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Concepta moves into state-of-the-art new lab

Published: 08:02 21 Sep 2016 BST

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The place will be home to four people working in research and development.

The fertility specialist Concepta PLC (LON:CPT) said it moved its UK lab to a new site at Colworth Park, Bedfordshire, doubling the size of its headquarters.

The switch is in line with its strategy of increasing its “operational capacity and economies of scale” ahead of the launch of its My Lotus fertility test in China in the second half and CE marking of the product next year.

The new facility will be home to four people working on research and development and two in quality assurance.

There’s also a separate area for assembly area for a further ten people producing testing strips for the MyLotus meter.

Chief executive Erik Henau said: "Concepta's research team will be working in the new lab effective immediately to accelerate new product development, both within our core business area of fertility as well as other areas in the wider mobile health space.”

Listed in July, the AIM newcomer raised £3.5mln and should be revenue-generative before the end of the year. Analysts reckon it might break even in 2017.

A lot of the hard yards developing the MyLotus fertility kit were done before the firm was subjected to the glare of the public markets.

It means cash that investors have ploughed into the company via a share placing will solely to generate sales and profits.

The product, which will retail for £250-£300, has been developed for women who have been trying to conceive for six months or more.

MyLotus measures hormone levels in urine to give quantitative and qualitative measurements that might help explain the apparent lack of fertility, and is unique in the market in this respect.

It will go on sale first in China as the registration process “took the least time”, according to CEO Henau.

There it will be sold online to the emerging middle classes and via hospital pharmacies. It will be promoted in hospitals using the Wi-Fi system, which will carry a MyLotus landing page, and the product will be supported via an app.

Concepta has already agreed terms with a distributor in the People’s Republic that has agreed to pay cash upfront when it places orders for the device.

In Europe MyLotus is awaiting regulatory sign-off in the form of a CE Mark and is hoping to accomplish this next year.

Here it will sell the product online as there is a fairly well defined, accessible potential user base that is well informed about innovations such as MyLotus.

Henau believes that having the product stocked in a mainstream retailer would eat into its profit margins, while not really delivering the compensatory uptick in sales.

He estimates the market opportunity could be worth around £600mln.

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