A British firm that supplies big pharmaceutical firms with synthetic antibodies for targeted delivery of drugs will float in London this week, giving its two founders a combined paper fortune of more than $32m.
Dr David Bunka, a geneticist, and Dr Arron Tolley, an early school leaver, founded the group in 2008. The company has partnerships with the majority of the world's top 20 pharmaceutical firms.
When the two founders first met, Tolley was doing a PhD in virology, studying how genes are packaged in viruses. He told the Guardian that they decided to set up a business to address the need in the market for aptamers, which can plug the gap where an antibodies fails to be successful or perform correctly.
A chemical antibodies are short synthetic DNA or RNA molecule that bind to a specific target. Drugs can be attached to them to deliver treatments to cancer cells, and other diseases, as an alternative to antibodies, which take far longer to generate in the lab.
They can be used as a diagnostic tool. Cancer Research UK is working with the Aptamer Group on a leukaemia project, and the company is delivering its treatments into the kidneys.
The company, which employs 37 people at its base in a science park next to the University of York, has priced its initial public offering at 117p a share. The shares are expected to start trading on Wednesday. A placing of 9.2m new shares will raise 13.3% of the enlarged share capital.
The rest of the management team, including the chief technology officer Bunka, are locked in for a year and are not selling their stakes in the flotation. Stephen Hull, the former chairman, has shares that are worth over 3 million dollars.
The stock market debut of Oxford Nanopore in September was very well received. Since the flotation, shares in the firm have risen by more than 50% and are now worth $5.4 billion. The artificial intelligence drug specialist Exscientia's shares went up 23% when it listed on the stock exchange. The firm's market value is now $2.3 billion after they changed hands for $19.66, below the $22 float price.
The US firms and Canada's NeoVentures are competing with the Aptamer Group. The global aptamer market is worth between $5 billion and $9 billion, and is expected to grow to between $10 billion and $12 billion by the year 2025.
He said that the key benefits of aptamers are a higher success rate in development, broader target applicability, and easier manufacturing. The speed of discovery is the main benefit. It takes us on average a couple of months to develop aptamers, but the very fastest we can do is 17 days, when it can take four months and in some cases over a year to develop an antibody.
Unlike other scientists, he was late. He left school at 16 to work in a factory, but in his early 20s decided to go to college and get a PhD. He said that his attention deficit disorder gave him tons of energy.
In the 15 months to 30 June, the group's revenues totalled over 2 million dollars. The loss before tax rose to over 3 million pounds because of higher research and development costs.
The firm dropped a partnership with Mologic to develop a rapid Covid test because it realised the market was saturated with around 1,000 tests.
