Avacta announces good progress on virus tests

The Wetherby-based firm is collaborating with Cytiva to make a rapid test for mass population screening.

Avacta’s chief executive Dr Alastair Smith said: “We signed that deal on April 8 and by April 22, we had generated the Affimer reagents that bind the virus.

“Even by our standards, that is quick. That gives us a bunch of Affimer reagents that can detect the virus particle.”

Affimers are Avacta’s high-tech alternative to antibodies.

“That allows us to create a rapid, 10 minute saliva test, like a pregnancy test, but we’re working on saliva rather than urine,” said Dr Smith.

“Our test will say whether the person has the infection right now so you can let healthy people get back to work. That’s the primary objective.”

The tests should be available by July.

“We know the Affimers detect the virus and we know they are absolutely specific to the virus. They don’t cross react with MERS or SARS or any other coronavirus,” said Dr Smith.

Avacta is also working with Adeptrix to develop an antigen test to diagnose Covid-19 using hospitals’ existing mass spectrometers.

“Adeptrix has got a way of doing diagnostic tests in very high throughput - about 1,000 tests a day with one technician on one machine,” said Dr Smith.

“They are doing that on something called a mass spectrometer, a big piece of kit that almost all hospitals have got in their labs. The interesting thing is nobody is using them for Covid testing. So there’s a completely unused capacity there which we’re hoping to unlock.”

The two firms will develop an Affimer-based kit so that clinicians can use the mass spectrometers to run Covid-19 patient samples.

“The benefits are very high throughput and a major increase in capacity,” said Dr Smith.

The two firms are beginning discussions with big companies that supply these mass spectrometers.

“Adeptrix and Avacta would licence to a big partner to take the product to market,” said Dr Smith.

“That will be a lab test. They should be available in July onwards.”

Away from Covid-19, Avacta is working to get its cancer drug AVA6000 into the clinic as soon as possible.

“There are some Covid-19 headwinds,” said Dr Smith.

“We are working shifts and the capacity just isn’t there. We think things will slip by a quarter.

“Clinical trials have been pretty much halted in the UK to give hospitals the resource to deal with other things. We expect that to relax a bit in the third quarter. So that should allow us to get into the clinic in Q4, or probably realistically, early Q1 next year.”

AVA6000 will be used to treat soft tissue sarcoma, breast cancer and ovarian cancer.