NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) — Premaitha Health reported a 24 percent revenue increase for its fiscal year 2016/2017 today.
For the year ended March 31, the Manchester, UK-based molecular diagnostics company, which focuses on noninvasive prenatal testing, had more than £3.1 million ($4 million) in revenue, up from £2.5 million during the previous fiscal year.
Revenues included about one month's worth of sales from Yourgene Bioscience, a Taiwan-based next-gen sequencing, bioinformatics, and NIPT company that Premaitha acquired on March 2.
NIPT testing volumes for the year increased by 40 percent, to more than 24,000, from 17,228 the previous fiscal year.
Last week, the company said that it is trying to recover £750,000 from Genoma, a Swiss customer that recently went bankrupt.
Also, Illumina sued Premaitha in the UK for alleged infringement of NIPT-related patents in 2015, and Premaitha said today that it "continues to prepare a robust defense" against Illumina's claims, which will be heard starting in July. In addition, the firm is providing "full support" to the European Union's competition commission, which it said last year is looking into potentially anti-competitive behavior by Illumina.
The company said that revenues from the UK currently make up about 25 percent of its overall revenues, and that it is trying to reduce its intellectual property risk by expanding its business into markets not covered by Illumina's IP and by innovating its product.
"We have continued to make rapid progress to establish Premaitha as an internationally recognized, high-growth company in the emerging clinical genetics field, despite the challenges presented by Illumina's litigious approach to competition, and Genoma's financial difficulties," said CEO Stephen Little in a statement.
Over the last year, Premaitha has expanded its geographic reach, appointing distributors for its test in the Middle East, Southern Europe, and Croatia.
Premaitha's Iona NIPT is currently available in the UK, France, and the Middle East and the company has further installations of its test planned this quarter in France, Italy, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, South Africa, and Northern Europe.
It has now validated the Iona test on Thermo Fisher Scientific's Ion S5 sequencing platform, and several of the upcoming installations will involve this instrument.
In February, Premaitha had announced a deal with an unnamed European diagnostics services group with a network of laboratories across Europe that performs more than 100 million diagnostic tests annually. Under the agreement, Premaitha is to install the Iona test in at least two locations this year, a central lab in France and a lab in a different European country. Premaitha said today that the first installation is on track for June and the other one is planned for later this year.
Premaitha has also registered the Iona test, which is CE-marked, with national regulatory authorities in three countries so far and is "well advanced" in registering the test in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
It plans to register the test in China later this year or early in 2018 "once a suitable partner has been selected."
The integration of Yourgene is "progressing extremely well," the firm said in a statement. In early March, Yourgene signed an OEM supply agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific for eight countries in Southeast Asia, which Premaitha said has resulted in increased revenue in Taiwan, Malaysia, and Thailand. Since it was acquired by Premaitha, Yourgene has also gained new customers in Singapore, Thailand, India, Jordan, and Hong Kong. The two companies are collaborating to develop new products that they believe will be attractive for customers in Asia and the Middle East.