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The key is testing: • It is “very rare” for people without symptoms to transmit Covid-19, the World Health Organization said Monday. Initially, it seemed that asymptomatic individuals could spread the coronavirus, a worry that led governments around the world to implement restrictive lock downs in an effort to control the spread of the disease. As more research is done, however, the WHO believes that asymptomatic spread of the disease isn’t the main driver of outbreaks. “From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual,”the head of the WHO’s emerging disease unit Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove said. “It’s very rare.” Based on the evidence now available, Van Kerkhove said that the most effective method for containing outbreaks is testing, tracing and rigorously isolating patients infected with Covid-19.

RNS out
Watch the price tomorrow

Perhaps you have all seen This :
@MylesMcNulty
#AVCT
@avacta
2019 Annual Report out. It's a beast of a read, but so far the standout line is in the CEO Q&A, p.17:

Q: "How confident are you that the phase I clinical trialfor AVA6000 will be successful and will the COVID-19pandemic cause a significant delay in starting?"

A just-published study in the journal Lancet may dampen the enthusiasm for using chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients.
The results from a multinational registry analysis of more than 96K patients failed to show a treatment benefit when the meds were used alone or with antibiotic macrolide while their use was associated with a higher risk of death and increased frequency of ventricular arrhythmias.

'Better than we thought" - Dr. Fauci on Moderna, as shares jump pre-market
May 22, 2020 8:07 AM ETModerna, Inc. (MRNA)
"Having looked at the data," it is "quite promising", NIH's Dr. Anthony Fauci said in an interview on NPR of Moderna's (NASDAQ:MRNA) new efforts and it's Phase 1 trial.
Moderna shares jumped more than 4% premarket, reversing a recent trend following some lingering skepticism toward the beginning of the week that the original announcement lacked strong detail.
He said that it was encouraging "in the sense that in the Phase 1 study, the vaccine induced neutralizing antibodies" vs "binding antibodies." That allows the prospective vaccine to block the virus and it was done "better than we thought."

Pharma majors:
As mentioned by the CEO in the latest presentation, the majors are all over the companies who is involved in virus testing.
Here is yesterday’s one : Glaxo teams up with early-stage gene editing firm to develop coronavirus test
May 20, 2020 12:50 PM ETGlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK)2 Comments
GlaxoSmithKline's Consumer Healthcare unit (GSK +1.0%) inks an agreement with South San Francisco, CA-based Mammoth Biosciences to develop a lateral-flow diagnostic assay that detects the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with comparable sensitivity and specificity to real-time PCR tests.

Just remember, Avacta has NOTHING to do Moderna?s MRNA Corona virus trials, as the company has stated previously.
Their 3 Affimer trials with Moderna is very different.

Look what JNJ is is announcing pre ASCO

You really need to remember what this company have to offer.
Read the CEO’s comments post JP Morgan conference

Moderna Announces Positive Interim Phase 1 Data for its mRNA Vaccine (mRNA-1273) Against Novel Coronavirus
Stock up 30% pre opening

Another one of Avacta’s JV’s

ADCT
ADC Therapeutics, a Swiss Phase 2 biotech developing next-gen antibody drug conjugates for difficult cancers, increased the proposed share offering for its upcoming IPO on Thursday.

The Épalinges, Switzerland-based company now plans to raise $175 million by offering 10.3 million shares at a price range of $16 to $18. Deerfield Partners and certain existing shareholders, including Redmile Group and AstraZeneca, have indicated an interest in purchasing $100 million worth of shares in the offering. The company had previously filed to offer 7.4 million shares at the same range. At the midpoint, ADC Therapeutics will raise 40% more in proceeds than previously anticipated to command a market value of $1.1 billion.

Saliva is more sensitive for SARS-CoV-2 detection in COVID-19 patients than nasopharyngeal swabs.
Rapid and accurate SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic testing is essential for controlling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The current gold standard for COVID-19 diagnosis is real-time RT-PCR detection of SARS-CoV-2 from nasopharyngeal swabs. Low sensitivity, exposure risks to healthcare workers, and global shortages of swabs and personal protective equipment, however, necessitate the validation of new diagnostic approaches. Saliva is a promising candidate for SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics because (1) collection is minimally invasive and can reliably be self-administered and (2) saliva has exhibited comparable sensitivity to nasopharyngeal swabs in detection of other respiratory pathogens, including endemic human coronaviruses, in previous studies. To validate the use of saliva for SARS-CoV-2 detection, we tested nasopharyngeal and saliva samples from confirmed COVID-19 patients and self-collected samples from healthcare workers on COVID-19 wards. When we compared SARS-CoV-2 detection from patient-matched nasopharyngeal and saliva samples, we found that saliva yielded greater detection sensitivity and
under a CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license .
consistency throughout the course of infection. Furthermore, we report less variability in self-sample collection of saliva. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that saliva is a viable and more sensitive alternative to nasopharyngeal swabs and could enable at-home self-administered sample collection for accurate large-scale SARS-CoV-2 testing.

Out over the weekend, fantastic news.
Just shows you Avacta’s SARS-COV-2 Affimers Reagents substantial potential.
Avacta -Cytiva Will be part of very exclusive group.
Huge earnings potential.
:
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the first diagnostic test with the option of using home-collected saliva samples for COVID-19 testing. Specifically, the FDA issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) to Rutgers Clinical Genomics Laboratory for their COVID-19 laboratory developed test (LDT), which had been previously added to the high complexity molecular-based LDT “umbrella” EUA, to permit testing of samples self-collected by patients at home using the Spectrum Solutions LLC SDNA-1000 Saliva Collection Device.

US buyer back, post hrs trade reporting

City wire interview,
Extract : The whole point about the FTSE 100 is it isn’t does have much IT. It doesn’t have much biotech either,’ said Williams.
At the end of last week, nearly a third of the portfolio was made up of information technology stocks. Cyber security company £262m Kape Technologies (KAPE) is the largest holding at 6.5%.
Healthcare stocks account for 13.6% with the largest holding a 4.5% weighting in £163m Avacta (AVCT), which is collaborating on a coronavirus test with American company Cytiva, formerly GE Healthcare.

Remember last paragraph : active discussions with other parties.

Remember the MIT study announced before the week end, that PCR test had limitations vs an Antigen test, which is where Avacta and Cytiva comes in!

Good that IP Group is going and triple A shareholder like Miton Group has doubled their share holding. Excellent news

Great to see Premier Miton almost doubling their holding in Avacta.
Good to have top quality share holders supporting our company.

Antigen testing could be a faster, cheaper way to diagnose covid-19
Current coronavirus testing is plagued by a lack of resources. An antigen test could be a useful alternative that bypasses supply-chain bottlenecks.

.

Coronavirus testing in the US is nowhere near where it should be. A recent road map suggested we need to test upwards of 20 million people every day in order to safely reopen the economy (we’re currently running around 150,000 a day). To scale up, we need to move beyond conventional methods—and that might require an entirely different type of test.

The gold standard for covid-19 testing is the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. In a PCR test, genetic material collected in a nasal swab is copied millions or billions of times over so that markers for covid-19 infection can be identified (the virus’s RNA is too tiny to identify on its own, but making more copies makes it easier to find). PCR testing isn’t perfect, but it’s seen as the most accurate form of testing available for viruses. Unfortunately, it takes time, energy, and trained personnel to run these tests. That makes PCR testing too hard to scale up to the numbers we really need.

“There will never be the ability on a [PCR] test to do 300 million tests a day or to test everybody before they go to work or to school,” Deborah Birx, head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said on April 17. “But there might be with the antigen test.”

What’s an antigen test? While PCR tests look for evidence of viral genetic material, and antibody testing detects human antibodies against the virus, antigen tests look for fragments of viral surface proteins as a marker for infection. (An antigen is the part of a pathogen that elicits an immune response.) These proteins, usually from the coronavirus’s surface spikes, are big enough to study on their own, without spending time and energy making new copies.

Identifying their presence could mean a diagnosis of infection in just a matter of minutes, without expensive equipment, training, or power. In theory, a reliable antigen test could be pretty easy to scale up and could then be used in the home or at point-of-care locations. It could be the test we need to get America back on its feet again.

ADC and AZN working closely together, AZN holds 35%+ of ADC and at last IPO attempt, wanted to participate significantly in the issue.
AZN sits on the board.
Avacta and ADC deal made last year!
October 2019
Collaboration and Option Agreement with ADC Therapeutics
Focus on developing potent Affimer-drug conjugates
Avacta Group plc (AIM: AVCT), (Cambridge and Wetherby UK), a biotechnology company developing novel cancer immunotherapies based on its proprietary Affimer® platform, today announces that it has entered a collaboration and option agreement with ADC Therapeutics SA (Lausanne, CH), a clinical-stage oncology-focused biotechnology company pioneering the development of highly potent and targeted antibody-drug conjugates for patients suffering from haematological malignancies and solid tumors. The agreement is to develop Affimer-drug conjugates combining Avacta’s Affimer® technology with ADC Therapeutics’ pyrrolobenzodiazepine (PBD)-based warhead and linker technologies.