OREANDA-NEWS. October 13, 2015. Avacta Group plc (AIM: AVCT), the developer of Affimer® biotherapeutics and research reagents, is pleased to announce that its collaborator, ProtATonce, has demonstrated the first use of Affimers in assays on the market leading Luminex platform. Their results were presented at the Biomarker Summit Europe in Berlin.

In February 2015, Avacta Life Sciences and ProtATonce announced a collaboration to evaluate Affimers as affinity reagents in the Luminex platform and, if possible, to develop Affimer-based assays with market leading levels of multiplexing. ProtATonce has now evaluated several dual antibody/Affimer multiplex assays and has shown that Affimers can be used either as capture or as detection reagents and can deliver robust bead-based ELISA assays. These results were presented at the Biomarker Europe Summit.

ProtATonce is one of a number of exclusive Luminex partners selected to develop and commercialise multiplexed assays as a service offering on the market leading Luminex xMAPTM platform which enables large numbers of biological tests to be conducted and analysed quickly using bead-based assay kits. The Luminex technology is capable of carrying out up to 500 tests in one experiment, but this high level of multiplexing is only possible if the antibodies that are used in the test kits are specific and show no cross reactivity between tests. The cross reactivity of antibodies significantly limits the degree of multiplexing of the Luminex technology to a few dozen tests.

Affimers are an engineered alternative to antibodies which have the potential to solve the issues of cross reactivity and unlock the potential of high performance multiplex assay platforms such as Luminex. They offer several advantages including thermostability, pH resistance, stability during freeze drying, and smaller size which means higher packing density on the assay surfaces.

Dr Alastair Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Avacta commented:

"I am delighted with the collaboration with ProtATonce and the progress that they have made in setting up the assays and evaluating Affimers on the Luminex platform. It is critical at this early stage of commercialisation of Affimer reagents that they perform well in the hands of collaborators and customers and the number of such examples are building quickly.

We're particularly excited by Affimers robust performance on the Luminex platform, the market leading multiplex assay technology, as it presents a significant commercial opportunity for Affimer-based multiplexed assays."

Dr Leonidas Alexopoulos, Chief Executive Officer of ProtATonce said:

"Affimers are a great alternative to antibodies and we are excited about their initial performance on bead-based multiplex assays. In the last few months we have worked hard to develop new coupling chemistries on assay surface that take advantage of the Affimer's small size and packing density. We have successfully built a robust dual antibody/Affimer multiplex assay and we look forward to further expanding our Affimer-based multiplex portfolio."