Avacta confident after foreign wins

York-based Avacta, which is a spin-out from the University of Leeds, made a pre-tax loss of £597,000 for the six months to January 31, compared to £1.19m for the same period last year. Revenue rose to £1m from £894,000.

The firm said it had received strong interest from the bipharmaceuticals sector for its Optim system, which helps to speed up drug development.

It has formed distribution agreements with firms in America, Japan, Taiwan and continental Europe.

In a statement the firm said forward order visibility for Optim was “good”.

“The differentiating features of the product are the compelling return on investment and its ability to facilitate early stage, high throughput analysis of compounds reducing development risks and costs.

“Avacta’s own sales efforts, and now those of partners, continues to build the sales pipeline. Conversion is now growing, following the expected sales cycle for large capital equipment in this market.”

Optim has been developed to accelerate and reduce the cost of drug development through the early stage analysis of drug compounds. This early analysis helps to identify the best drug compounds for development.

Optim can deliver vital information 10 times faster than any other system while using sample sizes less than a hundredth of those currently needed.

Avacta also said its overheads have fallen following the completion of product development for Optim and AX-1.

Since the end of H1 it has seen four more Optim orders taken for American and China and four units dispatched to America, Europe and China, it said.