Partnership Aims to Develop Protein Inhibitor

Funding awarded to the Avacta Group will be used to develop its Affimer^® reagents in partnership with the Mary Lyon Centre at MRC Harwell. The initiative offers potential to increase overall efficiency of breeding programmes, while providing a significant commercial opportunity for the Company.  

MC3Rs, a UK-based scientific organisation dedicated to replacing, refining and reducing the use of animals in life sciences, has provided a CRACK IT Solutions Technology grant for the project, which aims to develop inhibitors of a protein called inhibin. Reducing the action of this protein would stimulate production of a greater number of embryos per mouse, (superovulation); this could reduce the number of mice needed for embryo production by 100,000 animals a year in the UK alone. 

Dr Alastair Smith, Avacta Group Chief Executive Officer, commented: “We are grateful to NC3Rs for providing the funding that will allow us to develop Affimer inhibitors of inhibin, which we will provide to MRC Harwell for evaluation. If successful then there is a potentially very large global market for such Affimer reagents that will reduce the costs of production and the number of mice used each year in breeding programmes. We are delighted to be working with MRC Harwell on this project which could also open the way to applications in human IVF treatments.”

The Mary Lyon Centre at MRC Harwell, a world-leading centre for functional mouse genomics providing expertise, tools and facilities to generate mouse models of human disease, will evaluate the ability of the Affimer reagents to induce superovulation in mice.