UK biotech firm Aptamer to float valued at £80.7m
A British biotechnology firm that supplies big pharmaceutical firms with synthetic antibodies for targeted delivery of drugs will float in London this week valued at £80.7m – giving its two founders a combined paper fortune of more than £33m.
Aptamer Group was founded in 2008 by Dr Arron Tolley, 44, an early school leaver who later completed a doctorate in biophysics and molecular biology, and Dr David Bunka, a geneticist. Today, the York-based company has partnerships with the vast majority of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical firms, including Britain’s biggest drugmaker, AstraZeneca, and Japan’s Takeda.
When the two founders first met at Leeds University, Tolley was doing a PhD in virology, studying DNA packaging mechanisms in viruses. “We noticed there was a need in the market for molecules that could plug the gap where antibodies failed to be successful or perform correctly, and we decided that we would set a business up developing aptamers to address that need in the market,” he told the Guardian.
Aptamers, also known as chemical antibodies, are short synthetic DNA or RNA molecules that bind to a specific target, such as proteins or viruses. Drugs can be attached to them to deliver treatments to cancer cells, for example, and for a host of other diseases – as an alternative to antibodies, which take far longer to generate in the lab.
They can also be used as a diagnostic tool, for example in cancer detection. Aptamer Group is working on a leukaemia project with Cancer Research UK, and with AstraZeneca on delivering its kidney disease treatments into the kidney.
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 the London Stock Exchange’s junior Aim market on Wednesday. The firm will also raise £10.8m by selling 9.2m new shares in a placing – equal to 13.3% of the enlarged share capital.
Tolley, who serves as chief executive, Bunka, its chief technology officer, and the rest of the management team are not selling down their stakes in the flotation and are locked in for a year. Tolley’s 23% stake will be valued at £18.5m, while Bunka’s holding will be worth £14.7m and Stephen Hull, the former chairman, has shares worth £3.6m.
The flotation comes after Oxford Nanopore’s stellar London stock market debut in September. Shares in the firm, whose DNA sequencing technology has played a key role in tracking Covid-19 variants globally, have risen 54% since the flotation to 655p, valuing the business at £5.4bn. When the artificial intelligence drug specialist Exscientia listed on Nasdaq a day later, its shares soared 23%. They now change hands for $19.66, below the $22 float price, giving the firm a market value of $2.3bn.
Aptamer Group is competing with companies such as the US firms Aptagen and Base Pair Biotechnologies, and Canada’s NeoVentures Biotechnology. The global aptamer market is worth $2.5bn at present and is forecast to grow to between $5bn and $9bn by 2025, said Tolley.
The key benefits of aptamers compared to antibodies, he said, are a higher success rate in development, broader target applicability, and easier manufacturing – aptamers are synthetically manufactured whereas antibodies are grown in cell-based systems. “The main benefit is the speed of discovery. It takes us on average a couple of months to develop aptamers but the very fastest we can do it in is 17 days, when it can take four months and in some cases over a year to develop an antibody.”
Unlike other scientists, Tolley was late to the game. He left school at 16 to work in a factory and become a bricklayer, but in his early 20s decided to go to college and university and completed a PhD. He has ADHD and was disruptive at school because he received little support, but now channels it into his work. “I think of my ADHD as a superpower because it gives me tons of energy,” he said.
Aptamer Group’s revenues have climbed 62% since 2019 and totalled £1.6m in the 15 months to 30 June. Its loss before tax rose to £2.9m in that period (from £941,000 in the year to 31 March 2020) because of higher research and development costs.
The firm is also developing a test that can detect Covid-19 in wastewater in partnership with Deepverge, but dropped a partnership with Mologic to develop a rapid lateral flow Covid test because it realised the market was “saturated, with around 1,000 tests,” Tolley said.