Avacta's CTO to Present at Major US Conference

11 October 2018

Avacta Group plc

("Avacta" or "the Group" or "the Company")

Avacta's Chief Technology Officer to Present at Major US Conference

Avacta Group plc (AIM: AVCT), the developer of Affimer^® biotherapeutics and reagents, is pleased to announce that its Chief Technology Officer, Dr Matt Johnson, will be presenting new data for Affimer research tools and diagnostics reagents at the Biomarkers and Precision Medicine Congress in San Diego on the 12 October 2018.

Dr Johnson will be presenting recent data showing how the Affimer technology can be used to simplify diagnostics and other immunoassays.  

The data that Dr Johnson will present shows that immunoassays built using Affimers perform as well as, and in many cases better than, equivalent assays built using antibodies.  These data are critical in driving the adoption of the new Affimer technology in a huge market that is dominated by antibodies.

In the second part of his presentation, Dr Johnson will speak about an innovative class of Affimers that captures antibodies but only when the antibodies are bound to their own targets. This offers a route to improving an important type of diagnostic test to have a more specific and clearer result. The commercial potential for this class of Affimer is significant.

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For further information from Avacta Group plc, please contact:

About Avacta Group plc (www.avacta.com)

Avacta's principal focus is on its proprietary Affimer^® technology which is a novel engineered alternative to antibodies that has wide application in Life Sciences for diagnostics, therapeutics and general research and development.

Antibodies dominate markets worth in excess of $100bn despite their shortcomings. Affimer technology has been designed to address many of these negative performance issues, principally; the time taken to generate new antibodies, the reliance on an animal's immune response, poor specificity in many cases, and batch to batch variability.  Affimer technology is based on a small protein that can be quickly generated to bind with high specificity and affinity to a wide range of protein targets.

Avacta has a pre-clinical biotech development programme with an in-house focus on immuno-oncology and bleeding disorders as well as partnered development programmes. Avacta is commercialising non-therapeutic Affimer reagents through licensing to developers of life sciences research tools and diagnostics.