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Prior to the series A financing, AffyXell was jointly owned by Avacta and Daewoong, split 45/55. The quality of the financing is quite telling with regard to the progress of the company and its future growth prospects.
The following mission statement from one of the investors also reveals a lot about about how AffyXell is perceived by world class business:
“Samsung Venture Investment Corporation is actively investing in future-oriented businesses based on new and innovative technologies that are expected serve as new GROWTH ENGINES.
I’m not surprised that I cannot find any information about the share of AffyXell that has been allotted for this investment, but I wondered if anyone here had heard?
Thanks!
On finance, and I stand to be corrected, I was feeding grandchildren at time, but I got impression that AK wanted to, or was planning to, restructure debt over the longer term of existing contracted revenues. And on terms more fitting to the quality of their financial status.
AK sounded very confident about signing up new customer(s) in near term.
He was keen to point out that anyone needing to use or transport gas in South East Nigeria, basically had to talk to SAVE. If anyone wanted to replicate their infrastructure, it’d cost over $1bn (value of current infrastructure) and take years!
He was upbeat about the potential for growth in the Nigerian economy, and that within the economy, demand for energy was increasing at a faster rate than say, Brazil, Russia, India and China. Which translates into increasing rates of energy demand for SAVE. He quite casually mentioned potential future supply to new deep port(s). AFAIK, and from memory, new deep port development in their region is set to attract 800,000 new jobs in 2300 new businesses... numbers from memory!
Thank you Zengas for sharing your knowledge and insights!
Please can you help me, you’ve mentioned Vitol and Blue Chip Investor Base on several occasions, but I’ve been unable to locate the relevant information to read for myself. Driving me potty and I’d appreciate being pointed in the right direction. Thanks.
I read the RNS in a negative way until it was noticed that they’re developing an in-house pipeline of Affimer-based diagnostic assays including the AffiDXTM SARS-CoV-2 Lateral Flow Rapid Antigen Test and a BAMSTM SARS-CoV-2 Assay in partnership with Adeptrix Inc.
I hadn’t realised that we were developing an AffiDXTM SARS-CoV-2 Lateral Flow Rapid Antigen Test, presumably for sale in USA?
I’d have thought the footnote below, pointed out by lovebug and others, would have created a positive buzz, if it was the main body of the RNS?
“The Company is also developing an in-house pipeline of Affimer-based diagnostic assays including the AffiDXTM SARS-CoV-2 Lateral Flow Rapid Antigen Test and a BAMSTM SARS-CoV-2 Assay in partnership with Adeptrix Inc.”
The following is a word for word extract from Alistair Smith, interviewed 22 Dec 20:
“SARS Cov 2 Rapid antigen test is a very, very significant opportunity for the diagnostic business, and as we go into the Christmas period I can tell you that I am very happy indeed with the performance of the test. So we’re now moving into clinical testing, in parallel with manufacturing scale up.”
It’s the second day running, I’d imagine that the mm’s don’t want to get caught short. Perhaps they know that an RNS is quite close and so trade 100 shares after close at 144p to ensure that the market opens at 144p. If no RNS, then they can let the price drop, if an RNS, then they get a head start, and not get caught out? Maybe?
CS is right. I think the reason was down to the lengthy effort & time required to get the Affimer through in-human trials, and that there’s no capacity to get this done in the short / medium term. But it’ll happen, and maybe sooner than we think, with a little help from Daewoong, Moderna and other partners.
Hants... Cytiva are confirmed to be ‘in the game’ in this article published 6-Dec-20
https://www.modernhealthcare.com/supply-chain/testing-asymptomatic-patients-becomes-more-prevalent-and-useful
Thanks Richob
It’s a great reminder of the sheer scale of what Avacta is engaged in, and so many of these projects are well established and maturing very nicely.
And then there’s the ‘undisclosed’ projects too!
AfamaMan... Maybe, but it’s fair to say that discussion on this board has all but trashed the idea of a successful saliva antigen test, and I’ve seen posts practically blaming Cytiva for screwing up the dev, with nothing to support the notion. So, the existence of such a recent affirmation of the ongoing collaboration between Avacta and Cytiva is quite refreshing.
Here’s a part of the article...
Asymptomatic testing in the UK
In the U.K., the government is pushing ahead with its plans for asymptomatic testing using a variety of testing platforms.
Early in November, U.K.Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that Liverpool, England, would participate in a whole city COVID-19 testing pilot program to offer every resident and worker repeat testing, regardless of symptoms. The program offers a combination of laboratory PCR tests, rapid turnaround lateral flow assays that don't require a laboratory, and loop-mediated isothermal nucleic acid amplification, or LAMP, testing.
Separately, the U.K. Department of Health and Social Care also said that it will provide roughly 670,000 rapid SARS-CoV-2 tests to local public health officials this week to expand testing in asymptomatic individuals.
David Wilson, commercial director at Weatherby, UK-based test developer Avacta, noted that while some progress is being made toward the adoption of asymptomatic testing, only people with symptoms are still getting tested in many regions of the world because of test capacity constraints.
"What we really need as an industry is the capability to test people who are symptomatic and asymptomatic frequently," Wilson said recently while speaking on an online IVD industry panel about diagnostic design and manufacturing organized by Marlborough, Massachusetts-based Cytiva, a Danaher company formerly known as GE Healthcare Life Sciences.
Avacta is developing a saliva-based rapid SARS-CoV-2 antigen test with Cytiva.
Frequent testing could play an important role not only to ensure that people remain infection-free but also to compensate for a lack of sensitivity in testing, Wilson added.
At the same time, getting to those numbers of tests to enable frequent testing is going to be an enormous challenge.
"We are talking about needing to run billions of tests per year to get to that point," Wilson said. "Current global manufacturing capacity is significantly lower than what is need to implement testing at that scale."
In getting to broader levels of testing, including for asymptomatic patients, molecular testing in the laboratory provides the potential to achieve the greatest accuracies, but such tests can also "be potentially difficult to scale and we can't rely on PCR alone to give everyone access to testing," Wilson said.
As a result, there's a critical role here for decentralized testing, involving point-of-care PCR and lateral flow, antigen testing, he added.
David Persing, chief medical and technology officer at Danaher's Cepheid, who also spoke on the panel, said that antigen tests can be "really valuable to provide short-term results around infectivity."
Antigen tests may prove to be particularly useful in testing people getting on a "four-hour flight or attending a four- to six-hour sports event," he said.
This of news may have already been posted on the BB, but it’s new to me...
Since Cytiva wasn’t mentioned in the recent RNS, together with the prevailing radio silence, I got the impression that Avacta’s collaboration with them was on the rocks. But this ‘modernhealthcare’ article, published 6-Dec contains some quotes by David Wilson, and the author states that Avacta is developing a saliva-based rapid SARS-CoV-2 antigen test with Cytiva.
https://www.modernhealthcare.com/supply-chain/testing-asymptomatic-patients-becomes-more-prevalent-and-useful
I thought it possible the article was ancient news recycled, but there are plenty of other clues in the text to support the notion that the article is recent.
DW also talks of the need for billions of tests.