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Per the Avacta RNS today - surely "others" includes ODX?

"On 8 February 2021 we established a commercial partnership with Mologic to provide Avacta with a faster route to market for the lateral flow rapid antigen test by CE marking it for professional use under Mologic's existing ISO13485 quality system. The CE mark will then be transferred to Avacta after it receives ISO13485 accreditation, which is expected by the end of March 2021.

· The collaboration with Mologic also provides initial manufacturing capacity for the lateral flow test with Global Access Diagnostics (GAD) in addition to the agreements with BBI Group, Abingdon Health and others that will provide manufacturing capabilities that can be scaled to several million tests per month."

"In Genomics (23% sales), SourceBio provides cutting edge DNA sequencing to academic groups and biotechs, with demand driven by the growth in personalised medicine, which requires greater understanding of genes and specific mutations.

What has really sent the shares into orbit has been LeCoque’s inspired move to gain regulatory accreditation for its laboratory testing business to provide Covid-19 Antigen RT-PCR tests as a hedge against the current decline in elective procedures. These are considered the Gold Standard in terms of accurate detection with a 70-99% success rate and are superior to the 15-minute lateral flow tests. It has landed some large private healthcare providers including Spire and Nuffield as well as Virgin Atlantic and a leading high street retail and pharmacy group. SourceBio has also won lucrative testing work with the NHS with a new framework agreement due to be signed in February. All told, from a standing start last May, it’s ramped up to over 10,000 tests a day.

Liberum estimates it will generate £67m free cash flow by the end of 2022 (against a current market cap of £164m). The broker says it assumes testing demand will fall away rapidly from July 2021 as the vaccines are rolled out but LeCoque expects healthy testing revenues to be sustained at least to the end of 2022. He points out that 1.) the Liberum note was published before the South African mutation, which triggered the third UK lockdown and could cause vaccine resistance; 2.) vaccine uptake may not initially be high enough to achieve herd immunity; 3.) testing may still be required in the medium-term for “fit to fly” and participation in mass sporting / concert events; 4) the virus could become endemic and return annually.

The sixty four thousand dollar question is how LeCoque plans to plug the eventual gap when Covid subsides. He says he’s already running the rule over several eps enhancing acquisitions both within Healthcare diagnostics such as testing labs in London for better access to the Capital’s large private healthcare market, US expansion and other oncology specialties such as lung, brain and bowel.

Liberum forecasts pretax profit of £12.4m and eps of 13.5p in FY’20, followed by lift-off to £56m and 61.2p this year, before subsiding to £14m and 15.5p in ’22. By then cash should be £73m or 44% of the market cap. Speculative, but it could have its time in the sun."

Now the new issue of Momentum Investor is out, it's hopefully OK to print the tip for SBI from the prior issue, which is a good read - and that was when the share price was 219p:

"SourceBio International - Healthcare diagnostics firm mining rich seam from covid testing

219p Epic code: SBI

(Momentum Investor)

I’ve just come off a Zoom call with Jay LeCoque, CEO of SourceBio, a provider of diagnostic testing to the NHS and private sector, whose shares, which listed on AIM last October at 162p, have made a spectacular debut.

Having enjoyed success as CEO of diagnostics firm Celsis (achieving a 7.6x cash return for shareholders ’09-‘15) and then at bio-decontamination firm Bioquell, (share price rise from 146p in ‘16 to 590p in ’19), LeCoque joined SourceBio, the former Medical Solutions, in 2016. At that time the company was struggling after failing to integrate a series of acquisitions, but LeCoque sold non-core businesses, cut costs, upgraded the sales force and raised prices for the first time in 10 years.

Of SourceBio’s three divisions, the one stoking investors’ fervour is Healthcare Diagnostics (37% of £19.8m sales in FY’19), which tests patient tissue samples, sourced either from routine screening programmes or biopsy extraction. It operates out of several licenced laboratories and has access to the largest consultant pathology network (currently 75 pathologists) in the UK. Around three quarters of sales is cellular pathology, where samples are tested for cancer or chronic disease with the balance involving molecular tests to detect cancer sub-types or mutations.
SourceBio works for the NHS and private sector and excitingly demand is growing at 15% p.a, driven by an ageing population requiring more healthcare services, a need for a faster diagnosis and ongoing capacity constraints in the NHS, where most labs are understaffed. Following the disruption from the pandemic there is an estimated 10 million backlog in NHS procedures and an estimated 1 million laboratory samples requiring analysis. To avail of the opportunity, LeCoque has invested in a new Digital Pathology system, allowing transmission of sample slides via the cloud instead of physical ones. New AI systems will weed out the obvious positives and negatives to further boost productivity.

Within its other two divisions, Stability Storage (40% sales) and Genomics, the former involves storing new drugs in controlled conditions (temperature, humidity, light) to ensure they remain stable over the long term. This is a key regulatory requirement before a new product is released into the market. It’s a great business because typical projects last for three years, leading to high recurring revenues while there’s little work required apart from monitoring, so gross margins are 80%. The market is growing 7-9% p.a. thanks to a strong late stage pipeline of complex biopharma drugs."

Per the Downing Strategic Micro Cap letter just out this morning, VLG are a new Buy for them:

""We also invested into Venture Life, a leader in developing,manufacturing and commercialising products for the self-care market, which we have followed for some time through our ownership in other funds and which we think has reached an interesting juncture with significant growth prospects."

"VENTURE LIFE was announced as a new position towards the end of 2020, although it is a company that we have followed for the best part of two years. We built our position over the course of last year as our investment case continued to play out, and as other significant developments unfolded.

Firstly, our investment case which centred around increasing own-brand product diversification, utilising latent capacity within the manufacturing base which in turn should unlock significant operational gearing. This is due to a relatively fixed cost base and margin accretion from increased mix towards own-brand products. Progression along this line of thinking was most noticeable in the half results, in which an 80% increase in revenue resulted in nine-fold increase in adjusted profit before tax, which eclipsed the profits made in the whole of the previous financial year. Despite these impressive results, we believe that this is the beginning of this journey. Based on the half year results, management believe full year utilisation will be around 56%. Furthermore, 65% of the top line growth was organic, with 15% from 5 months of contribution from the PharmaSource BV which will deliver greater margin accretion as synergies are enacted and manufacturing is moved into Venture Life’s facilities. PharmaSource BV was acquired on similar multiples as previous acquisitions of <7x profit before tax, before synergies. Previous acquisitions are now trading on <3x profit before tax, following manufacturing integration, yet these acquisitions are still exhibiting double-digit growth 2 to 4 years post acquisition. We believe these returns will manifest into impressive returns on capital invested as the business scales to utilise excess capacity and recycles capital into further growth. We were initially able to access this return profile for less than 9x earnings, which we felt was a steep discount to comparable businesses that are not as vertically integrated as Venture Life.
Additional developments during the year that are worth noting are as follows:

? Signing of an exclusive long-term distribution agreement in China with minimum
purchase obligations worth €168 million over a 15-year period.

? Ramped up production of hand sanitiser gel within 11 days to produce €3.2 million of revenue at the half year from zero before the pandemic. The initial investment was €110,000 and was initially designed to support Italian hospitals on a compassionate basis. But following strong demand from retailers, it evolved into DISINPLUS, a new range of anti-bacterial products."

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