Member Info for hants

RK, will you be topping up this week?

Set your alarm for 6.59am and you'll be fine.

Or alternatively 10.34am if you think Sir Al is probably having a Monday morning lie in tomorrow.

I'm looking to buy some ODX tomorrow as IMO it's likely the rumours of ODX manfacturing for AVCT will transpire to be true. With RTC members BBI and Abbingdon already signed up, it would be strange not to see ODX on board.

All the current indications are that AVCT will be the test primarily used for moonshot. Not much is known about Mologics LFA, but even if successful will they will have the same hurdles as AVCT, but with the availability of reagents to overcome too. Not only does it need to be possible to produce a reagent at scale, it also needs to be robust. AVCT don't have the latter problem due to their Affimer reagents. With competitors dropping out of saliva and moving to swabs, or having low sensitivity like the Korean test which has been on the news this week - perhaps Affimers will transpire to be the element which makes a saliva LFA possible.

Released last night (scroll down a bit). Stolen from AVCT board.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-8801981/STOCK-WATCH-Martin-Sorrell-set-blockbuster-deal.html

If AVCT are successful + if ODX are manfacturing + if the Gov proceed with Moonshot (all of which are very likely in my opinion)... ODX will certainly be very pleased they invested in all that new kit to increase their capacity! Those machines will be running around the clock...

Exactly PL75, not difficult to join the dots on this. Exciting few weeks ahead (I know we've been saying that a while, but now it finally seems to be true!)

Anyway, I've clogged up the board enough tonight. Off for a late gym session. Have a good weekend everyone.

I'm tempted to buy some ODX as I would be very surprised if they didn't come onboard as a manfacturing partner. I wouldn't be surprised if we had that as an RNS within the next couple of weeks. Low market cap at present, £167m.

Potential for a big rise over there if a partnership is announced with Avacta IMO. Failing that, they'll still sell a few antibody tests and their food intolerence stuff looks good too.

The RTC is University of Oxford, Abingdon Health, Omega Diagnostics, BBI and CIGA.

We are on CONDOR, but we are not in the RTC. I imagine the original reason for this being that we are working with an American firm called Cytiva who are a serious pharma player, owned by Danaher. Cytiva helped to develop the LFA and are supplying a component (the strip).

BBI and Abingdon (RTC members) are lined up to produce our antigen tests. There's also rumoured discussions with ODX and they might be on board sooon too. So that's probably where your confusion is coming from.

The Gov are looking to indentify infectious people and antibody testing cannot meet that need. ODX might be manufacturing an antigen test by Mologic, but nothing is known about the status and progress of that test aside from some trials at Heathrow. I covered this in one of my earlier posts.

Silles:

- Nobody knows to what extent one gains immunity and how long it lasts
-Immunity passports, I covered this earlier. Would create an absolute mess. Very obvious what would happen.
- Mass screening will be done with antigen tests (see moonshot info and my earlier post on infectious period)
- Antigen testing is better for this, again for the reasons I stated earlier. Antibodies are produced around 7 days after showing symptoms. By this time, you are past the most infectious period anyway. Avacta are aiming to detect Covid-19 2 days before symptoms show... so that's around 9 days sooner than an antibody test.

The Gov narrative has changed a lot over the last few months, there's no getting away from that. As sleepydave has said, all companies with a decent test will do okay.

If/when Avacta pull this off - the landscape of testing will change very quickly. Even more so if the Gov proceed with moonshot.

In MY OPINION (lets be clear on that before somebody gives me a bashing), if/when Avacta release their test - all other testing stocks will make a nosedive as this realisation dawns on people. I hold NCYT and SNG as Covid plays, but I intend to be well clear of NCYT shortly.

Okay - well lets re-visit this thread in a few weeks or months then and see how it's played out.

If everybody is taking regular antigen tests as part of moonshot - we'll know largely who's had Covid-19 and who hasn't. (Okay, there will be some asymptomatic carriers and a few will slip through the cracks.) Couple this to an app and the Government will have their statistics from the antigen tests which have already been taken.

My point is they won't stop the spread and very few people are going to take an antibody test just so the Government can gather some statistics - espcially after their terrible handling of this crisis and very little public confidence.

It's all good and well making the tests, but when the Goverment are clearly stating (as per your link) that theres nothing for the user to gain other than perhaps satisfying their curiousity and being a number to the Gov - people are not going to be lining up to take them. Maybe people within the healthcare sectors, but not general public. All IMO of course.

gkb47, extract from you own link:

"A positive result means the test did detect COVID-19 coronavirus antibodies so it is likely you’ve had coronavirus before (even if you can’t recall having symptoms). It is not possible to say when.

It does not mean you are guaranteed to be immune (protected) from further infection. You might get the virus again.

It does not mean you cannot spread the virus to others."

gkb47, IMO there's been a huge change of direction away from antibody tests and towards antigen tests since the RTC was set up at the beggining of the year. Not a full U-turn, but there's no question the UK Gov want a rapid antigen test and are much less interested in a rapid antibody test.

The article you posted states:
"In total, the UK-RTC can manufacture 10m tests within a six-month period."

That is a small amount in comparison to the quanities that Avacta are lining manufacturing partners to produce.

Silles - if you haven't done so already it's worth putting some time into looking at the differences between antigen and antibody tests. In summary there's two things you need to know:

1. Anti-body tests can in pricinple pick up current infection. However, by this time the infectious/most infectious period has already passed. The infectious period is two days before symptoms show through to seven days after symptoms show at which point the viral load begins to fall.

2. The UK Gov appear to have little to no interest in antibody tests. You're not going to stop the spread with them because people have done their spreading already by the time an antibody tests shows positive! Any attempt to use antibody tests as a passport to increased freedoms/holidays would end in disaster. We would have people who didn't feel they were at risk actively setting out to catch Covid-19, like children with chicken pox. This would leads to massively increased spread accross all demographics of people and would be disastrous. They are a tool for statistics and not much more.

adequate*

An AVCT ODX deal would also stop the friction between our two LSE boards, which would be a bonus!

That's my understanding too Pigster. Aside from the Heathrow trials (which are IMO mainly a publicity stunt by an airport to force the Government to move towards airport testing as soon as possible), there appears to be no other information currently available.

It doesn't mean they're not ahead, they could be..... there's just nothing to suggest they are. An ODX/Avacta deal would lead me to believe that Avacta are indeed ahead. Of course, even if Mologic are infront of us - they still need to manufacture on scale in order to take any meaningful market share - which is the big obstacle which Avacta are currently working through.

We have the power of Affimers on our side - this means we have a reagent which is easier to manfacture and on scale whilst also being robust. Anybody wishing to compete with Avacta will either need to use Affimers or find an equally good reagent with adequete availability.

I would be delighted to see a manufacturing partnership with ODX.

The Korean LFA is not looking promising due to low sensitivity and others failing with saliva and moving towards nasal swabs as already posted on this board.

The LFA antigen test we don't know much about is Mologic. If successful, ODX are lined up to manfacture it. If ODX sign up with Avacta, it would be a negative indicator for the mysterious Mologic test and a positive one for us.

I've taken a brief look at brh this week and interested to know more also. No holding at present.

Mixed emotions on Avacta today. On the one hand I'm very satisfied that everything is fine. On the other hand, seeing the share price down isn't great.

Any indication of a delay and the traders and rainbow chasers move on so that's exactly what has happened today. On a positive note, anybody looking to take a position is now crystal clear on where we are and the revised timelines. I believe this should provide some stability to the share price and hopefully stop the very annoying drop which any non LFA RNS has been creating.

Any fears of bad news should now be gone. We know everything is fine and the clock is reset. Onwards and upwards from here!

Stupid post of the day award goes to Simmo77.

Dependent on what could be very significant revenue from sars-cov-2 testing, AVA6000 could go further into clinical development without a partner.