Avacta Group plc (“Avacta” or the “Company”), which provides innovative, high value proprietary technologies and services to the pharmaceutical and diagnostics markets, is pleased to announce that it has appointed Isogen Life Science as distributor in Mainland Europe for the Optim 1000, its ground-breaking, ultra-low volume protein analysis system.

The Optim 1000 has been developed to accelerate and reduce the cost of critical protein analysis during pre-formulation, stability testing and formulation of biopharmaceuticals. In these critical areas of drug development the directors believe that Optim 1000 will deliver vital information tens of times faster than any other known approach using sample sizes more than a hundredth of that currently needed. This quantum leap in efficiency allows drug developers to gain much greater insight into their products at an earlier stage of development which could lead to a significant reduction in later stage failure and thus the overall costs of bringing a drug to market. Optim 1000 comprises a bench-top instrument and a single-use sample holder which it is expected will lead to significant recurring consumables revenues.

Isogen Life Science (ISL), headquartered in De Meern in the Netherlands, is a well established and respected distributor of instruments, reagents and consumables in the areas of cell biology, molecular biology and biochemistry. Accordingly, ISL has strong relationships with a large number of biopharmaceutical and biotech customers throughout Europe. Avacta chose Isogen as its European distributor for Optim because of this strong track record in sales into the biopharmaceutical development area and because of the strong commitment to high quality customer support.

ISL has placed an initial order for an Optim 1000 to be placed within a European biopharmaceutical research organisation thereby taking the total number of Optim unit sales todate to five. In the past few months Avacta has progressed a number of potential orders which are expected to reach fruition in the near future as the capital equipment market appears to be recovering from recession. This, combined with the added sales potential of ISL in Europe, gives the Directors confidence of achieving their sales target for the current financial year.

Alastair Smith, Chief Executive, Avacta Group plc, commented:

“Isogen Life Science impressed us with their in-depth knowledge of our marketplace. Moreover, they demonstrated a clear and comprehensive understanding of the value that Optim can deliver in its different application areas. ISL has shown resounding past success in deploying instrumentation and reagents within Avacta’s target markets of Northern and Southern Europe and we are confident that they have the customer relationships to accelerate sales of Optim this year. The Avacta sales team will now focus on the UK market and on broadening our sales efforts into other key markets such as the United States through direct activity and through further partners.

“Naturally we are delighted that the appointment of Isogen has been accompanied by an order and we look forward to working with them in the future to fully capitalize on the market opportunity for Optim in Europe. “