Member Info for mstar

Thanks for posting RichKen. I was not aware of the Selexis partnership. This was announced in June but I did not see an RNS.

This partnership develops AVA 004, a PD-L1 inhibitor. There are other PD-L1 inhibitors on the market. Keytruda targets the most aggressive type of skin cancer, melanoma, and I believe has cured the oldest living US president, Jimmy Carter. Keytruda has also been a key driver of the Merck share price recently.

I would appreciate input from qualified medics who are specialists in this area.

There is significant potential value in Avacta, not only in rapid covid testing but in the PreCision platform, the TMAC platform, the affimer platform and the MSC joint venture. However, I doubt that current Avacta shareholders will receive much of this inherent value. Most of that will go to those who properly understand the potential and arrange to obtain it for themselves or their company.

On Squawk Box at c11.15am UK today: I think we’re gonna see very quickly lateral flow tests come onto the market. These are like pregnancy tests where you put a swab of fluid, nasal fluid or saliva, on a piece of paper. You wait ten or fifteen minutes for a read-out on whether you have covid or not. I think you’re gonna see those tests come into the market in significant quantities and they’re gonna give rapid results and be fairly reliable. And that’s really gonna change the equation on doing screening for the population. That’s gonna afford and allow for bringing screening into the workplace, into schools and do it in a location where you don’t necessarily have the capacity to maintain sophisticated machinery.......I think we’re gonna see these tests come into the market quickly. Maybe this month. They are not gonna be available to the consumer in the home.....You’re gonna have to have some kind of medical intervention.....They don’t want people getting the result at home snd not reporting the results to public health authorities. This is still a special pathogen that requires public health reporting.

He added he expected widespread use of LTFs probably in September.

The problem is not Miton per se. Yes. They may be poor fund managers but they held on to their Avacta stake until it reached three figures. Most of the institutions with a holding in Avacta sold last year when the share price was about 20p. There has been only one new reported institutional holding this year despite the several fund raises.

Too many Avacta shares are held by traders with little idea of what potential the company has. So it will be easy for the Aim traders to generate business by swinging the share price around each day.

Conversely the lack of serious investors has meant the Avacta share price is low and continues to provide an attractive entry price for those who are.

I wonder which test Matt H has in mind for this. 4 million a day, 365 days in a year at say £5 each. And a market cap at say two times sales. And I wonder what the share price would be of such a supplier.

If you miss a repeat on CNN you can hear the audio in a podcast. Search for Fareed Zakaria GPS.

Thanks for sharing lukedrywaller. Whenever the interviewer lost the thread or didn’t understand something he said “Very interesting” and changed the subject. If the £5 test is not Avacta’s it will be interesting to see how it works at that price. I wonder how the price was known. It would not be relevant for quality testing but would be for negotiations. And will the UK government try to buy up the entire Cytiva and Avacta supply for several months? What would that leave for Medusa19?

I think you know the answer. It is cancer but trials that satisfy the EMU and the FDA take a long time and cost a lot of money. Most of the traders on here today will be long gone by the time those results start to come in.

Two of their funds showed Avacta as their number one holding at the end of June. One I looked at is an investment trust which would not be subject to forced selling. They have placed Avacta in their microcap funds and it may be more liquid than their other holdings.

Avacta should have collected several serious institutional investors by now. Half their institutional shareholdings were sold off last year without replacement. And Premier Miton have continued the institutional sell-off this year. In the June fundraising only one new reported institution was found and most of the placing seems to have gone to private investors who have sold out since.

Avacta has placed its independence in jeopardy by not taking care to find serious investors at this stage of its development.

Thanks Chiron. Now I understand why you said we could relax. I think we can also relax if Medusa19 is selling product from other suppliers. To build an effective distribution network around the world will be very expensive. That could not be justified with a limited product range. I would expect them to extend to other tests, Then maybe medicines and and other healthcare products.

Thanks Chiron. I am pleased we have a qualified professional on the board. I acknowledge that an antibody test is not in competition with the Avacta test. But what makes you think this is the Spanish test? It says it’s a saliva protein test. And if it’s an IgG test does IgG transfer to saliva?

The text does not say that the second test is an antibody test. Antibodies build up slowly after infection. It says it is both a protein test and an immune response test. I know of no immune response to covid-19 which is a protein. I would also expect the Avacta test to have a specificity higher than 95%. If someone without the covid-19 infection showed up positive would require an explanation.

I would expect Medusa19 to market a range of tests which could be sold directly to consumers and others via its website. This would be a good business of which covid-19 would just be a part. Avacta’s diagnostics division could create many of these tests.

Wow. Price sensitive info not in an RNS.

The interview is date stamped yesterday. It is directors talk but if you google the string in the post above you can find the link.

The RNS does not say the companies will collaborate to develop and manufacture tests. It says they will collaborate. It then says they will develop and manufacture the tests. This means they will both manufacture the tests, not necessarily on their premises. Avacta is not. This probably implies Cytiva will manufacture the tests it markets under the contract but not say tests for the retail market.

AZN is not valuing its drug conjugate deal at $6 billion. It is paying up to that figure for a share of the job. Only $1 billion is unconditional. If all goes well the jv will be valued at about $12 billion.

Avacta's drug conjugates use affimers instead of monoclonal antibodies - as I understand it. These are much smaller than monoclonal antibodies and may be able to penetrate into tumours more effectively because of their small size.

There were two price monitoring extensions reported. I assume it was the result of matching up those late trades.

65,000 new people were tested positive in the US yesterday and those were just the ones who got results. Some labs are now taking a week to produce test results. And CNBC has just reported that some Americans are waiting in line for up to 15 hours to get a test in the first place.

I wonder if there is a way to improve things for our American cousins.

Rich: Don't you mean Tesla is their largest shareholding? It is worth looking at the shares held by SMIT. They are superbly good at selecting good stocks. And that group is one of the four known institutions holding Avacta shares.

And the same platform technology could potentially used with other toxic chemotherapy drugs to increase the dose significantly and the effectiveness of the treatment.