Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
The tweet on the 9th says well on our way to 60,00 which seems to be missing an 0 since earlier tweet on 6th refers to 20000 to go. This is just pipetting ethanol buffer in tubes mind you and they seem to have allocated 6 weeks for the trial as a whole. Anyone sure of the start date? I think it must have been late October so might not be complete for another two or three weeks.
Maybe its so good they have had to get to 60k to test its limits properly. For example, if false positive is zero with 20k sample you might want to see if its still zero with 60k. Sensitivity wise you would also get more statistical confidence from the big sample. It may also have become like our equivalent of innovas phase 4. So they may be testing things like throughput and ease of mass use and interpretation and delivery of results. Like a pretty full on field trial in effect perhaps in preparation for superlabs
Yeah on another thread we were looking at the 912m tender as just being a few quid a test. Need to get em that cheap in bulk if everyone has to take 2 days apart because of low sensitivity. But get one that detects nearly 90 per cent or more of the infectious and it can probably be done just once at least if prevalence in community is not too high.
The article posted here the other day mentioned use of saline with ms as a possibility - it was mentioning rhe Austrian test (in use for individuals purchase but not yet by governments) and mapp sciences (still being commercialised)
Innova use swab in mouth which is a saliva based approach and Bell ia quite keen on theirs. So its not so much opposition to saliva as wanting a method of sample collecting that is not messy - the concern is basically about spit.
Dave - yes buying in the breathalsyer modules. Its good. No need to take time and money reinventing an existing wheel.
So on the front page, at least, the antibody test they are selling is now finally described in terms that dont make it sound like it does the job of a rapid antigen test. Wonder why they didn't do that in the first place and were instead also mis advertising it in the wider media.
By the way the bmj editorial linked above makes some great specific points on some issues concerning lack of transparency and corruption but overall if one of my students had written it I would be *******ing them for its limited use of evidence and ranty biased style. It seems to refer to the ukrtc test only once and in doing so does not even bother to evaluate the bmj article. To make a critique you cant simply recite a source you have to evaluate the arguments made in that source. To not do so is cheap lazy journalism rather than the considered approach to use of evidence that one should expect from the editor of a medical journal.
Some pist are conflating antigen and antibody tests here. Mass testing as rolled out in Aus and in Liverpool is antigen. UKRTC test is antibody which has a very different set of purposes. The BMJ article is about the UKRTC test. It challenges its stated accuracy. If the BMJ article were correct then of course it would adversely affect the share price. Indeed just the perception that it was right has in fact damaged the share price. Other news may also be negative about its accuracy and affect the sp. So it may continue to be volatile. I did not feel that odx was equipped to provide a decent riposte to the BMJ article. Thankfully Abingdon as the developer provided a great response. I think any nervous shareholders should read it to settle themselves. It properly debunks the key premises of the article. For me personally I had expanded my holding on the irrational post vaccine news drop. After the BMJ article I was reassessing. But after the Abingdon response I returned to full confidence. Principally through this test and potentially through antigen as well ODX should have more than enough profitable demand to both warrant its planned expansion and to go further still should the practicalities align for that.
Take the links together and its interesting to see how seriously use of ms is being taken. There is competition out there but its all in different stages. The Austrian competition is already in use but as an expensive commercial solution, with only limited plans for wider rollout. Avacta seems to have goal of much wider rollout, including getting govmts to use test widely. I am not concerned about Mapp Sciences as comp as its not quite as far along in the process. The israeli solution using AI etc. is interesting - bit similar to the DeepVerge endeavours.
Nursing a significant knife after adding to a 30p a share holding by getting gashed grabbing a falling knife after presentation. Still we are nearing the business end for the covid developments so I'm going to add this week at these levels, since I think at least the wastewater and possibly the breath test will come good. And one is simply just a clever incremental to an existing technology and the other has the potential to become a broader personal diagnostics tool which should underpin interest in its purchase. We are seeing rapid antigen strips being rolled out now and they will reduce r. But because the innova one in poll position has weak sensitivity - only 57 per cent when self administered - therr is a big market opportunity for the likes of avacta and Deepverge to do a lot better. If Deepverge can beat the likes of innova then even without needing to beat Avacta it can have a significant market if it can get unit costs of all the elements reasonably The government will want fast roll out of good solutions and several solutions will be needed to effect this. Could be pushed as a flight solution. Less or no plastic waste is also a bonus. We dont even know if any of the vaccine frontrunners will prevent transmission rather simply boost immune response, suspect just latter.
Yes Agent - you elaborate very precisely the point I was in more basic terms stressing. The more vulnerable are more vulnerable often because of immune system that are less strong and the concern is that often they will not develop immune resistance as strongly when vaccinated. Furthermore it seems that when scientists are talking technically they talk about sars cov 2 as what infects you and only describe you as having covid if you get symptoms. I thinl thats the description pfizer went for. If so, when they say only a very small percentage of the vaccinated got covid vis the placebo control group they mean only a small percentage got disease, not that only a small percentage were infected with sars cov 2. To measure whether the vaccine was doing anything at all to reduce transmission you would need to be testing all of both cohorts for sars cov 2 several times a week. They appear not ro have done that. I think it and at least most other vaccines are simply designed to provoke your immune system to respond to them in such a way that if you then catch sars cov 2 you are much more likely to beat if off easily without it taking serious hold. That is likely to mean you still transmit and in fact are rendered more dangerous to others because of the greater potential to be asymptomatic.
So long as sars cov 2 remains transmitting significantly and there is a significant amount of naturally more vulnerable people who remain so for want of a good vaccine or simply reluctance to guinea pig up for a new one then testing will be needed on a large scale.