Avacta Group plc (“Avacta” or the “Company”), which provides innovative, high value proprietary technologies and services to the pharmaceutical and diagnostics markets, announces that it has signed a distribution agreement for Optim, the market leading low volume protein analysis system, with Cold Spring Biotech Corp (“Cold Spring”) in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Avacta and Cold Spring have entered into an exclusive distribution agreement for the sale of Optim in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in what the Directors believe is a strategically important market for the Company.

Optimhas been developed to accelerate and reduce the cost of drug development by providing early analysis of compounds to identify the best candidates and to define the optimal processing conditions. In the critical stages of pre-formulation, stability testing and formulation of biopharmaceutical drugs, Optim delivers vital information tens of times faster than other approaches using sample sizes less than a hundredth needed by existing techniques.

This quantum leap in efficiency and reduction in cost of analysis allows drug developers to gain a greater insight into candidate drug compounds at a much earlier stage of development. This in turn leads to a significant reduction in the likelihood of failure of drug compounds and reduces the overall costs of bringing new drugs to market.

Optim comprises a benchtop instrument and a single-use sample holder that will lead to recurring consumables revenues.

Cold Spring is a market leading life sciences distribution company headquartered in Taiwan (offices in Taipei, Taichung, and Tainan) with commercial operations throughout Hong Kong and mainland China (offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and Wuhan). Founded in 1983 they are established distributors with many years of experience in selling high value instrumentation and consumables in the rapidly growing Asian Biotech and Life Sciences market, representing major technology innovators such as Affymetrix and Caliper Life Sciences. The Chinese biotech market is now the fastest growing biotech market worldwide and the Chinese government expects it to grow 24.1% between 2011 and 2015.

Alastair Smith, Chief Executive of Avacta Group commented:

“We are delighted to have secured an agreement with a very well respected and well established Far Eastern distributor, in this rapidly growing and potentially very important region for Avacta’s products. Although, relatively speaking, China is still a developing biotech market, it is nevertheless ranked in the top five in the world for biotech innovation. Continued inward investment by the Chinese government is aimed at supporting this growth as well as considerable investment by major global pharmaceutical companies.”