A CITY science business has seen its revenues leap significantly since the same period last year.

Source Bioscience, based at Nottingham Business Park, says its sales were up 17 per cent in the period between the start of July and this week – the third quarter of its trading year.

The improvement means that revenues over the first nine months of this year are up 13 per cent.

The increase has been partly driven by a huge leap in revenues in the firm's life sciences division, which carries out complex genetic testing for pharmaceutical firms and research organisations.

In a stock exchange trading statement, Source Bioscience said it had enjoyed a 54 per cent leap in life sciences revenues – mainly driven by an increase in DNA sequencing work.

Source has invested more than a million pounds in some of the most advanced DNA sequencing machines in the world, its Illumina Genome sequencers capable of carrying out in days work which used to take months.

It has also launched a website which has brought in more customers, along with an overnight DNA sequencing service at its labs in Oxford and Berlin.

Genetic analysis is vital to work by research organisations and healthcare companies because it helps flag up people's susceptibility to disease and their likely response to new treatments.

The machines can help speed up research into advances in medicine and biotechnology which tends to target specific diseases and produce treatments which can be individually tailored to differing genetic make-ups.

Genetic DNA sequencing also has applications in agriculture through research into the resistance of crops to disease or drought.

Source Bioscience has also been boosted in the past three months by demand for its cancer screening products and services, with the NHS approving the use of an automated cervical screening process.

In the statement, Source Bioscience said: "Overall performance for the year to date is in line with management's expectations, representing a continuation of the strong growth and business performance achieved last year. We continue to expect full year profits to be in line with market expectations."