New contracts with top ten pharma partners

Three contracts with top ten pharmaceutical companies

First sale of Optimer®+ to a top 5 major pharma customer

Advanced stage sales pipeline grown to £3.2m

Aptamer Group plc (AIM: APTA), the developer of novel Optimer® binders to enable innovation in the life sciences industry, is pleased to announce further agreements for Optimer development with a combined value of up to £275,000 including three of the top ten global pharmaceutical companies. Upon development success, several of the partnerships include the potential for additional follow-on fee-for-service development work and potential licencing.

These agreements represent the latest round of conversions from the Company's expanded sales pipeline, which now totals £3.2m following the conversion of both the recently announced contract with Timser Group and the deals announced herein. This represents a conversion of circa 16% of the £3.9m pipeline the Company started the week with (up from £3.0m stated in last week's trading update). These converted sales have been passed to production, increasing the current production pipeline value to £1.9m, which will be converted to revenue in due course. The Company anticipates further contracts, currently in final negotiation stages, will close before the financial year's end. The directors are encouraged by this increase in customer confidence and by the recent rapid expansion of the pipeline, which the Company intends to capitalise on over the coming months.

In relation to the three larger contracts, the first agreement with a top ten pharmaceutical company will develop Optimer binders to improve the manufacture of biologic drugs. The Optimer binders will enable improved drug purification for the customer, preventing product loss. Upon success in this project, there is potential for further downstream development contracts for Aptamer.

The second agreement with a top ten pharmaceutical company will develop a pair of Optimer+ binders for use in a highly sensitive immunoassay platform. The Optimer+ platform was selected due to its rapid development timeline. There is potential for the binders to be used in a clinical trial, supporting further use and follow-on contracts.

The third agreement with a top five pharmaceutical company will develop Optimer binders to a known cancer target for use in flow cytometry assays. This will support accurate pharmacokinetic analysis in drug development, where other affinity ligands, such as antibodies, have failed to perform as required.

Additional smaller contracts, which were secured with a value of up to £60,000 (total £275,000). Some projects are expected to progress through the laboratory by the end of the financial year, with others enhancing the production pipeline for the following year.

Dr Arron Tolley, Chief Technical Officer of Aptamer Group, said: "I am pleased to be able to announce new agreements with three of the top ten pharma companies, further validating our platform technologies and their potential, including increasing commercial interest in the Optimer + platform. In total, we have agreed £275,000 of deals that we have aggregated in this announcement, in addition to the partnership announced with Timser yesterday and the strength we see in our pipeline.

With the sales pipeline expanding and converting, we are beginning to see our strategy to build lower-risk fee-for-service revenues bear fruit. It is important to clarify that contracts in the pharmaceutical industry often take significant time to negotiate, frequently include confidentiality restrictions, and sometimes do not meet the materiality threshold for individual announcements.

An important part of our strategy includes horizon scanning for material licence fee opportunities, and I am excited to share further information on this in due course. These opportunities, of course, stem from our fee-for-service work streams. We continue to make good progress with our developed Optimer assets, with ongoing discussions around our drug delivery vehicles for the liver. Additionally, our work with Unilever developing Optimers in cosmetics applications continues to advance, alongside our partnership with Neuro-Bio to deliver Optimer binders for use in a rapid diagnostic test for Alzheimer's disease."