City briefs: Aptamer Group and WANdisco
Life sciences firm, Aptamer Group, has signed signing two new fee-for-service contracts initially worth over £500,000, with the potential for downstream milestone and royalty/licensing payments.
The York-based business, which develops Optimer ® binders that can be used as synthetic alternatives to antibodies, says these latest contracts are in addition to £1m worth of recognised revenue in H1, as well as the additional £1m in signed orders confirmed in its recent trading update.
Dr Arron Tolley, chief executive officer, said: “Signing these two substantial deals is a solid start to the second half.
“The diverse nature of these partnerships demonstrates the broad applicability of the Optimer platform across the life science industry, from supporting improved manufacturing methods to developing new drugs and the increased need for novel antibody alternatives within the life science market.”
The first deal is with BaseCure Therapeutics, a pre-clinical stage biotech company dedicated to the discovery and development of innovative siRNA-based medicines.
Aptamer is working with BaseCure Therapeutics to identify cell targeting Optimer binders which might be developed as potential delivery vehicles for siRNA uptake into target cells and tissues.
The second contract is with a developer of custom enzymes based in Asia. Aptamer will develop Optimer binders for incorporation into a biosensor to allow convenient monitoring of the ingredients in the company’s manufacturing processes.
:::
David Richards
Sheffield-headquartered big data specialist, WANdisco, has struck an initial agreement worth $9m/£7.3m with a global European-based industrial and consumer goods company.
The deal is for a one-off migration for manufacturing process and other enterprise information management data which resides in the client’s data centres in Europe and Asia to be migrated to multiple cloud service providers.
WANdisco says it was chosen due to its proven ability to migrate petabyte scale data and its capability to migrate data to multiple cloud service providers.
It adds the manufacturing sector is increasingly producing large sets of data, making it a strategically key target market. The company expects manufacturing data to become a core and growing market for its expertise in future.
David Richards, CEO and chairman of WANdisco, said: “This is the first company to choose our solutions to migrate manufacturing process data at scale, using our unique ability to seamlessly and securely migrate large scale data from on-premise platforms to the cloud.
“Moving data from on-premise platforms to the cloud is continuing to drive a significant pipeline of opportunities for our business.
“Companies across multiple industry verticals face significant challenges in successfully executing this data movement and unlocking the full capabilities of the cloud.”
