer term these technologies will be transferred into the human clinical diagnostics market. Avacta joined AIM in August 2006.