Avacta moves forward with growth plans
AVACTA said it is confident it can grow each area of its business as it moves forward with new plans.
The Yorkshire healthcare company, which provides innovative diagnostic tools, consumables and reagents aimed at reducing the cost of human and animal healthcare, highlighted plans to push forward in each division.
After reporting a fall in revenue, from £3.13m last year to £2.7m this year yesterday, Alastair Smith, chief executive officer, said all three elements of business – Avacta Analytical, Avacta Animal Health and Avacta Life Sciences – are very important to the group and it expects to grow in all three businesses.
“There are different scales of opportunity for the three different areas of business,” he said.
“We are really excited about Animal Health and opportunities with Affimers. This area has the potential to be the largest element of the business but it is at an early stage.
“The Analytical division is well established and has good year the growth of that will probably be fairly simple for us.”
The AIM-listed Wetherby-based company said in its Animal healthcare division it is trying to expand that business outside of the core historical focus and through new platforms such as its Sensipod.
The group said it is launching a canine test which will be able to diagnose cancer and can be used to can be used to detect if an animal will stay in remission, enabling the animal to live longer.
“This is really significant.,” Mr Smith said.
“These are blood tests and are simple and will really help vets. That is very exciting for us and launches in November.”
In its Life Sciences division, where the group is developing novel non-antibody affinity reagents called Affimers, the group said the key to success in this area is an understanding on this market and the group’s plan is to address where are gaps in the antibody market and discover new markets.
Avacta’s protein production facility is capable of manufacturing hundreds to thousands of Affimers per week, has been established to supply the internal development of very large affinity microarrays containing tens of thousands of Affimers. Such microarrays will be used for biomarker and drug discovery and will be much larger than the biggest antibody arrays currently available for the purpose.
The group said the potential for this division is “huge”.
Avacta recently appointed Dr Matt Johnson to lead the group’s Affimer technology development and production teams. Dr Johnson joins from Abcam – one of the leading providers of research antibodies.
