Avacta Group plc (LON: AVCT) CEO Alastair Smith joins DirectorsTalk to discuss the selection of its first-time-in-human clinical candidate for the Affimer platform. Alastair explains the significance of this news, the long term plan for developing immunotherapies with a PDL1 inhibitor and with the announcement that the TMAC linker is going to be tested in humans in the first half of next year which is much sooner than was expected talks us through the planned clinical trial.
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 Group plc has a pre-clinical biotech development programme with an in-house focus on immuno-oncology as well as partnered development programmes. Avacta is commercialising non-therapeutic Affimer reagents through licensing to developers of life sciences research tools and diagnostics.