Avacta Group Regulatory News (AVCT)

8 February 2018

Avacta Group plc

("Avacta" or "the Group" or "the Company")

Capital Markets Day

Strong Progress and Milestones Outlined to 2021

Avacta Group plc (AIM: AVCT), the developer of Affimer® biotherapeutics and reagents, is pleased to provide a review of progress against the objectives set in 2015 that were outlined at its Capital Markets Day, which took place on 7 February 2018 for financial analysts and institutional investors. The Group outlined the milestones that it expects to achieve over the next few years as it aims to build a clinical phase pipeline of Affimer therapeutics and a recurring revenue stream from Affimer reagents.

During the presentation, Dr Alastair Smith, Chief Executive Officer, reviewed the size of the opportunity presented by the Affimer technology in the life sciences markets and reiterated the two focal points of the Avacta business model: to build a reagents business in non-therapeutic markets with long term recurring revenue and to grow a pipeline of Affimer therapeutics for development in-house and partnering.

Dr Smith further reviewed the excellent progress that the Group has made against all the objectives set out in 2015, namely:

1) Developing the first Affimer therapeutic candidate for clinical development

2) Building a pipeline of therapeutic Affimers and enabling Affimer platform technologies for licensing or future in-house development

3) Securing further Affimer therapeutic license/partnering deals

4) Growing a custom Affimer revenue stream with the potential for long-term royalties.

Avacta has developed a large number of lead Affimer molecules in its first programme, a PD-L1 antagonist, and is on track to make an IND filing in 2019/2020 and to begin phase 1 clinical trials in 2020. Dr Smith pointed out that the immuno-oncology field is focusing on combination therapies and that the PD-L1 assets that have been developed to date provide a backbone for future combinations with, for example, LAG-3 inhibitors, which the Group is also developing.

The Group has now established a pipeline of ten discovery/pre-clinical programmes from which it expects to select the most promising candidates to build a clinical pipeline of two or three programmes. Dr Amrik Basran, Chief Scientific Officer, also highlighted the recent development of the Affimer XT™ platform technology which can extend the time that another Affimer drug spends in the blood stream. Affimer XT can also be licensed to third parties to be used in conjunction with any other drug for which extending the serum half-life would create a bio-better. 

The partnerships that have been established since 2015 were reviewed and the next milestones were discussed. Dr Smith outlined the importance of data demonstrating the benefits of the Affimer technology, particular in-vivo data, in securing licensing deals with large pharmaceutical companies and indicated that Asia was a region that the Group would be targeting in the near future to secure partnerships.

The Affimer reagents business model was discussed and the growing momentum in terms of pipeline, number of ongoing evaluations, published scientific articles and revenue was also presented. Dr Smith reviewed the potential in terms of longer term royalties from reagent licensing deals and noted that the valuation of such a recurring revenue stream would underpin the current market capitalization on its own, meaning that there is significant upside from the Affimer therapeutic programmes.

Finally, Dr Smith outlined the high level objectives for 2018-2021, which are to establish the recurring revenue stream from Affimer reagent licenses and to become a clinical stage biotech with multiple clinical stage programmes.

The Capital Markets Day presentation may be downloaded from Avacta's web site at: https://www.avacta.com/investors/documents.

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About Avacta Group plc (www.avacta.com)

Avacta's principal focus is on its proprietary Affimer® technology which is a novel engineered alternative to antibodies that has wide application in Life Sciences for diagnostics, therapeutics and general research and development.

Antibodies dominate markets worth in excess of $100bn despite their shortcomings. Affimer technology has been designed to address many of these negative performance issues, principally; the time taken to generate new antibodies, the reliance on an animal's immune response, poor specificity in many cases, and batch to batch variability. Affimer technology is based on a small protein that can be quickly generated to bind with high specificity and affinity to a wide range of protein targets.

Avacta has a pre-clinical biotech development programme with an in-house focus on immuno-oncology and bleeding disorders as well as partnered development programmes. Avacta is commercialising non-therapeutic Affimer reagents through licensing to developers of life sciences research tools and diagnostics.