Member Info for Monkshood

Ophidian- Thanks, that was the data I commented on before (where it shows that they will not pick up the D614G mutation in a tryptic digest).
The method described is just on recombinant S1. I assume that an assay would be capturing a mix of intact virions as well as detached S1 proteins, although this will depend on whether they disrupt the virions first.
What they still have not demonstrated, is how well the assay works over a large number of saliva sample, whether analysing the intact S1 peptide (rather than a tryptic fragment) is good enough and the LOD/LOQ of digested/undigested assays.

If it works well enough without the digest then it is clearly a very quick assay.

I am rather surprised at just how long it has taken to get things to this stage. They must have had the beads attached ages ago, why not present methodology and data on how it can be used as a screen? It would be good to know sensitivity, even if it was just from spiking the S1 into saliva samples, plus some limited data from ‘real samples’ .

what a cheery pair you are :0)
They put out a trading in November in 2017 when they had strong trading; they are considering one this year, I take this as a positive.

It looks like they maintained a 25% increase in YoY sales through September, following on from the same in August and 59% in July. If this continues, then they will be looking at sales of around £400m in the next quarter.

Yes, even if you strip out all of the exceptional inflows and repayment of JRS it still leaves them with 20M net cash after what is, traditionally, their weakest quarter.

Apologies Cautious, I did not explain it well, by 'more details' I meant of the detection technique.

I have doubled up my holdings here over the past week. Hopefully at the next update, we will see a similar bounce to that of rfx today. It is hard to see how this will not return at least 50% over the next couple of years.

From Ramsdens trading update-
'We have made good further progress with jewellery retail both in store and online and have capitalised on increased consumer demand for competitively priced, high-quality jewellery and luxury branded watches.'
This fits with the results of WOSG which also showed a demand in this sector.
As expected FX down but they have relatively more exposure to this than HAT (a reason I prefer HAT at the moment)

I have been told that HAT may release a trading update in November.

Doze, that is pretty much the same for all of the tests. Typically the samples come in in a 15ml screw top tube which then needs to be transferred manually to a 96 well microtiter plate. After this the process of adding reagents, wash solutions etc can be automated. Because you have a signal amplification step with ELISA it can potentially be more sensitive than the LFT.
What your list use does highlight, is how widely used the technique is (and your list was just looking at pathogens not blood tests etc), this returns to the point I made yesterday , if Affimers do offer a significant advantage over the use of antibodies in diagnostics (which seems to be the case) then there is a very profitable long-term future in licencing them for use in these tests.

Not an expert in this area. The trick is with the secondary antibody/ linked detection methodology.
Roche-'The reaction mixture is aspirated into the measuring cell where the
microparticles are magnetically captured onto the surface of the
electrode. Unbound substances are then removed with
ProCell/ProCell M/ProCell II M. Application of a voltage to the electrode
then induces chemiluminescent emission which is measured by a
photomultiplier'
Avacta's will use a more standard, enzyme linked colorimetric based detection which would be slower, but is a more widely used technique.
Looking further down the road, if Affimers do offer the advantage that they appear to, then there will be a large market in licencing to companies such as Roche for their own assays.

This is the space that the ELISA test will be competing in-
The Roche ELISA is an 18 min lab based test. I would imagine that their systems can use any similar ELISA based assay. This gives an idea of time and throughput of this type of analysis.

Basel, 13 October 2020 - Roche (SIX: RO, ROG; OTCQX: RHHBY) announced today that it intends to launch a high-volume SARS-CoV-2 Antigen test as an aid in the diagnosis of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. The test is planned to be made available at the end of 2020 for markets accepting the CE Mark. Roche also intends to file for Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
The Elecsys SARS-CoV-2 Antigen immunoassay runs on all cobas e immunochemistry analysers which are widely available around the world. These fully automated systems can provide test results in 18 minutes for a single test (excluding time for sample collection, transport, and preparation), with a throughput of up to 300 tests per hour from a single analyser, depending on the analyser.
Further details - (and on Investigate- daily announcements)
https://www.fda.gov/media/137605/download

The increase may also be in part because 'SDL on Monday said it has secured a long-term contract to support the US Navy's rationalisation, reduction and centralisation strategy.'
https://www.sdl.com/about/news/2020/sdl-wins-long-term-enterprise-agreement-with-us-navy/

Looks like my assumption was correct. Nice move up today now that the uncertainty has been removed, glad I took the opportunity to do a final top up Friday. I thought that there may be more votes against from rws holders but with only 0.25% it implies the II's see the merger in a very positive light.

It is hard to say for sure until details of the assay for screening are known. If you are drug testing athletes by MS then you need really accurate quant, so you would use internal standards, for a covid screen, orders of magnitude would probably suffice.

Pigster has covered some aspects of the quant using MS. There are a few other provisos, are the affimers beads in excess, efficiency of binding, downstream processing losses, linearly of the response at the concentration of S1 being detected.
How relevant some of these will be will depend on the final assay, for example if it includes tryptic digests then the efficiency of the digest will influence the results.
The gold standard in MS quant is to included a 'heavy' standards (in this case it would this would be a C13 N15 labelled S1 protein) as early into the process as possible, you then look at the ratio of the labelled to unlabelled peaks. I really cannot see them doing this for screening though, so I think it will be more of a +/- semi quant method.

From the Telegraph
'Coronavirus is driving a “white van man” boom as the pandemic boosts demand for home deliveries, fuelling a spike in the price of second hand commercial vehicles used by couriers.'
Should be good for the company.

As far as I can see either manufactures maldi ToF's would be fine, the S1 peak was shown at 80k m/z which should be within the range of the Bruker Microflex used as Biotypers in the path labs.

I think that another aspect will be the correlation between how contagious someone is and a positive test. If the presence of spike protein correlates better than RNA then BAMS/ELISA may be a more useful test. I have not seen a study of this (although it has been mentioned in the media) and was alluded to in their last presentation, where there was a slide showing how rtPCR was detecting sars cov2 beyond the infective period. If the window between a positive test and being non contagious can be more accurately gauged then it would save many days of unnecessary isolation.

Whist I agree with your sentiment about monetising there assay-
At the start of the epidemic, in about February, I looked at Ncyt and thought 'it's just a rtPCR' reaction what's special about that... I also saw some data from Southampton in early April about using interferon and thought that's interesting but not that surprising ... Fortunately, I was already in Avacta for their cancer work so I did not make the same mistake here!
There are lots of ways of processing the BAMS, it may be they just want to show it is useful for a broader range of research rather than just screening. Having seen this paper I think that they will go down the intact protein route for screening as it cuts out a lot of steps, some of which (eg tryptic digest) takes time and can be a bit variable.

@Pigster- Thanks for flagging this paper.
The method in the paper is cheap and fairly quick. However the samples are more complex as other proteins are precipitated. This was not too much of an issue for the small number of samples they looked at, but potentially it could be. If you are using saliva you may have differences due to the microflora in the mouth or differences depending on what someone has just eaten. Another issue not addressed, is how good is this at differentiating samples containing other coronaviruses? Using an affinity purification method (BAMS) can negate or minimise these problems.
Personally , I am not a big fan of acetone precipitation used in the method as I find it often gives poor and rather variable recoveries.

What I really like is that they are looking at the intact S1 peptide with no tryptic digestion (the MS profile shown in the last Avacta presentation was a tryptic digest). There is no reason I can see therefore, that this cannot be applied to the BAMS assay which means that you get an equally fast prep which results in a cleaner sample that can then be analysed very quickly. Another positive is that the S1 protein also seemed to be the best marker and that is what the affimer binds. This makes it a much more viable screening method, rather than just a research tool.
As they say in the paper-
‘S1 peaks showed clear elevation in levels for the SARS-CoV-2 virus culture spiked samples …..This marker alone could perform as a specific Corona virus MALDI ToF MS screening test with near 100% detection and specificity at 10^3 -10^4 PFU SARSCoV-2 virions in a 10ml gargle/saliva sample.’

SDL voted in favour , but there has been no announcement from RWS. I did email and ask, but the Director of Communications did not 'communicate ' back....
Given the price movements on the original announcement, I think that both companies should have put something out straight after the votes. As both share price ticked up this afternoon I assume that it was passed in both votes.