CEO Message

Our customers are the leading, global pharmaceutical companies. These companies continue to face enormous challenges. In order to develop new drugs, they invest huge sums in R&D (over $55Bn, 18% of sales in 2006). Despite increasing R&D investments year on year, the number of approved drugs is decreasing. Therefore, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly focused on the effectiveness and productivity of their R&D - perhaps their key determinant of success. Over 90% of potential drugs fail in clinical trials despite years of pre-clinical discovery and development. One reason is that responses in animals are only a partial guide to responses in humans. To bridge this gap, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly using human tissue. Human tissue offers a way to support progression of human targets and check the efficacy and safety of drug candidates before testing in humans.

In the past, our customers have sourced their required human tissue themselves, and carried out their own analyses. However, excellence in this area requires:

• A wide network of donor sites
• An extensive biobank
• Ethical and consent compliance
• Tightly controlled QC procedures
• Comprehensive clinical information
• Scientists versed in the procurement and use of human tissue

Asterand is one of the few companies that specialize in this area - we provide human tissue-based solutions to support activities across the entire drug discovery and development process. We can supply tissues obtained with ethical approval and informed consented for research or actually perform the research services using these tissues. Through our focus we have created expertise and we believe that we offer significant advantages to our customers - for example, we regularly source from 36 active donor sites, and are thus able to access tissues from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and disease type/stage with unrivaled turnaround.

We announced our strategy to secure our leading position in this specialist area in June 2007, and are currently making good progress.

As our customers move to outsource and concentrate on their own core capabilities, our goal is to become the partner of choice in human tissue, enabling our customers to move candidate drugs to the clinic more quickly, more cost-effectively, and with greater confidence.

Martyn Coombs
CEO, Asterand plc

--Martyn Coombs, CEO