Avacta Group Share News (AVCT)

(Sharecast News) - Avacta Group has started work with the UK government's 'CONDOR' programme, it announced on Wednesday, to evaluate and clinically validate the high throughput Covid-19 bead-assisted mass spectrometry laboratory assay, developed with Adeptrix.
The AIM-traded firm said the Covid-19 National Diagnostic Research and Evaluation Platform, or CONDOR, recently funded by the National Institute for Health Research, UK Research and Innovation, Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation, was created by the government to provide a route for evaluating new Covid-19 diagnostic tests in hospitals and in community healthcare settings.

It said Adeptrix's bead-assisted mass spectrometry platform uses its Affimer reagents to capture the virus and viral proteins from patient samples, and combines that with mass-spectrometry analysis to provide a "highly sensitive and specific" diagnostic test.

Up to 1,000 nasopharyngeal swab or saliva samples per day could be analysed by a single technician using the assay, which the board said made it a "very attractive" high throughput technique for Covid-19 screening in the clinical setting.

Through the collaboration with the CONDOR scheme, Avacta said it would be provided access to patient samples and collaborators in UK hospitals, to evaluate the performance of the prototype assay, and to conduct the clinical validation study.

The work with the CONDOR programme was beginning immediately to evaluate the test performance using real patient samples, and would quickly progress to full clinical validation.

"I am delighted that the Covid-19 assay that we are developing with Adeptrix has been accepted into the CONDOR programme," said chief executive officer Dr Alastair Smith.

"This provides us with access to patient samples and partners in UK hospitals to rapidly carry out the validation studies that are critical to progress the assay development.

"We are confident that the assay will perform very well and potentially provide a new gold standard for laboratory reference testing for the Covid-19 infection"

Dr Smith said the assay runs on equipment that is already installed in most hospital clinical microbiology labs, but was currently unused for Covid-19 testing.

"Therefore, with the potential for a single technician to analyse up to 1,000 samples a day, the assay will provide a significant boost to centralised hospital testing capacity around the world.

"I am also very pleased that the CONDOR programme will support the clinical validation of the rapid saliva-based Covid-19 antigen test strip that we are developing with Cytiva.

"This, combined with other collaborations that we are putting in place, will provide us with access to a sufficient number of Covid-19 patient samples to allow us to quickly clinically validate the saliva rapid test."

At 1610 BST, shares in Avacta Group were down 6.67% at 133p.