Manchester, United Kingdom, 30th July 2004 - World-wide distribution of Avecia’s new award-winning Pd EnCat™ encapsulated palladium catalysts has been agreed with the leading life science and high technology company Sigma-Aldrich. Under the agreement, Avecia and Sigma-Aldrich intend to develop and commercialise additional new EnCat™ products.

The Pd EnCat™ product group is designed to help life science companies find easier, cheaper and cleaner routes to new products and is a key enabling technology in the emerging field of supported reagents and catalysts.

The technology has applications across pharmaceutical and agrochemicals discovery, development and manufacturing.

In discovery applications, Pd EnCat™ technology allows the “cleaner chemistry” benefits of reduced toxic metal contamination in new product candidates, as well as easy materials handling and higher throughput from process automation.    Products can also be used in flow processing applications. In commercial scale applications, Pd EnCat™ can reduce solvent consumption and waste and can improve catalyst recovery, re-use and re-cycling.

The highly versatile technology enables the palladium content and ligand type, as well as the bead size and structure, to be tailored exclusively to suit a particular chemical process for customers. Pd EnCat™ recently won the 2004 “Innovation of the Year” award from the UK’s Chemical Industries Association (CIA).

The Pd EnCat™ line will be available from Sigma-Aldrich with effect from 13 August 2004 and is web searchable. “Response to Pd EnCat™ in customer trials has been excellent. The agreement with Sigma-Aldrich puts a major distribution network in place to build on this”, said Avecia Pharmaceuticals’ Vice President, Dr Pete Jackson. “Sigma-Aldrich’s expertise will also help to prioritise the planned extension of the product range for the benefit of their extensive customer base”. “The advantages gained through PD EnCat™ are clear and the performance is well-documented”, said Dr. Chris Hewitt, Director of Business Development for Chemistry a Sigma-Aldrich. “Sigma-Aldrich looks forward to partnering with Avecia in providing and growing this leading-edge technology”.

Key advantages of Pd EnCat™ include:

-Very low residual metal and ligand levels in final product
-Ease of recovery by filtration
-Efficiency and economy gains through ease of re-use and re-cycling
-High selectivity in hydrogenation and transfer hydrogenation reactions
-Excellent levels of activity in C-C bond forming reactions
-Tailoring of catalyst properties for specific processes

Pd EnCat™ was first commercialised by Avecia following a highly successful research collaboration with Professor Steven Ley from Cambridge University and teams from Syngenta and AstraZeneca.

The technology has attracted strong interest and initial sales since its formal European market launch by Avecia Pharmaceuticals at last Autumn’s CPhI show.