INVESTORS’ patience and faith in a brilliant high tech York company is on the verge of paying off.

Revenues for Avacta, the company based on York Science Park, which has invented a machine to speed up the development of drugs, have hit the £1 million mark – a 12 per cent rise from £890,000 last year.

Avacta’s interim results for the six months ending January 31 also show that it more than halved an operating loss driven by its research and development into Optim, a benchtop device which uses quick, laser-based analysis to select compounds of any new drug which are more likely to succeed, saving pharmaceutical companies millions of dollars..

Now the deficit has fallen from £1.19 million to £600,000 and is cushioned by £2.25 million on its balance sheet.

As Professor Alastair Smith, the chief executive, today predicted the firm would attempt to break even by next year, its AIM market shares tweaked up three per cent to 1.2 pence.

Confidence by investors, many of whom have stuck loyally by the company over the past four years, is at a high given a commercial partnership deal signed in February with the life sciences business of the $2.4 billion turnover Pall Corporation, the global leader in the filtration, separation and purification industry, to sell Optim in the US.

Some analysts are predicting £11 million worth of sales of the device in the US alone by July 2013 and meanwhile Avacta has signed another breakthrough agreement to sell Optim into the combined billion dollar market of mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan and an exclusive distribution agreement with DKSH Japan.

The firm has also begun to see revenues from its veterinary diagnostic device, AX-1, and commercialisation of protein test kits for the animal health market is now under discussion with a major international distributor..

The result has been that half the 50-strong Avacta workforce is now based at new manufacturing premises at Thorp Arch, Wetherby, where the administration for Avacta Animal Health, the veterinary side of the business, is also based.

Prof Smith said he was reluctant to predict exact figures for next year. The “cash burn phase”, fuelling product development was over and with Optim rolling out revenues were beginning to grow, he said.

“We intend breaking even next year but we should be focusing on fundamentals rather than specific numbers.”

These fundamentals include having a strong balance sheet and securing very good partners “Pall Corporation approached us which suggests we have something very special,” he said.