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Thanks all!

Got a link please mate?

I'm one Covid episode and one jab in already, yet I'm still currently isolating in bed, feverish and coughing, awaiting for a PCR result. Lots of my peers are starting to go down with it and we are months away from our second vaccine appointments. If it's going to be like this all summer its going to be unworkable...

From the Guardian:

"Two million people could contract Covid this summer, potentially meaning up to 10 million must isolate in just six weeks, Guardian analysis shows, prompting warnings over risks to health and disruption to the economy."

Plus hospitalisations ticking up sharply; we've already seen one hospital go 'code black' - I have a feeling Sajid Javid's 'Ayn Rand' approach to public health is in for a sharp U-turn soon enough.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/06/data-predicting-2m-uk-summer-covid-cases-prompts-health-fears

Isn't the reason investors here dismiss the webinar as pointless and the share price tanked because he led the market to believe the roll out would take longer than many expected?

My guess is that said we have a M/C of around £500m, which presumably was true when the video was made, but as of today is £390m.

Maybe also they thought better of putting the chemical formula for Precision up so clearly but who knows

Hopefully the dross will now disappear and we'll be on for a 10% bounce tomorrow once they take their positions and start ramping.

Why gamble when you can invest in AIM!

He said ten percent because that's where the gap which just filled at 154 is - its what half the dross on this board today has been hoping to achieve

Al's timelines are bunk, sure - but his main gambit was to produce the worlds best performing LFT, which he has delivered. |

Today's slide is being driven by the UK Government saying 'it's your problem now, good luck' and in doing so generating additional doubt about sales volume/route to market.

I don't think that's easily pinned as a consequence of the CEO, who seems to have been ****ed around by the government as much as anyone else TBH

The company has fundamentally transformed from what it was twelve months ago - with multiple revenue-generating partnerships and licensing deals signed, clinical trials about to start, the first diagnostics products on the market and multiple new products in development. Plus fully funded until 2023.

Frustrating to see the (predictable) slide today - but the global market for LFTs is bigger than the UK government, who in any case have stated a test to release system is on the cards.

No way this is going back to £1!

Riesgo - IDK the answer and without trying it, no-one will. Unsurprisingly, manufacturers tests their product against the designed performance envelope and defined failure states, not for the more outlandish ways users could intentionally manipulate it - so I doubt Avacta know either.

However, while not being a scientist, I would suggest that given the way in which LFT's work - migrating a conjugated label (Affimer) from an immobilized reservoir to a signal line (if the target is present) - it would be possible to trigger a false positive in any test with the right solvent.

I would hazard a guess that given regents can be released from binding sites through changes in PH levels (elution), the use of a suitably alkaline or acidic (Orange Juice) solvent can release the regent from the reservoir in the absence of the virus, triggering a false positive signal.

That might be complete *******s, but I think its a vaguely coherent answer...

Also of note:

"The study was funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council, the Technology Strategy Board and Avacta"

Heavy hitters there...

Thanks to Dave on Twitter!

Bumping this thread back up in light of this nice little synopsis - https://scienmag.com/new-treatment-options-for-deadliest-of-cancers/

Further to yesterdays discussion of the new Tomlinson Lab paper in Nature, there's a nice summary here in Layman's terms, including this rather encouraging paragraph:

"Co-first author of the report and PhD student, Amy Turner, from the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, said: “Because it causes 20-30% of all known cancers, RAS really is the Holy Grail of therapeutic targets. The fact that it has previously been termed “undruggable” has allowed us to demonstrate the huge impact that our Affimer technology can have when it comes to treating challenging pathologies. We have already identified small molecules that bind to RAS, so it will be very exciting to be involved in developing these over the next few years.”"

Huge potential!

https://scienmag.com/new-treatment-options-for-deadliest-of-cancers/

Avacta have the exclusive rights to Affimers in all applications - it's their intellectual property.

Agreed DTW - it's a phenomenally powerful technology platform, which is endlessly scalable and producing cutting-edge science in markets worth hundreds of billions annually.

Buy and hold for me, please.

Mr A - I didn't read it super closely as a lot of it is over my head (I'm an architect not a scientist) and i'm sure others can give a better interpretation of this than I (Monkshood?).

But without re-reading it, I think they got to K3/K6 through computational simulation of KRAS, hypothesizing the existence of a ridge in the protein from the chemical structure, then generating a range of Affimers which might bond through the normal selection process / phage display.

They then examined the efficacy of the Affimers through the impact on KRAS expression in engineered cell lines, selecting those with the highest effect; effectively 'probing' the molecule to see what worked.

The binding of these Affimers on KRAS was then studied through X-ray crystallography, SEM, etc, to reveal previously unknown binding sites on the protein which can be targeted for therapeutic use.

And your summary is correct (I think) - the Affimers inhabited KRAS and can themselves be used therapeutically.

"Thus, Affimer K6 demonstrates that the use of biologics with small interaction interfaces can not only bind and inhibit difficult-to-drug proteins but also identify and probe druggable pockets on such proteins, potentially acting as templates for small molecules. Importantly, the K3 Affimer shows inhibition of RAS but also demonstrates a preference for KRAS over the HRAS and NRAS variants. To our knowledge, the only other biologics to express such RAS variant specificity are DARPins K13 and K1916."

I don't have enough of science background to fully understand the paper, but having read it, it seems the Affimers work well - better than DARPins - and the method outlined has significant further application in drug discovery and cancer therapies.

The difficulty in targeting the proteins the affimers have succeeded in binding too is repeatedly highlighted and evidenced by the very few alternatives which have any efficacy - affimers were comparable or superior to these.

Exciting stuff!

"Here, we explore the possibility of using Affimer proteins, an established biologic with a small probe surface formed by two variable regions26 known to bind at protein interaction ‘hotspots’25,27,28, to probe RAS for druggable pockets and conformers that might be amenable to small-molecule inhibition.

Such a direct approach utilizing small probe surfaces has not previously been used with scaffold-based biologics and ***could revolutionize drug discovery,*** by exemplifying a pipeline for small molecule design that has the potential to unlock the currently ‘undruggable’ proteins."