Member Info for Monkshood

Not my area, but I thought that single /triple quads were more common in hospitals , usually used for small molecule analysis in the format of LC-MS or LC-MS/MS. You can have a maldi front end to these but it is less common than electro spray.
They are not clear about the details of how the sars cov 2 analysis will work. Most of the blurb from Adeptrix talks about digest then pull down of peptides. The other option is pull down the virons then digest - this could potentially also open it up to use of other MS's . There is also not any discussion of protein glycosylation which may need addressing . None of these are significant problems, once the assay is released it will be interesting to look at the method to see what they do.

Orphidian, I do have experience of doing protein quant (in a research environment) using most of these techniques.
The MS can replace the need for LC, however the matrix effects can become too severe without some sort of sample cleanup/pre-separation, this is where the affirmers fit in as they can enrich and purify the target proteins and so reduce the background.
The discussion about other biomarkers is in interesting one and relavant to Avacta. At the moment in a medical situation many proteins are measured (singularly) using elisa tests or similar, using MS there is the potential to multiplex these so you could monitor many proteins from one sample at the same time. The main problem is that the proteins used as biomarkers are typically at low abundance. it is easy to envisage how affirmers could fit into this approach using a multiple array to purify and enrich for the target proteins.
I don't see the sar cov2 MS test being a huge money earner, but I do think that the collaboration and awareness that it raises will open other future, larger, avenues of revenue for the company.

Yes, I am invested here. I was in originally for the cancer work. I was lucky enough to get most when it was cheap (lowest was 14p). I have sold some on the way up as I don't like to have much more than 10% in one company having been caught out in the past. Boring, yes, but I don't stress when the price drops!
Technically I can see no reason why the MS analysis will not work, there are sar cov2 peptides which are diagnostic and have been shown to detectable by MS from saliva, the main thing will be what it costs and the available instrument capacity relative to hospitals running PCR tests.
I have no practical experience of what is involved in making the strip tests, but like everyone one else here can see the value in a simple test of this type...

Huum … was that all a bit too nerdy??

Is just the usual rampy it is going to £10 so 'buy avacta' better ;o)

For the IS (internal standards) you can either add tags of different molecular weight to a control and your sample, this is after trypsin digest or you could add a chemically synthesised heavy peptide (expensive?); or, (before digestion) add a synthetic protein labelled with Arg/Lys amino acids containing heavy isotopes C13/N15, this is a better IS as it controls for the digestion but will need more work in advance. Tryspin cuts at these two amino acids so a 'tryptic peptide' will always be labelled this way. The MS will measure the ration of the light (sample) to heavy (standard) peptides.

BAMS is just form of affinity purification (that's where the affirmers fit in) with MS detection. The last (MS) bit can be on different platforms but I think they are referring to using maldi ToF . The maldi bit, is how you get non volatile peptides to ionise and the MS is what you are using as a detector. If you do it this way then you do not need to separate the peptides first by LC which makes it a lot faster. (ToF = time of flight - a type of Mass Spec)
The problem with MS is the effect of the matrix - no not the film... but the other 'stuff' in the sample which can enhance or supress a signal. There are also several steps in the sample prep , it will need deglycosylating (unless the specific peptides being detected have no glysoylation sites) and digesting with trypsin to give pieces small enough for MS.
They will be working on which peptides are te best to use and optimising the other steps to get the best results.

@Richob. Do hospitals have lots of spare capacity on their MS's? This is a genuine question .the triple quads used in most hospitals are working 24/7 from what I have heard but no idea about maldi tof's if that is what is proposed.

@Ophidian, what do they use as an standard (internal) to allow for extraction losses and ion suppression?

I think that they said that this ( BAMS method with Adeptrix) was intended mainly for hospitals - not sure how many have the 'toys ' or capacity on them to do this but it would be fairly quick and cheap if they do have. I think that the test strips will be the preferred option but there should be almost no problems getting the MS method to work and so is a more certain option.

Sorry! it has been shown that you can detect specific sar cov 2 peptides by LC MS in crude acetone precipitated saliva preparations. Essentially the affirms will be used to pull down the virons which will give a faster, cleaner and more concentrated sample than a crude acetone precipitation.
There is no reason why this would not work. There are several options for how this is then analysed (for novocyte lovers you could even use pcr!) but I believe the plan is to use a type of MS (Maldi) although other types are possible. Depending on whether they want just a +/- result or a more quantitative result will determine the type of controls used in the analysis.
The best is to add peptides containing heavy isotopes and look at the ratio of these to the unlabelled ones in te samples.

As you can see marker peptides for sars cov2 in crude ppts from saliva by tryptic digest and LCMS/MS there is no reason to expect that an upfront pull down method would cause any problems and should be quite straight forward. I believe that they were proposing using Maldi but they could use LC-MS/MS if they needed more sensitivity although throughput may be slower .
Not sure if they are just going for a +/- or will use labelled peptides as an IS to give a quantitative output, anyone know?

bamb, mto have >20k cleaners in the UK, but I am not that keen on the company so not invested their.

I copied and pasted this from this mornings Final Results rns!

Fair enough TO, I do that with some.
However, I think that they are being overly cautious in the presentation and agree with one of the callers who was asking about them selling their factory build's to other companies (even though the ceo missed the point!). I know several people putting up factory builds near me and a friends loft conversion was done in this way. I believe that this has a good long term future so I am happy to stay in for now.

There has been a steady reduction in the shorts on the asx through this quarter, it held above 5% for quite a while but is now consistently moving down. I think that the shorts have had a large part in keeping the share price repressed by stifling in raises in the share price (any rise was always followed by a large increase in shorts to the extent of approx 25% of daily trades), so I view this as very positive and an indication that the share price should start to rerate nearer to that of its peers. To put it into context nearly all shorts were taken out from September at <80p .

From their agm statement
We have recently launched a new service, FiltaShield, a bacterial cleansing service that can eliminate any traces of COVID-19 bacteria and provide protection for 30 days. I would be concerned that they do not understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria...….

Second £10m tranche of buyback to start, FTSE 250 beckons and a nice solid trading update.

That has been a nice rerate so far today. Still so way to go yet....

Nav down 2.3%, I have brought back into pin after selling out earlier in the year. They are taking a fairly conservative approach to the nav and the discount gives plenty of further headroom. One to tuck away as a long term holding.

I managed to top up @ 261.98- a rare occurrence for me to manage to get in at the bottom...
The CFO buying at 301 is a good sign. Much of the missed targets are still assets on the books, most houses that were waiting to be sold are still likely to go ahead. They said that the land sales are now further down the road (ie not the next quarter) but it is still an asset to be sold later on. I like that they can focus on the local authority housing if the private sales slow, they also have their factory built houses which they acknowledged will be easier for construction with social distancing.