RE: John Bell in today's Sunday Telegraph13 Sep 2020 17:39
The only thing which indicates Mologic could be further ahead is their LFA antigen tests use in the Heathrow trials. The ODX board believe they are further ahead for this reason.
Whilst we don't actually know for sure, I don't believe the Heathrow tests indicate that Mologic are ahead.
This was simply an attempted proof of concept to leverage the Government into doing something which would of course hold significant financial benefit for all airports, probably none more so than Heathrow because of it's size, international flights etc.
Of course, it raises the question - why not Awacta?
Well, I don't think this is a difficult question to answer with even a small amount of common sense applied. Would Awacta, who are supported by the UK Gov on the CONDOR program, give a batch of tests to an airport so that airport could use them to pressurise the UK Gov... I don't think so.
Furthermore, they probably can't if the popular opinion of there being an NDA in place is correct - which I very much believe it is.
EVEN IF Mologic are ahead, IMO the UK Gov are surely going to be much more keen on Awacta's test for the following reasons:
1: Clinical validation on CONDOR. Yes, I know ODX are part of the rapid test consortium but they're only a manufacturer, it's not their test.
2: Performance. Based on what we know of Affimers, it seems it's going to be very difficult for any competitors to match the performance of the AffiWX test. Both in terms of spec/sens and robustness of the test.
3: Production capacity. Making the LFA's fast enough is a massive hurdle. We already know that Aquackta very much have their ducks in a row and again have the benefit of Affimers.
Do your own research but that's my opinion on it. Of course, as is constantly repeated there's plenty of market for more than one company. We want to be first though as the publicity will be incredible and the share price will go full space shuttle on us....