The cost of providing healthcare to a growing and ageing population is rising throughout the world. New drugs are expensive to develop, most don’t reach the patient and those that do are often prohibitively costly. Inadequate or delayed diagnoses add to the costs because delayed treatment leads to longer treatment periods and extended hospitalisation. This is an acute problem for state and insurance funded healthcare models and affects the clinical outcome of patients.

There are few opportunities to invest in companies providing solutions to these urgent challenges.

Avacta Group plc is a pioneering British consumables and equipment manufacturer with proprietary, disruptive technologies that help get drugs to market quicker and more cheaply, and help put rapid, accurate diagnosis in the hands of vets and clinicians.

Avacta’s first two products are the Optim 1000 and AX-1. OPTIM 1000 is a device that weeds out poor drug candidates and can do this very early in the development process potentially saving millions for drug developers and making drugs cheaper for patients. AX-1 delivers gold standard laboratory tests, that usually take days to carry out, in under an hour in the clinic, allowing better and faster diagnoses to be made and improving the outcome for patients. Avacta’s initial focus is on the unregulated veterinary diagnostics market and in future AX-1 will be exploited in the human healthcare market.

Avacta is at a transition point in its development, moving from a period of cash burn and product development into one of commercializing its first products. Accordingly revenues are growing strongly and operating losses are significantly reducing. Avacta is a growth company and has a pipeline of commercially validated further product and reagent developments that will be brought to market in due course.

The management team is focused on delivering continued growth, profitability and substantial value to shareholders over the medium and longer term.