Life sciences firm Avacta makes ‘significant progress’ in year of R&D investments
Life sciences firm Avacta has reported a slight increase in revenue after successfully completing an £11.6m fundraising round.
For the year ending 31 July, the Wetherby-based firm saw group revenues increase to £2.76m, from the £2.74m achieved in the year before.
Avacta is a developer of Affimer biotherapeutics and reagents.
Revenues for the Affimer business, Avacta Life Sciences, increased to £1.19m (2017: £1.15 million) as the number of custom Affimer projects and funded FTE development projects transitioned during the year following the completion of funded FTE project and transfer across to the customer’s in-house development team for the next stage of development.
Revenues in Avacta Animal Health slightly dropped to £1.57m (2017: £1.59m), which Avacat said was due to the division re-focusing “on its core pet/equine allergy tests, with certain non-core tests/services gradually phased out during the year.”
During the year, the group also reported £10.39m in losses before taxation from continuing operations, compared to last year’s £7.89m. But Dr Alastair Smith, CEO of Avacta Group, told TheBusinessDesk.com that this is “the result of investments in R&D that ultimately delivers drugs in the pipeline, so I’d prefer to see it as an investment in the R&D of the company.”
Speaking on the slight rise in revenue, Smith said although the increase “sets the expectation for next year,” for the time being Avacta is concentrating on the R&D stage.
For the £11m raised earlier this year, Smith added that this “would be used to continue to grow our pipeline. To get the lead programme to the clinic and to continue to generate license deals.”
In a statement Avacta Group said: “We are very pleased with the significant operational progress made over the past year which firmly underpins our progress towards key near term commercial and clinical milestones which represent major value inflection points for the Affimer platform and the Group.
“Based on the growing body of pre-clinical data generated by the in-house therapeutic programmes, and by the partnered programmes, the Group has made significant progress in our partnering discussions. We are very confident that the Group will deliver at least one substantial pharmaceutical licensing deal whilst the technology is still at a pre-clinical stage, during which, we remain focused on getting first-in-man clinical data in 2020.
“The joint discovery recently announced with Tufts University Medical School has become an important second programme in our therapeutic strategy, which is aimed at improving patient response beyond that achieved with simple immune-checkpoint blockade. We are particularly excited by the interest that this novel form of drug conjugate has generated with potential partners.
“The substantial number of technology evaluations of Affimer reagents that we have established is now showing signs of bearing fruit. We expect to be able to report on reagents licensing deals in a number of application areas in the coming financial year that will validate the licensing business model which we are pursuing, and in turn, will underpin future royalty revenue streams.
“Recognising that these significant license deals take time to win via technology evaluations, we have shifted business development focus slightly towards nearer term revenue generation through custom Affimer services, and we are building a small in-house pipeline of diagnostic Affimer assays for licensing as set out at the recent placing.”
