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There are several concerns re the pension liabilities of Carclo.

1 LDIs have been used by some pension funds but which pose existential risks for them at the moment. In some cases pension funds have run leveraged exposure to interest rates. There could be massive losses if they close out these outsize risks by Friday as recommended by the Bank of England governor - or even more if they do not.

2 Carclo still run defined benefit pension schemes when most private sector companies switched them to defined contribution funds decades ago. These funds pose risks to companies like Carclo.

3 Carclo refers to some pension liabilities which are inflation adjusted. This means that pension liabilities could be up by 10 percent in the last year just because of these adjustments.

4 The Carclo pension fund paid out £9 million in pensions in a year when Carclo only made £3 million top-ups to the fund. The fund would therefore be £6 million short even if the pension fund had not lost money due to LDI risks or declining investment values - or if the fund liabilities had not increased due to UK inflation.

For seethree: www.fda.gov/patients/fast-track-breakthrough-therapy-accelerated-approval-priority-review/fast-track

Slide 13 from the presentation shows that six times the Precision dose in pre-clinical trials produced 18 times the dox concentration in the tumour. If this proportion is the same in the clinical trials then just the standard Precision dose administered will create about three times the dox concentration in the tumour. This would be because in standard dox the drug gets absorbed as it flows throughout the body. In the trial much of the Precision dose keeps circulating until it gets absorbed in the tumour.

This Precision dose has already been cleared in the trial. At three times the dose in the tumour the Precision drug is already much more effective than the standard of care dose currently used.

More trial data are required to confirm this but this interpretation will not be lost on the professional observers attending the presentation next week.

Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, has said Moderna will consider acquisitions but only of information pharma companies ie only companies manipulating DNA or RNA. On that basis I do not think Avacta would qualify.

An acquisition of Avacta if AVA6000 trials are successful is probably inevitable but from another company.

Interesting move.

The book, A Shot to Save the World, covers the development of the Moderna covid vaccine in detail. The vaccine was developed without the virus itself and the project was completed within 2020.

https://www.modernatx.com/pipeline

The Moderna project pipeline is mostly but not entirely vaccines.

Stephane Bancel says any acquisitions will be of information medicines which I understand to mean digital medicines built around DNA or RNA sequences.

The Moderna

Yahoo Finance app

You can set up several portfolios - say a UK portfolio and a US portfolio or a watchlist etc and include shares from around the world.

Good post Runner.

Plan A was to raise funds via the LFTs. These still sell at high prices in the US but Avacta has not obtained approval there. In the future patients planning to use Pavlovid to treat a covid infection will need to know whether they have covid and so will need a stock of reliable LFTs well into the future. Pavlovid is priced at over $500 per treatment course. The US will get the lion’s share of Pavlovid when production first ramps so this is the key territory for LFTs this year.

Plan B was to raise funds via a PreCision licence when the technology had proved itself. That option may be available now depending on results.

If Avacta can’t manage either of these and the PreCision results are good they may be planning yet another fund raise. But if the PreCision news is good they should release those results first and get the share price up before dumping the fund raise on investors. We will find out in February if Avacta are getting their act together or continue to screw things up. The outfit arranging the three days of meetings look incompetent. They can’t even state the dates of the meetings the same way in two places on the same page.

What does Myles mean by “the large placing?”

That’s true and is a big positive. The downside is that it is Avacta and if there is a pothole they may trip over it because they are looking somewhere else. The FDA ask a lot more questions other than does the drug work and another amateurish approach would mean those questions are ignored and not prepared for. We must hope that the team responsible for AVA6000 are better than the team working on the LFT.

That is the probability of success for past applications to the FDA, not the chance for Avacta’s new drug. But it does give a clue to the value of the prize for humanity.

The senior Covid scientist Sir John Bell has warned British manufacturers to “stop complaining and try harder” to make working lateral flow tests, after they claimed widespread shortages were caused by undue reliance on China.

Sir John, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University and one of the Government’s leading advisers on the pandemic, hit back at complaints that domestic suppliers have not been able to secure approval for their tests.

He said there had been “quite a lot of noise from British manufacturers of lateral flow antigen tests”.

“But British companies have been, with one exception, universally unsuccessful at making these tests,” Sir John added….

www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/01/08/british-firms-must-try-harder-make-covid-tests-says-sir-john/

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From the Telegraph: The UK imported £40.5bn more from China than it exported to the country in the year to June 2021, according to data from the Department for International Trade, a huge increase from the £11.8bn deficit in the previous 12 months.

This imbalance was driven by a 38pc surge in goods imports from China, while UK exports also declined by 34pc.

From the Telegraph: The UK imported £40.5bn more from China than it exported to the country in the year to June 2021, according to data from the Department for International Trade, a huge increase from the £11.8bn deficit in the previous 12 months.

This imbalance was driven by a 38pc surge in goods imports from China, while UK exports declined by 34pc.

Starbright’s version is the best although I would remove on earth. This is my edit:

“Why are we spending billions of taxpayers’ money on lateral flow tests from China when more accurate alternatives are available from British companies?”

BoJo could have sent similar sums to all British universities and develop a thriving UK diagnostics industry. All for the same money sent to this generous gentleman.

It is painful to see a Scottish Nationalist MP is the only one who has figured this out and is standing up for British industry. What are the other 700 plus doing?

If the government had a levelling up agenda they could have assisted in the construction of LFT production sufficient for the UK and export markets. But they have done a good job to level up in China. Maybe the Chinese government will reward those who played their part.

What has ABDX not done?

We do not know what Medusa would have done if the Avacta LFT was ready in mid-2020. They might well have set up manufacturing plants around the world along with worldwide distribution arrangements. It is difficult to justify more than cottage industry arrangements 18 months later at this stage of the pandemic.