Small caps round-up: FFastFill, Blue Star Capital, Fusion IP...

8th Mar 2012 08:23

FFastFill, a 'Software-as-a-Service' provider, announced that INTL FCStone (formerly Ambrian Commodities), the metals futures trading arm of Ambrian Capital, has signed for both its Trading Pro, SEALS and Eclipse applications for execution, matching and settlement. The contract win takes the number of category one and two members accessing FFastFill services to 22 members for the London Metal Exchange. Blue Star Capital, a seed investor in homeland security start-ups, saw losses narrow to £0.49m in 2011 from £2.17m the year before, as it banked the readies from the £0.31m sale of a stake in one of its investments, Zimiti. Net cash at year's end was £276,764, up from the 2010 figure of £27,065. The group raised £0.25m through a heavily discounted share placing at the beginning of February. Fusion IP, has announced that Seren Photonics, its LED technology company, has raised £1.8M in equity funding to enable Seren to transfer its technology to manufacturing partners around the globe. The first of these exploitation agreements was recently announced with an Indian manufacturer. The funding will be used to purchase key capital equipment and to create a specialist engineering team for the transfer of Seren's processes to its commercial manufacturing partners. EKF Diagnostics, a growing business within the in-vitro diagnostic devices market, has been granted a patent in the US for its HemoPoint H2 cuvettes. EKF has been issued with a Grant of Patent Rights by the US Patent and Trademark Office in relation to patent rights for the cuvettes that are used with the HemoPoint H2, EKF's hemoglobin measurement system.Circassia, a portfolio company of Imperial Innovations, a technology investment company, has successfully completed a large-scale phase II clinical study of its ToleroMune ragweed allergy treatment. Ragweed pollen is one of the main allergens responsible for hayfever in the US and its prevalence is increasing across Europe. The study shows the vaccine achieved a significant reduction in allergy symptoms in those patients whose ragweed allergy was most severe after just a short course of treatment.