Member Info for Monkshood

Agreed looks good. With more returning to workplaces and the outbreaks that have been occurring it can only be good for the business.

They run a tight ship, although revenues were 'materially impacted ' net debt has been reduced and they are setup to expand their pledge book going forward.
FCA - still unresolved but moving forwards.
Very happy with this update.

RD, Interesting that have have affirmers for EGFR, that the the group of proteins that look to have a key role in sar cov2 infection signalling that I mentioned at the w/e.

Thanks RK, lets hope that the instrument base turns out to be larger than has been indicated to me so the demand turns out to be to the up side.
What you may be interested in, one of the key targets that was identified from the work I outlined above is the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). I believe this also has a key role in some cancers and was why they were lots of approved drugs available to test. It fits closely to what Adeptrix currently target and shows another avenue where the companies have synergies.

Ok, now some more interesting stuff. I was listening to a talk today where they were looking at the proteome and phosphoproteome changes in cells in response to the virus, the method looks at quantitative changes in the level of ‘all’ proteins. Various metabolic pathways were induced, as were specific signalling pathways, the latter involving phosphorylation (this is where an amino acid in a protein has phosphate added to activate/deactiveate the protein). The work looked at targeting these pathways with inhibitors which was then shown to stop the virus replication. The nice part was the inhibitors (drugs) were all FDA approved ones.
With the pathways identified this is exactly the type of analysis that Adeptrix is great for monitoring (and was originally targeting in its marketing). It is where I can see a great future for the collaboration , Avacta can quickly generate affirmers to enable such a workflow. It is not high throughput mass testing but this type of analysis that I think could be developed between the companies going forward.
More of a money spinner could be development of multiplex MS for ELISA replacement -as I discussed previously.
Sorry to those who think that I am being too negative about the covid BAMS, I think it will be a good test, but just not used for mass testing (or to be clear, testing the masses…. ) It is almost ahead of its time with regard the availability of an instrument base. What I am hopeful for is that it will facilitate a long-term working relationship between the two companies going forward which will be profitable. Ideally, I would love to see them become one company as there is lots of potential for the approach and scope for so much synergy between them.

DOH85, You ask how, as a longer term holder, I can ‘point out reasons not to be positive’. If you look at what I have posted it may seem that way, but it is relative to some of the ramping that is made about the Sar cov2 BAMS test, but not about Avacta in general, including the LFT and the oncology work.
I say it as I see it, because I would rather there were, what I believe, realistic expectations than those that have been exaggerated by some on this BB and are unlikely to be meet.
If you look at the original rns about BAMS it was about additional capacity not replacing rtPCR (this is what they hope the LFT will do).
So in answer to RK ‘I think from what I have been asking there are a huge number of mass spectrometers around the UK NHS ‘ - I have talked to someone from the MS industry yesterday, they have been in it longer than me (which is 20years) and get around many sites. They echoed what I was saying on Thursday (and before), there are actually not that many MS’s in hospitals, those that are, are mainly triple quads (not single as I thought, although neither would be appropriate for the proposed BAMS assay) and they’re very few Maldi ToF’s. Hospitals find it hard to raise the cash for the instruments they do have (triple quad’s cost around £300k), and struggle to find and retain, skilled operators. The instruments that they do have are usually working 24/7.
Maldi ToF’s, used for the BAMS, are found more widely in Uni’s and pharma’s – AZ, GSK, Porton, etc. There are maldi ToF’s currently being used for analysis/measurement of Sars cov2 - for research – not sure of the details but I guess they would have a use for the BAMS kits early on. Internationally, I am not sure, there may be more maldi ToF’s in hospitals in Germany and the US but they are not going to be a standard item in most places .
I was offered a second hand maldi ToF for just over £100K! so new with all of the trimmings you are probably looking at a minimum £200K, so a fairly large cap ex, plus you need some robotics for the prep and a skilled operator. I do not see hospitals all rushing out to buy one in the next few months.

I had been holding off opening a holding here again (I jumped out in Feb) but started buying again now
Talking to some students who were due to start next year I was surprised at how many were not deferring, mainly as they saw that getting a temp job or travel was going to be problematic. Also the uni's have been saying that they would not defer places just because of covid, so next year would see a lot of competition for places.
What really swung it was taking to someone in admin at one of the top london uni's (an area most important for DIGS), I found out that they have had a big increase in the number of Chinese applicants for Post Grad courses to the extent that they will be pushed for places on the courses next year. They have all paid up deposits so these are not speculative applications.. Not sure why this is - may be the tensions with the US and Australia is having an impact, I had been expecting the latter to be the beneficiary extra students due to covid but surprisingly it may be the UK.

It is going to be a very interesting set of results. They were clearly very busy early on but I wonder if this has been continued.
I know a few people working in hospitals who say it has been very quite as most routine work has been cancelled. I would expect that a hospitals typical mix of product usage may be quite different this year, so it will be interesting to see how this impacts on Tristel.
It is hard to imagine that it has been anything other than a good half as they cover a lot of territories which have been at different phases of the epidemic. Also many countries have had lower rates than us so I guess these will have returned to more regular hospital treatment where cleaning/sterility is going to be an even bigger issue than before.
If it slips much more I will be topping up again.

If you wanted the best possible test I would use pulldowns with antibodies /affirmers then PCR . This way you get the purification then you amplify the signal, PCR's are more widespread and cheaper than maldi ToF's
I do think that the lateral flow test will be a big success though.

RK, I have seen you state this before, but not all Mass Specs are the same. If they develop a method for a maldi ToF then that does not mean you can run it on a quad MS (one of the most common, with only unit m/z accuracy ), or a triple quad or QToF or an Orbi etc.
They are using swabs - so no different in sample collection to the newer processing by rtPCR . Depending on the final method used there may be more sample prep steps than PCR , as I indicated above , increased steps can lead to quality issues - for example how well a tryptic digest works.
I have held avacta fro before covid and can see its long term potential but I do not believe in constantly ramping it especially in relation to the BAMS test. As I have said before, I think that there is lots of long term potential for BAMS and hopefully a long term collaboration between the companies ,but I am still sceptical of the size of market for this application in relation to covid.

I like the approach but I am still am not sure how widespread or available the equipment is. have asked my contacts but they all have been furloughed and are unavailable.
If you had a maldi ToT/ToF then you could get very good results (but this is more research level kit) . If you just use maldi ToF with a trypic digest you would get a peptide fingerprint (no daughter ions) but that is OK as the samples are 'cleaned' using the pulldowns.
There are several steps with this approach -pulldown, wash, deglysoylate (to remove sugar decorations on spike proteins) reduce, acetylate then digest, I think this one of the drawbacks . They may look for the intact spike protein - less sample prep but possibly more complex analysis as the data would need deconvoluting and you would still need to deal with glycosylation.
I am also not sure what they are using as controls/standards but will try and find out as this can affect the quality of the output.

Note- you only get fragments if you have MS/MS - not just maldi ToF, this gives you accurate m/z but no fragment ions.

Yes, you do get multiply charged peptides, proteins have a charge envelope which needs deconvoluting.
If you are doing MS/MS on tryptic peptides, the peptides will be at least doubly charged (typsin cuts at the basic AA’s plus they pick up a proton in the source) the nice part, is the daughter ions are usually singly charged, so if you select your transitions (parent/daughter ion pairs) carefully the daughter ions can be larger than the parent ions. (because the MS is looking at charge to mass ratio) this give a very reduced background as most other molecules get ‘smaller’ when you fragment them not 'larger...'
I have had some interesting information from Adeptrix. They have the ability to use anti S1, anti nuclear envelop, and an anti nuceocapsid protein for the pull downs (and possibly two others). They can use all of these together. I am not sure if they are all affirmers. They can then either look at intact proteins or do on bead digests to give peptides. They also could look at viral lipids. Furthermore, they indicate that they could also look for markers of inflation from the epithelia cells which are also in the samples. I guess that this will be like the strips, they will get out an initial working version then improve and elaborate the assay over time.

Their largest case towards the end of last year was a 40m tax avoidance case (although they indicated that something like this may, in practice be settled for 10m) - I wonder if this has now been settled as it would be significant enough for the delay. Looking at previous results they are often conservative with the 'fair value' to the tune of 50% or more, so it could potentially be worth an extra 5m on the years income.
All supposition, but we should find out next week.

Yesterdays purchases by Kerry Wood looks a bullish indicator of future news as well.

"I am pleased that the test development has progressed from a working initial design .....' said Klaus though gritted teeth...

Are they announcing their results then? Usually they flag this a week in advance (have I missed the rns?)

I think I understand now, they give a' fair value to cases in process' so I assume that one or more of these is to conclude with an actual value which differs from their initial estimate. Is this correct?

What I do not understand is why an announcement now would affect last years results (to March) rather than this years.

Thanks, interesting. I can see the overlap.