Avacta enters 'Affimer' licensing deal with Astrea Bioseparations

Cancer therapies and diagnostics developer Avacta Group has entered into a licensing agreement with Astrea Bioseparations, it announced on Monday, for the use of the ‘Affimer’ platform in affinity purification applications.

The AIM-traded company described Astrea as a “leading provider” of affinity separation products to the pharmaceutical and biomanufacturing industries.

It is a division of Gamma Biosciences, the life sciences tools platform formed by KKR, to build a “leading position” in bioprocessing for advanced therapies.

Following Astrea's successful evaluation of Affimer reagents for affinity separation, the two companies had entered into a non-exclusive agreement for the use of the Affimer technology in that field, Avacta said.

The firm said the agreement included a £0.5m upfront payment to Avacta, which gave Astrea the right to generate and develop Affimer reagents in-house for affinity separation.

It also provided Astrea with an option to convert the agreement into an exclusive licence if commercial performance criteria were met in the next three years, and subject to the payment of an additional undisclosed option exercise fee.

Avacta said it would receive royalties on future sales of Astrea's purification products that contain Affimer reagents.

“[This agreement] is another strong endorsement of the Affimer technology as well as an important validation of the licensing business model driven by an active pipeline of ongoing, paid-for technology evaluations,” said chief executive officer Alastair Smith.

“Avacta's in-house focus is on the diagnostics applications of Affimer reagents and therefore this license agreement with Astrea allows the group to commercialise the Affimer technology in a field of use where Affimer reagents perform extremely well but is now outside our main business focus.

“In addition, the group has made excellent recent progress with its SARS-CoV-2 lateral flow rapid antigen test programme and we anticipate data from the first clinical trial soon,” Smith added.

He said the company’s clinical evaluation of the ‘BAMS’ laboratory assay was ongoing at two UK clinical sites that it had established, adding that it had made “significant commercial progress” for all of its coronavirus testing solutions, establishing scalable routes-to-market for those products to meet expected “very high” demand.

At 0947 GMT, shares in Avacta Group were down 3.49% at 110.5p.