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redacted text was Share Pro ph ets

Seems reasonable to think it will get back up to around £4-£5. That's where it was before the ************* hatchet job which caused the price to plummet back in July 2020. Management has rebutted everything in that article, and Mithaq (Saudi fund, I think, with some expertise in this litigation funding sector) have bought £15m-worth of shares (~17%) recently (see RNS of 10 Feb)

Good Law Project has a summary of the Abingdon fiasco, with links to original material (court papers, contracts, etc.):

https://goodlawproject.org/case/abingdon-health/

SP +40% since this post. You are welcome. :-)

Apologies if this has been posted already, I'm only an occasional visitor to this board, so could well have missed it:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-020-00640-6

(It is in the journal Nature, title "Pre-symptomatic detection of COVID-19 from smartwatch data", if URL gets obfuscated - Google will find it for you)

"Using retrospective smartwatch data, we show that 63% of the COVID-19 cases could have been detected before symptom onset in real time via a two-tiered warning system based on the occurrence of extreme elevations in resting heart rate relative to the individual baseline. Our findings suggest that activity tracking and health monitoring via consumer wearable devices may be used for the large-scale, real-time detection of respiratory infections, often pre-symptomatically."

I'm not 100% sure if this is good news or bad news for Orph. Bad news, in the sense that all one needs to do to discover heart-rate signature for infection X is to just find some people with infection X and analyse their Apple Watch HR log from the days around the start of the infection. Does Orph actually have prioprietary data better than that? I guess they have HR logs, and other vitals, for all sorts of people with all sorts of infections - is that right? But with so many people wearing an Apple Watch or similar anyway, is it perhaps not very hard for wearable companies to build that data themselves?

And isn't it very odd to accept an investment of £175m at the same time as paying out £30m on a share buyback. If company needs to return cash to shareholders through a buy-back, why raise money from Koch at the same time? Makes no sense to me.

Thanks for reply. I did see the other news, for sure. But I'm not sure how to interpret the £175m Koch money. Preference shares aren't really 'investment in the company', are they? It is debt, convertible into equity, isn't it? Koch get interest at 9.35% + warrants at £3.50. If VCP just borrowed £175m at 9%, that wouldn't push the share price up.

On the other hand if I treat the whole Koch investment as equity:
£175m investment
£45m cost of exercising 12m warrants @ £3.50
Total cost to get 12m (9%) shares = ~£220m
Implied valuation = 220 / .09 = £2,200m ... which would be about 20x EBITDA, right?

I just have no idea how to properly value this news, I guess.

New to this share. Had it on my watch list from a week or two ago. Happen to start taking a look today and the price is going nuts. I've read the RNS about buying out Invesco's shares at £3.50. But why has that pushed the price up so high now? I don't get it ... can anyone explain?

They usually make most of their profits in H2:

PBT H1 | H2 | FY
2018 2.1m | 7.6m | 9.7m
2019 0.5m | 6.9m | 7.4m
2020 (2.7)m | ?? 7-8m?? | ??4-5m??

Typically trades at 12x PBT. 12x £5m = £60m, vs market cap now of c.£55m
Net assets also about £55m now

So base case makes this look safe bet which won't plummet on next results.

Upside? If they get back to run rate of around £9m PBT, then market might re-rate them to around 12x PBT = ~£110m, roughtly 2x current market cap.

I think the thing with wearables is that you can have a constant monitoring of temperature and other measures. The hypothesis is that patterns of temperature changes, HR, whatever else they measure could be used to predict / diagnose conditions.

*FDA, not FCA, I mean

The principle isn't new. The new (ish) thing is that HCTs are being authorised for Covid. That wasn't the case back in the summer, because the ethical consensus was (supposedly) that you shouldn't run an HCT with Covid because we didn't know for sure how dangerous it would be for the volunteers. The whole reason for the existence of the campaign group 1Daysooner is to persuade the authorities that HCTs should be approved for Covid.

The proposed UK trial is the only one that I have heard of so far. I don't think the FCA in the US has approved an HCT for Covid yet, but I might have missed it if they have.

I think there might be a causation fallacy here. Being sick in a hospital is dangerous because you are sick, not because you are in a hospital.

Surely you aren't seriously suggesting that, given that someone is sick, being in hospital is more dangerous than not being in hospital?

People who do lots of research before investing in AIM shares often lose a lot of money. But that's because they are investing in risky shares, not because they are doing lots of research!

CNN human challenge story is on front page of US and International websites (for me, anyway, maybe it is personalised, I'm not sure)

Can someone remind me where the £40m contract figure has come from? The RNS on 24/9/20 said gov contract they are negotiating would be "in excess of £7 million".

8 sites produce £2.6m GM, £2m cost, £0.6m EBITDA
16 sites would be £5.1m GM, £1.2m EBITDA
Add, say 30% LFL growth gets you £6.7m GM, £2.7m EBITDA, still not even enough to cover the enormous £3m central overhead. Some franchising fees, etc. etc. but seems they have a long way to go to be profitable?

Yet John Storey bought in, is now a NED. Luke Johnson on the share register. What's going on, I wonder?

At first glance, you'd think this business was toast. £800k market cap, below last report of net assets
But, they have £1m in the bank still and surely worst is over?
YoY sales for Q1 of Y/E 30/6/2021 up by 23% (according to Pre-Close Trading Update from Sep 2020)
20% sales increase would get to around £9m revenue
48% GM = £4.3m
Looks like they have around £3.5m overhead now (from guidance in same update)
=> EBITDA of £800k for FY 2021?
Market cap now is only £800k
Very significant risk of whole business closing and share going to zero ... but if people don't go skiing this winter might they buy a new kitchen instead? ... worth a punt?

Is anybody looking at this share? My read of the trading update from back in September:

- Not really hit by COVID that much, revenue about the same 2020 vs 2019
- £10m cash in the bank still
- One XL contract (>£5m / yr) launched end of H1 2020
- Trading at 1.5x revenue at the moment, but seems like revenue could double within the next year or two, and they are expecting to be profitable FY2020 so multiple should improve
- 4x increase in share price over next couple of years (2x revenue, 2x multiple?) feels not impossible?
- Seems unlikely to go to zero - lots of very long term contracts, which have weathered COVID so could survive most things?

Anyone else looking at this one want to share their thoughts?

Ah, OK, so seems they do sometimes use attenuated strains to infect the volunteers in a challenge trial (as well as sometimes being used as a regular vaccine, e.g. MMR vaccine is an attenuated virus, I think)

AFAIK: references to an attenuated virus are references to the **vaccine**. The vaccine is a weakened version of the virus, which triggers an immune response, but no serious illness.

In a challenge trial, you'd get the vaccine first, then be infected with the actual (unweakened) virus. Difference between this and a normal Phase III trial is that in a Phase III trial you give people the vaccine then just let them go about their business and see if anyone catches the virus in the community. Hence Phase III trials can take a very long time - if none of your volunteers catch the virus, was that because the vaccine worked, or because they just didn't come into contact with the virus?

With an HC trial, you know within a week or so whether or not your vaccine worked.