Member Info for Monkshood

The Taxpayer Protection Taskforce will recruit more than 1,200 new HMRC investigators to combat fraud within Covid-19 support packages. The government said it would be investing £100m into the taskforce.
The HMRC has previously admitted that as much as £3.5bn of the parallel £35bn jobs support scheme may have wrongly claimed through a mix of ‘error and fraud’.
Mano have worked closely with HMRC in the past. Even a small portion of £3.5bn will keep them busy for some time....

I am still here. I thought that even with the fx headwind it would stay up over 500, but clearly not. I have been slowly topping up at sub 500 whenever there is a dip.
Not that it means much, but the median broker target is 587. Results today, so it will be interesting to see what happens.

Increase in budget for HMRC for chasing up fraud. Should be good for Mano.

I am sure that Conbrio fund partners would have had a good 'look under the bonnet' before they took such a significant holding, especially with regards the future cost of the 2/3G sunsetting, this provides me with reassurance about this aspect.
I like that the dependence upon a single insurer for a chunk of the revenues is decreasing, this was a concern when they were dependent upon the insurance market. I did wonder if there would be a problem over 'data' with Brexit but this seems to be all OK.

The US is switching off 3G sooner than the UK/EU are switching off 2G. There is a bit in the accounts -
'As described in the 2019 Financial Statements, Management expect the sunsetting of the 3G mobile network in the US to be finalised in 2022.'
'Management believe that, at some point between 2025 and 2030, most UK and European network operators will finalise the sunsetting of their 2G networks'
I read the increase in provisions 247K - 1,785k as being due to the cost of changing the units in the US.
Interesting point about 'intangibles', is 'goodwill' their version of this?

The results follow what had already been outlined in the trading update. The divi is larger than I was expecting though.
'Final dividend payment of 17.7p per share proposed (2019: 10.0p) including 15.30p for supplementary dividend (2019: 5.8p) giving a total dividend for the year of 21.07p per share'

That is a shame Matt, it is an interesting plant, which is quite pretty, but it can be rather toxic if not handled correctly......

Doze, doxorubicin is off patent, the preCision form is patentable, it is what makes this such a good prospect.

I agree Urbansea, I originally invested primarily for the oncology side and their preCision conjugates. Whist I have occasionally moaned a bit about delivery on the diagnostics, they have been timely on this work.
I also had not realised until today that they will not need Phase 3 trials which will really accelerate the timeline going forward.

No idea!
I have looked for papers on this but have not found anything useful. There are papers comparing the different sampling methods but the ones I have found use pcr for the analysis which does not tell you about the proteins.
I searched for papers reporting analysis using MS as it should give a better idea of the proteins they are seeing. There are some looking at swabs and others at saliva/gargle solutions. Because they all have used trypsin digests and none have done absolute quantitative analysis it is hard to draw any meaningful conclusions , (with tryptic digests the MS response can depend as much on the peptide you are looking at as the abundance of it, you get more peptides with larger proteins so more chance of having ones that give a good signal ).
It would not be hard to do the analysis. If Adeptrix have an N Bams, as the CEO indicated in his last talk , then you could look at both S and N in a range of sample types, you can buy in labelled peptides as standards to give a reasonably quantified response.

Cheers Mowzerroks- please remember it is only my opinion/interpretation and may not be correct.

I also apologies for my all too frequent lapses of intelligible English, spelling and grammar (which I only seem to be able to see after I have posted!)

Robotics - fair point, it is hard to increase sensitivity when you are getting near LoQ's . If you think that 1 ct increase is a doubling of the signal it is quite hard to achieve this by LFT's . If, for example, the N and S tests have similar sensitivity then combining them (all other things being equal) you would only increase the sensitivity by 1 ct. Using two signal affimers would achieve the same results (so you would have 3 that bound S1, two of these would be reporters). Combine both methods and you only go to the equivalence of 2 ct's

Doze.- You can pcr from 'dead' things it only needs a template, they have sequenced (same thing in practice) from stuff over 1m years old. Protein can survive even longer.

The same would apply to the N half-life which I have not seen anything about and could be different than that for S1.

I have read a couple of papers looking at pfu's and ct and there are just so many outliers it is hard to draw clear conclusions especially as the numbers get lower.
The argument against pcr is that it picks up residual rna (which is actually quite labile), we do not know yet the half life of the antigens that the S1 affimers binds (it does not need to be entire S1) in relation to being able to isolate viable virions (i.e. a pfu) from the same samples.

The only common measure until they are trialled side by side is by ct numbers and s/s (which is itself referenced by ct number). I agree this is not perfect but what else is there? AS has never said it is the best LFT only the best S1 LFT.
It is clearly a competitive product, but there is no evidence yet to prove it is the best LFT.

I thought it interesting that he addressed the S/N question (does he look at the BB?). The comment about solubility was reasonable, not only is S1 on the outside it has lots of sugar groups which would make it more soluble (it is why I asked about the effect of these on movement in the LFT when he was answering questions one time ). Others have managed to get assays with N working, so it is possible to do it with this protein. As you say there is not a great deal of difference between the best N LFT and Avacta's S1 LFT so it may be 'swings and roundabouts' what you lose on the abundance you gain on the solubility.

They were making the point about spending time optimising buffers in the rns, so if there was a problem with artificial samples having them in VTM could have caused been the cause.

We know that it works well on clinical samples so I am quite happy with that, although I am still surprised that, if it was mainly about getting the buffers etc right it has taken quite so long to develop the test.

Sorry RD, re-reading you mean had an active infection at the time.
This has happened - if you look at the early vaccination data you only get protection after a couple of weeks, they can only know this if people are infected just before or just after the vaccination.

I believe in France they proposed only vaccinating people who have been infected with one dose . In Spain they proposed not vaccinating healthy under 50's who have been infected for the next 6 months.
I am not sure if this became official policy or was just a suggestion.
I think that the tests can be more expensive than the vaccines so providing you have enough vaccine testing first is not worthwhile.

'GCSEs and A-levels cancelled in England by the pandemic will be replaced by grades decided by teachers, the exams watchdog Ofqual has confirmed.'
Further confirmation that there will be plenty of applicants this year....

'GCSEs and A-levels cancelled in England by the pandemic will be replaced by grades decided by teachers, the exams watchdog Ofqual has confirmed.'
This will ensure that there are plenty of applicants this year.

Capacity limit is now at 50% for Aquariums & Zoos (up from25%), transitioning to normal levels May 1st. This will help Shark Reef Aquarium revenues.