Member Info for Merchantbanker

Doggy100 - You must have phoned Beacons Business Interiors and The Abingdon pub in Kensington. Easy mistake to make.

Mowzerrocks - not going to get involved on what has been a positive day all around. I stand by comments, and am looking for proof to support the confidence before my opinion changes, but bullish times for covid stocks and price action looks good and the popularity of the stock remains high so, very positive for you guys. I did chuckle at the "moonshot or moonshine" headline one of the papers went with though! A bit of resistance it appears at 180, but if it goes you could see 200 quickly. FYI still have no position and unlikely to any time soon.

Nice to see some blue and some bullish harmony across all covid stocks. GLA

A reminder of test performance for the competition:

Roche - 84%
Abbott - 94%
UK RTC - 99%.

Roche and Abbott are lab tests and our lateral flow device outperforms for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time.

What i am more interested in is seeing IIs buy in after the UK RTC news.

Anyone adding to holdings has them and Sneller to thank.

Last post tonight and i'm done!!!!

This might not go down well, but in my opinion, this rise in cases is exactly what the government need and exactly what they want to move forward with tackling Covid. I go back to exit strategy again. This can only come with immunity becasue you would never be able to isolate it globally to make it completely go away. Of course rising infections means more prevalence in the community. This will mean on a mass antibody testing programme the positive number will be higher than if they did this 2 weeks ago. I suspect they have a date or a target prevalence when they want to do the mass test. There has got to be a level where movement towards herd immunity starts to come into sight. Perhaps if they do a mass antibody screen at some point in the next few months it might be at 25% plus. A vaccine on the horizon would help us as closing the gap would be achievable without so many further actual cases. The data on age range showing that it is younger people mainly catching it at the moment is good news. If everyone under 30 got it and survived it, that herd immunity would go towards protecting the older generation. Perhaps even the relaxation and reversal of restrictions is designed to encourage that. i.e. people ask why they cant see their gran but they can go down the pub? Perhaps they are happy for the younger to go down the pub catch it and spread it knowing the risk is low, but with families of different generations the risk is higher.

It's funny today's pledges have come at the same time the vaccine trial has been put on hold......

Sparticus - 2m tests per week, we know the rough selling price, margin, and we know what the core business is worth. Fincapp broker note will guide on this. Only a small 2m tests per week is worth £900m+ on 5x earnings. I have heard 2 x sales used as potential diagnostics valuations in this climate, and this would be £700m+ valuation. But i have no doubt our capacity will go above 2m.

Tricky - sorry but not me that has brought up another stock on this board, i only mention it in response to challenges made. I'd rather talk about it over there, but they are incapable of having a proper discussion and only know how to abuse people and start going on the offensive here.
Avacta certainly will feature, if they get a test of the appropriate approved quality. All i ask is that there is some balance to the opinion that the test isn't want people hope that it will be. I posted this there to explain.... These from experience here are the steps to get a test to market. We know this from what UK RTC have done. We are currently at stage 12 with UK RTC. Avcta from their own RNS are at stage 3. Mologic Antigen we dont know but trial suggests we could be close to 7. I remember when we were at stage 3 we thought stage 14 was coming tomorrow but we have since learnt that it isn't that easy. There is something to be learnt and plenty to appreciate for how far UK RTC have come.

1 R&D
2 Prototype
3 Initial evaluation
4 Continued performance enhancement
5 Design Freeze
6 Clinical Validation
7 CE Mark
8 Manufacturing scale up and tech transfer
9 PHE/MHRA validation
10 Approval for Professionals Use
11 Commercial roll out for professional use
12 Self test study and validation
13 Self test approval
14 Commercial roll out for individual use

Sparticus - show me they have an approved test with the required sensitivity and specificity and i will start to believe you. It is not even obvious that Avacta's test is coming out at all. It has not even reached final design freeze, has not been clinically validated, CE marked by a independent body. As i have said many times, my issue is not that it can't happen for Avct, it is the degree of confidence and the level of success priced in that suggests this will happen for Avct without any evidence. There are so many companies out there that have or are trying to enter this space and most of them will fail. Affimers are unproven in diagnostics with zero products brought to market. They may well work in the lab, but where is the proof they can work on a lateral flow assay? There is zero evidence linking Avacta to UK Government strategy.

You can have all the capacity there is in the UK and i doubt you will get to 10m per day.

Do the maths..... how many tests per week do they need? And what is the cost? And who pays for it?

It will take the UK RTC until the end of the year to ramp up production to a level that produces 10m tests in total, (although i expect this will be increased) yet people seem to think that 2 of them will be making 10s of millions of Avacta tests per week and to ignore the fact they have UK RTC tests to make. You simply cannot go from zero to hundreds of millions of tests overnight.
BBI only have capacity for 10-15m tests per year.... and 10m of those are set aside for UK RTC.

These 4 companies are the crux of the diagnostics industry in the UK along with a few others. The reason there is a lack of capacity is because there is a lack of lateral flow devices going on the market because of complexity, regulation and the fact that there has never been need on this scale before.

This is clearly a nationwide and global effort to get tests and make them and they all need to work together. One companies success is the nations success. But prove up your test first. Show that it works before you start banking billions of dollars and expecting every other company to substitute their tests with yours. Get a CE mark, and then i am sure certainly my opinion will change.

I don't condone people posting trash on other boards, but that board is one of the worst i've seen for unsubstantiated "truths" based on nothing but blind faith. I have done just as much research on that company as anyone else and it is on my radar as a company of interest. If i believe i have something of balance or opinion i am entitled to post there and i will do with honesty and respect. If people want to fight back with insults or attacking another stock to me that's a bad sign that they dont actually have any evidence to challenge anything. If people post here things that are untrue of conflicts of opinion, i will challenge it with facts or circumstantial evidence and not with abuse, and anyone that has read my psots on here should confirm that. If you want to correct anything i have said that is factually untrue show me and i will revise my opinion.

TripHop - and as i asked you over there without reply....... was your niece ill? I suspect she wasn't as so far all potential cases of reinfection have had no illness or symptoms the second time around. This proves immunity. Immunity is not an external shield so it cannot prevent viral pathogens entering the body, it is rather a defence response that can kill those pathogens before they take over host cells and multiply. That is the role of antibodies. Also it is thought that dead viral cells can remain in the body for some time leading to a false positive result so it cannot be proven that this was a new infection.

To add to my point - today was about taking back some control with restrictions as the virus is getting out of hand. If the talked about antibody testing today and the offerings of immunity passports, that would be contradictory to today's messaging which is to take back control. Testing for the virus, social distancing, hand washing etc... this controls the virus, but immunity is the only exit strategy.

To me it seemed that antibody testing was a deliberate omission from today's briefing. The new tests that they spoke about were all conceptual tests. The UK RTC test is no longer conceptual or in development. This is coming. We had a sneak preview of evidence of this earlier in the week. This will be announced in a separate press release rather than get lost inside a wider update. One of the reservations was that positive antibody testing leads to immunity passports would be a political headache, giving privileges to some but not others. I still think they are working around this.

But i think what Boris promised today is unachievable to the scale that it came across. You cant mass test everyday. If you can i want to see the evidence it can be done first. I suspect this is just a publicity stunt, dangling a carrot. Antigen tests will be key to controlling the virus and a lateral flow test will be very highly sought. But you cannot test every person every day.

Mass antigen testing is not an exit plan it's a delay tactic. For me a negative antigen test is like giving a provisional licence, a positive antibody test is like taking the L plates off.

The case regarding what antibodies means, how long they last etc is irrelevant, as tests will sell no matter what the outcome means for them. Research, curiosity, piece of mind, immunity passports. We all want to know if we had it or not.

Oh it’s only $15 a test now.... fab so only gonna cost me £5k per year. Where do I make the cheque out ...... A Smith @ offshore account

OK, so have i got this right...... you guys say the Avacta test will cost £30. So i have to take one every day....? That's nearly £11k per year! Who's going to spend that?! Oh the Government are paying..... that's £722bn for 66m people ! Might be time to start thinking about moving abroad as at this rate the income tax rate will be 100% next year to pay for all this.

Hi G-Man11 - We don't really know, other than obviously it wont be an Affimer test. From history with Mologic the first we will learn is when it is CE marked. They have no need to provide details until then. The only evidence of progress is the Heathrow trial, which was a real surprise and a positive sign of progress.

You can learn a bit about it here.

http://ec.europa.eu/DocsRoom/documents/10337/attachments/1/translations
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/medical-devices-conformity-assessment-and-the-ce-mark

For a lateral flow device, it can be CE marked as a class 1 device . For a lateral flow device, it will need independent validation and then it can be CE marked and sold. For UK Government contract it needs to be MHRA approved. It will need to be CE marked first. MHRA approval is more thorough and will be done in the field as well as clinically. Professional use approval and self test approval will likely be a 2 step process.
Whether you like other tests or not, you can at least learn from the process.

Timster - thanks for reminding me Avacta have another step before CE marking as they need to apply for ISO13485 accreditation. Although i am not sure if this is necessary if they are using BBI or Abingdon, but if it's Avacta's test i would think they should be accredited too.

Ophidian - It's from experience of going through the same process with another test. We thought we were days away at the same stage avacta are and its been a 2/3 month process to get to self test study.