Avacta Group Regulatory News (AVCT)

Avacta Group plc

Major Collaborative Agreement Covering the USA and Canada

Avacta Analytical Signs a Sales and Marketing Agreement for Products and Services with Pall Corporation

Avacta 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 signed a commercial agreement with Pall Corporation (NYSE:PLL)("Pall"). As part of the agreement, Avacta and Pall will collaborate to develop and market products and advanced analytical services for the life sciences market. The relationship has been initiated with Pall entering into an agreement to market and support Optim, Avacta's market leading ultra-low volume biopharmaceutical analysis tool, in North America.

Optim has been developed to accelerate the speed of and reduce the cost of drug development through the early analysis of compounds to identify the best candidates for development and define the optimal processing conditions. In the critical stages of pre-formulation, stability testing and formulation of biopharmaceutical drugs, Optim delivers vital information tens of times faster than other approaches using sample sizes less than a hundredth needed by existing techniques. This quantum leap in efficiency and reduction in the cost of analysis allows drug developers to gain greater insight into candidate drug compounds at a much earlier stage of development. This in turn leads to a significant reduction in the likelihood of failure of drug compounds and reduces the overall costs of bringing new drugs to market. Optim comprises a benchtop instrument and a single-use sample holder that will lead to recurring consumables revenues.

Pall has recently reported annual revenues of $2.4 billion and is the global technology leader in the filtration, separation and purification industry. Its Life Sciences business, with which this commercial partnership has been agreed, accounts for roughly half of Pall's revenue and is focused on facilitating the process of drug discovery, development, regulatory validation and production. Pall's products are used extensively in the research laboratory, pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.

Avacta has agreed an exclusive commercial partnership with Pall to market Optim in North America and to work closely together to develop and market other advanced technologies and analytical services aimed at the life sciences market. This agreement provides Avacta with a powerful commercial and scientific partner in this critical market and Avacta believes that this relationship will contribute substantially to business growth. Avacta has recently reported its first sale and installation of an Optim unit in the US and will now work with Pall to address already rapidly growing interest in the market. As part of this initiative, it has also agreed to place Optim units into two prestigious US university biopharmaceutical research laboratories with extensive commercial interactions and key opinion leader status.

Alastair Smith, Chief Executive of Avacta Group commented:

"This is a very significant agreement for Avacta and I expect it to be transformational for the Group. It provides a world class commercial and product development partner in the strategically critical North American market and potentially wider afield.

"Optim is a powerful tool designed to reduce the costs associated with developing and manufacturing biological products and this sales and marketing agreement with Pall has significantly enhanced our prospects of exploiting Optim's significant market potential throughout the wider bioprocess market.

"We are very excited about the potential of this collaborative relationship and I look forward to keeping the market updated as this commercial partnership develops and assists Avacta in delivering its strategic objectives."

Ken Frank Senior Vice President of Pall Corporation and President of Pall's Biopharmaceutical Division commented:

" The Optim technology and Avacta's expertise is a perfect complement to Pall's strategic position in Total Fluid Managementsm for our biopharmaceutical customers. This agreement allows us to combine our process know-how and existing products and services with this exciting new technology to meet very important needs in process development, process monitoring and high throughput analytics."

23 February 2011

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 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.