Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
From the financial statements i infer most of the business is equipment for manufacturing LFTs. Beza says the factories are operating round the clock. Right now there is a shortage of LFTs. So Carclo should be raking in the sales. My concern is that they may still not be generating sufficient profit for a business sector which will probably not continue at this scale indefinitely. And the H1 profits are massively exceeded by the borrowings and the pension deficits. Does anyone know if they are still providing defined benefit pensions, the error which got them into trouble with pensions?
Who can figure out what is going on re Microtox? This is my take. There is an unstated number of orders for a product which should be a market success. Preassembly is planned for China but no contract has yet been signed. Final assembly is planned for Cork but there is not much to assemble. There are no plans to manufacture in other locations.
This post is to suggest that Myles McNulty should consider putting himself forward as a director of Avacta.
I understand he has a significant shareholding in the company and could ensure that the interests if the shareholders are taken more fully into account by the board. He has an exceptional analytical and enquiring mind and should be able to spot and prevent many of the missteps the company is prone to take before they are taken.
Avacta needs many more institutional shareholders with significant holdings. The strategy for the four main platforms all need a clearer focus so that the shareholders get a fair share of the earnings the platforms will hopefully create.
Even now, Dr Smith is thinking of licensing out AVA 6000 for a licence fee of 5 to 10 percent, along with some conditional fees presumably when most or all of the clinical trials are completed. BioNTech struck its deal with Pfizer for 50 percent of the gross profits before the clinical trials started.
When the company raised funds last year the share price halved as news spread ahead of any public announcement. Then the AIM dealers handed the new shares to their clients at a massively discounted price who then mostly dumped the shares onto the market as soon as they were able to. Ruane were the only institutional holder picked up at the time.
We are necessarily in the hands of the science as for as the therapeutical platforms are concerned. But if the science works we are still in the hands of those who control the assets. Those are the same people who handled the LFT development since the covid pandemic began. The science worked but Avacta is still struggling to get approvals and relies on people who sit on their hands or want other LFTs to succeed for personal reasons.
So I hope Myles will consider this proposal and consider what he can do both for the benefit of himself, all shareholders and future sufferers of cancer and covid.
Good update Myles.
Point Biopharma have confirmed the planned timeline for the introduction into the clinic of PNT 2004.
Https://investors.pointbiopharma.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/POINT-RACA-Investor-Call-Presentation.pdf
Jive turkey - that’s right. Stéphane Bancel said that in the Q2 earnings call. Do we know how affimers are created? Could that process be considered as digital/information? Moderna will certainly have enough cash to make several acquisitions this year and next year.
Point Biopharma have licensed Avacta’s TMAC technology and is now a publicly traded company. Their TMAC under development includes two pre|cision molecules, a radioactive warhead and an affimer checkpoint inhibitor in a single molecule. In yesterday’s update this is what they reported:
PNT2004: PNT2004 is a FAP-a targeted radioligand in preclinical development for the treatment of solid tumors. FAP-a is highly expressed on a wide range of solid tumors but absent in all other healthy tissues, offering the potential for a tumor agnostic therapy that could enable the precise treatment of a variety of solid tumors independent of tissue origin. POINT is continuing preclinical studies and expects to initiate clinical development for this program in 2022.
Tumor Microenvironment (TME) Targeting Technology: POINT’s FAP-a activated prodrug technology attempts to limit a ligand’s ability to bind with receptors on healthy cells, to prevent off-target delivery and improve therapeutic index. Currently in the pre-clinical stage, POINT’s TME Targeting Technology is sub-licensed from Avacta, who has named it pre | CISION™ (an Avacta trademark).
Good stuff scardey. I recommend you also write to Jeremy Hunt MP, chair of the Heath and Social Care Select Committee.
https://members.parliament.uk/member/1572/contact
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The letter, published in the BMJ, states: “It is undisputed that lateral flow tests (LFDs) cannot detect the lower levels of virus among individuals in early infection. There is a high chance that infected contacts in a classroom may be infectious before they are detected as positive by a LFD test.”
The scientists said they were also concerned that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently banned the Innova lateral flow test that is being used in schools, citing risk to health and “further spread of the virus”.
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said yesterday it had reassessed the Innova test following the FDA ban and extended approval until August.
Graeme Tunbridge, the MHRA director of devices, said: “We have now concluded our review of the risk assessment and are satisfied that no further action is necessary or advisable at this time.”
However, the Royal Statistical Society said the regulators’ assessment needed to extend beyond physical safety to the consequences of false positives and false negatives.
“The full range of consequences, from liberalised behaviour to deprivation of liberty, should be considered,” it said.
Around 19,000 infections were picked up by lateral flow devices in secondary school pupils between March and June, but despite new guidelines saying cases must be confirmed with a PCR test, only half were checked.
Of the 9,546 that were checked, nearly one third came back negative, meaning almost 3,000 tests had to be removed from the reported figures.
Experts warned that false positives made tracking the pandemic harder.
Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said: “In evidence-based medicine we call this a problem of noise, and it’s difficult to see what is really going on amid this noise.
“I would be ignoring lateral flow testing and be focusing on PCR positivity to get a true picture of the pandemic, and that shows cases are only going up in small incremental measures.”
An education department spokesman said daily contact testing as a replacement for self-isolation would be reviewed at the end of June. The Department of Health did not comment.
Professor Sir Andrew Pollard opines without the facts.
From the DT: Professor suggests impact of virus on education could be reason for rolling out vaccine to children
Sarah KnaptonHarry de Quetteville
CORONAVIRUS testing in schools is hugely disruptive and should be suspended, experts have said, as it emerged that up to 60 per cent of “positive” tests a week are coming back negative when checked.
Under plans to keep schools open, more than 50?million lateral flow tests have been carried out on youngsters leading to thousands of pupils and their social bubbles being forced to self-isolate for 10 days.
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But analysis of Test and Trace data by The Daily Telegraph shows that in secondary schools, one third of lateral flow tests checked against the gold-standard Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test have come back negative. In one week in March, it rose to 60 per cent.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, who led the Oxford vaccine programme, warned that mass testing was leading to such huge disruption in schools that it might be worth vaccinating youngsters in order to stop the chaos.
“If children are not severely affected, if they’re not major drivers of transmission, the testing itself is picking up lots of cases, causing classes to be sent home and so on,” he said.
“We’ve got to get to a point where we’re not impacting on education. And I think that impact on education could be a reason for vaccination.”
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is currently deciding whether to recommend jabs for children, amid fears the risk may outweigh the benefit.
Children and teenagers have been disproportionately hit by measures to control the pandemic despite being largely unaffected by the virus. Many have had exams cancelled, and have been forced to study away from their peers for months on end, putting their mental health and socialisation at risk. Yesterday, 23 British academics from universities including Oxford, Cambridge and University College London, wrote to Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, warning that lateral flow testing posed a danger for schools.
They are particularly concerned that contact tracing trials could spark a wave of new infections, and have called for them to be suspended.
Currently, 170 schools and colleges across England are taking part in the trials in which students no longer need to self-isolate when a close contact tests positive, if they themselves test negative using a lateral flow test.
But there have been concerns that as well as throwing up false positives, lateral flow devices miss large numbers of true positives. A pilot last year in Liverpool found they failed to spot positive cases around 50 per cent of the time.
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https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/05/17/amazon-plans-to-launch-its-own-at-home-medical-testing-brand.html
This looks like a superb opportunity for Avacta.
Carclo’s lateral flow tests look the same as the ones on the Avacta site as well as at least one of their contract manufacturers. Avacta says it has a very accurate covid LFT which awaits a CE mark upon which it can market them globally. If the only manufacturer or one of the only manufacturers of the plastic LFT units so far is Carclo the company could expect to sell every one it can produce for some time.
To DonaldTrumpsWig: Good text. I recommend you send the email, maybe in a less confrontational form to Fergus Walsh, medical editor, Hugh Pym, health editor, Simon Jack, business editor and Evan Davis, PM presenter. Choose a good subject so they read it. The last time I wrote to the BBC the address format fergus.walsh@bbc.co.uk worked.
THE 10-day “stay at home” rule for people contacted by NHS Test and Trace could soon be lifted if a major new government trial proves daily coronavirus tests are a suitable alternative.
Under current rules, contacts of people who test positive for Covid-19 have to self-isolate for 10 days but people will instead be given a week’s worth of tests.
The study involving 40,000 people will see adults offered the chance to avoid quarantine every day if they produce a negative morning test.
The move marks the first steps to see whether Britain can ease strict quarantine rules, and would remove the threat of fines starting at £1,000 for leaving the home.
Last night it was reported that Boris Johnson is considering scrapping the limit on the number of mourners at funerals from May 17, as well as the one-metre plus rule for social distancing from June 21. Up to 30 people will be allowed at funerals from May 17, according to the next stage of the Government’s lockdown roadmap. No?10 described the reports as “speculation”.
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It comes amid an increasingly optimistic backdrop as the prevalence of the virus in society decreases, with modellers said to believe the risk of a third wave is dwindling because of promising vaccine data.
Deaths from Covid-19 have also been below the five year average of flu for the past six weeks. The trial will begin in England next Sunday and will reduce the numbers of people forced to miss work, helping to kick-start the economy.
And it emerged some test-and-trace contracts are not being renewed. A source said: “As a result of decreasing levels of prevalence, NHS Test and Trace are reducing the size of the contract-tracing workforce.”
The reduction in the team is in response to the fall in daily case rates, from 60,000 new cases each day at the peak to around 2,000 currently.
A Department of Health spokesman said: “We are continuing to respond to changes in demand and reflect staff numbers accordingly. Just as we increased numbers working in the trace service over the winter, we are now responding to the reduction in case numbers we’ve seen this spring.”
Matt H, the Health Secretary, said: “This new pilot could help shift the dial in our favour by offering a viable alternative to self-isolation for people who are contacts of positive Covid-19 cases, and one that would allow people to carry on going to work and living their lives,” he said.
From May 9, close contacts of people with Covid-19 will be contacted by telephone and sent seven days of rapid tests if they wish to participate in the study.
They will test themselves each morning for a week and, if negative and showing no symptoms, be exempt from home quarantine. Prof Isabel Oliver, who is leading the study as Public Health England’s national infection service director, said the research was key to informing how “the approach to testing might evolve”.
Since December, more than 200 schools, 180 workplaces and about 800 people have parti
Carclo could be building up capacity for later flow test production. The LFT on the Carclo website looks to have the same design as one in the Avacta presentation released today other than the line colour - the cellulose strip and chemical process is not provided by Carclo.. Avacta reported today they have projected LFT production of c5 million per month. Expect demand to be a multiple of that starting in May when the CE mark is obtained.