Avacta Group plc (LON:AVCT) Chief Executive Officer Alastair Smith caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss generating over 50 affimer reagents in only 4 weeks for their partnership with Cytiva.
Q1: Avacta Group announced earlier this week that its partnership with Cytiva was ahead of schedule, can you remind us what that partnership involves?
A1: We’re collaborating with Cytiva, which was formally GE Healthcare Life Sciences until they were acquired by Danaher a few weeks ago, to develop a rapid point of care test for the coronavirus antigen. So, that’s a test that tells you whether you’ve got the infection right now or not, not that you’ve had it in the past, it’s not an antibody test but an antigen test.
That test is going to be a rapid test, it’ll take a few minutes rather like a pregnancy test strip with a visible readout so one blue line, two blue lines, and it’ll use saliva as the sample. It’ll be for professional use and consumer self-testing.
Q2: Can you explain for us the detail behind the announcement earlier this week?
A2: The first part of the collaboration with Cytiva for us to produce affimers that could detect the virus and the announcement a couple of days ago was to update the market that we had successfully achieve that and done it in only 4 weeks which, even by our standards, is extremely quick.
So, we’ve now generated a large number of affimer reagents, more than 50, that bind to the spikes on the outside of the virus, we’ve all seen pictures of the virus, the affimers detect those spikes particular to the coronavirus.
Those can now be used in a point of care test and with other types of diagnostic testing as well.
Q3: Looking forward, what are the next steps now in the partnership and more widely for Avacta Group?
A3: We’re now identifying the best affimer reagents from those 50 or so that we’ve generated and we’re going to provide those to Cytiva very soon, probably next week, so they can begin developing that rapid test strip diagnostic format.
We have retained all of the commercial rights for the affimers and the testing. So, we’re going to continue our ongoing discussions wi9th other diagnostic companies with a view to establishing other partnerships to develop rapid tests, like the test strips, but also other forms of diagnostic test that can add to the overall testing capacity to fight this infection.
