London Stock Exchange today welcomes Aptamer Group plc (“Aptamer” or “the Group” or “the Company”), the developer of novel Optimer® binders to enable innovation in the life sciences industry, onto the AIM market. The Company has raised a total of c.£10.8 million at 117p per ordinary share and has joined AIM with a market capitalisation of c.£80.7 million. It will trade under the ticker ‘APTA’.

Aptamer is a leader in the provision of aptamer discovery and development services using its proprietary automated and high-throughput Optimer® platform. Aptamer operates across three life science sectors: custom services (research and bioprocessing tools), diagnostics and therapeutics. Over the past four years, Aptamer has seen organic revenue growth of 400% and developed a blue-chip customer base, having supplied or collaborated with 75% of the global top 20 pharmaceutical companies.

The Company solves intractable problems for biotech and big pharma by developing aptamer-based molecular binders, as an alternative to antibodies which fail to perform 50% - 60% of the time. Its scalable, automated platform allows rapid, reliable and high capacity binder discovery and development. The Group has developed novel, proprietary aptamer technology, known as Optimer® binders, which offer further performance and commercial benefits in addition to those of standard aptamers.

Incorporating three distinct aptamer selection methodologiestuned for different target types, the Optimer® platform offers a strong differentiator relative to its antibody and aptamer peers. Additionally, Aptamer’s platform avoids the need for animals in the discovery and development processes. Aptamer has key projects in development with multiple partners that could act to improve the delivery of therapeutics to the site-of-action, support the drug development pipeline to monitor drug quality and speed up key processes, improve the stability and reliability of diagnostic tests and enable innovative proteomic discovery platforms.