Avacta signs US agreement

As part of the agreement, US-based Pall Corporation will also work with York-based Avacta to develop and market other advanced technologies and analytical services aimed at the life sciences market.

Avacta believes that the relationship will contribute substantially to business growth. The company recently reported its first sale and installation of an Optim unit in the US and said it will now work with Pall to address already rapidly growing interest in the market.

As part of this agreement, it has also agreed to place Optim units into two US university biopharmaceutical research laboratories.

Optim has been developed to accelerate and reduce the cost of drug development by providing early analysis of compounds.

Avacta said Optim delivers vital information tens of times faster than rivals and uses sample that are one hundred times smaller.

This allows drug developers to get an insight into candidate drug compounds at a much earlier stage of development, which leads to a significant reduction in the likelihood of failure and reduces the overall costs of bringing new drugs to market.

Alastair Smith, chief executive of Avacta Group said: “This is a very significant agreement for Avacta and I expect it to be transformational for the group. It provides a world class commercial and product development partner in the strategically critical North American market and potentially wider afield.

“Optim is a powerful tool designed to reduce the costs associated with developing and manufacturing biological products and this sales and marketing agreement with Pall has significantly enhanced our prospects of exploiting Optim’s significant market potential throughout the wider bioprocess market.

“We are very excited about the potential of this collaborative relationship and I look forward to keeping the market updated as this commercial partnership develops and assists Avacta in delivering its strategic objectives.”

Ken Frank, senior vice president of Pall Corporation and president of Pall’s biopharmaceutical division, added: “The Optim technology and Avacta’s expertise is a perfect complement to Pall’s strategic position in total fluid managementsm for our biopharmaceutical customers. This agreement allows us to combine our process know-how and existing products and services with this exciting new technology to meet very important needs in process development, process monitoring and high throughput analytics.”