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Good interview. Looks like Richard Marsden is in the US. He isn't there to do one interview with Fox news is he? He will be there to support the kick off for the Activ 2 home trials. I think we can expect an absolute barrage of PR to accompany the trials from tomorrow and for the rest of the week. Coupled with tonight's UK press briefing to mark the tragic milestone of passing 100,000 deaths here I am guessing we will see coverage here too. Don't suppose I am the only one to notice the CEO of NHS England has advised the nation tonight, that we have a viral treatment in trials which will probably help us reduce the lethality of the virus in the next 6 months.

Only posting this so you can see the sp at cop. Now that I am here. Whoop whoop! GLA

Simon shares, you have a cigar if you fancy one mate! We've done well riding the storm of the attention seeking Deeks and fending off the derampers. Finally going for my walk. On Monday I am going to start sharing extracts from the House of Commons meeting with Dido Harding for new investors. I'm sure there will be news at the weekend because we are going to get decisions on contract awards and if past experience is anything to go by, news will get leaked to the Sunday papers. Covid is the big story and people need to see a way out. This firm is part of that story. There will be more to surprise us - there aren't many diagnostics firms for tests in the UK and we have a working relationship with all of those with next generation tests. Planned and agreed collaboration. Government intervention to make the best of our resources. A unique experience outside of wartime. That's where we are.
Be like Simon. Have a treat. Don't be like playingtheodds, crying into his teacup because the sp ran away from him when he was trading and his deramping never got him his elusive buy in price.

Tbh, anyone who is paying attention knows. The lead for NHS Test and Trace and her accountant appeared at the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee and gave evidence on Wednesday. They told us:
1. The government have been building up a UK diagnostics industry to ensure we can respond in future to further iterations of this virus and any other.
2. £6 billion earmarked for lateral flow tests- PCRs too slow and oversensitive- picking up cases who are no longer infectious.
3. They made a decision on £912 million contract.
4. Test and trace will continue to help us manage the pandemic. 37 other contracts still to come between February and May
Chris Molloy tweeted that we are manufacturing at scale using a consortium of manufacturers in the UK diagnostics industry.
Sir John Bell and two of the MHRA committee wrote to the BBC to condemn misinformation from John Deeks and to say that lateral flow tests will play a key role getting us back on our feet. Every local authority is opening up free mass testing centres and workplaces are signing up for the program.
John Deeks has 'clarified' to say that he didn't mean what he said.
It's happening. Institutional investors will be clamouring to get in next week.

The tender schedule says that the decision will be communicated to applicants in the week commencing 25th January. Since I am in a speculative frame of mind I am betting that Johnson will announce their plans for mass testing with lateral flow tests in every workplace and every local area, at tonight's press briefing. He has to balance the bad news- restrictions ongoing- with light at the end of the tunnel.

We're going to find out very soon who got the £912 million contract or whatever element of it that they have awarded so far. The NHS Test and Trace lead, Baroness Harding told the HoC Public Accounts committee on Wednesday this week that they have made a decision last Friday. Chris Molloy, the newly appointed chair of the UK RTC said that we are now working collaboratively in 'a consortium ' to scale up manufacturing of lfts. I am putting money on the likelihood that ODX are manufacturing for whoever has won the contract. They want another 265 million lateral flow tests according to the testimony to the Hoc Public Accounts Committee.

Don't feed the trolls. The market is open. Protect and promote your investment. Imho.

Once they have time to check out who's who in British diagnostics. So get in before they do.

The minutes of the meeting are on the HoC website. Will share it from my pc if no-one else does by the time I get back from my walk.

What time is the press briefing?

Dido Harding and her accountant David Williams from the NHS Test and Trace told the House of Commons Public Accounts committee on Wednesday that they have made an award from the £912 million contract last Friday. The Chair of the UK RTC is tweeting to say that we are working collaboratively in a consortium to manufacture lfts at scale. The Baroness advised the committee that we are building up a UK diagnostics industry so that we are prepared for the future. The immediate intention is to spend the vast majority of the £6 billion budget available for lateral flow tests.

As they do the research to find out who is who in the world of UK UK diagnostics. Only us and Abingdon Health in the UK RTC are listed on the stock market. Easier to bag from a lower baseline ( comparing us to Abingdon as an investment prospect). We have the same relationship with AVCT if they come up with a test as the other consortium members. We also have 3 lft tests. And we can manufacture for any lft test. Mologic are also due to publish results from their lateral flow antigen tests following larger trials. Results to date are already better than lft tests in current use according to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, who are the academic lead for evaluating tests before the final MHRA approval stage. MHRA have started to approve lfts but so far the top tests can't manufacture for the requirement to deliver hundreds of millions of tests. The UK government backed RTC ( consortium) will support the roll out.
ODX's other 2 antibody lfts with Mologic and the RTC are ready to go, having been CE marked. Both will play a role in monitoring the efficacy of vaccines for governments and individuals.

Forecasting the very near future. This is going ballistic from next week. Here's why.
Chris Molloy, is the new chair for the UK RTC. The UK RTC is a consortium of 4 diagnostics companies and Oxford University, including ODX. PA Consulting have been appointed as consultants to bring together UK manufacturers to ensure we can get the best lateral flow tests scaled up to deliver several hundred million tests for delivery in stages from February. Chris Molloy tweeted this week to advise us that Surescreen lfts are going to be scaled up for mass testing through leading diagnostic companies in the UK working in a 'consortia' collaborating to get the job done.
He's the chair of the UK RTC. It's a consortia which was formed by the UK government to lead the way in British diagnostics. ODX have confirmed yesterday that they are scaling up to capacity of 2 million tests a week by April. Whoever gets a test approved is going to get produced by ODX. That's about the nub of it.
Chris Molloy also tweeted that we are going to hear more about it next week.
If you are going to top up- this is the day. I am taking my own advice. If you are a new investor- good decision. Read the FT article from yesterday, unless you have already done so. If you are a new investor- sorry about the trolls and the de-rampers- every board has them. Like little kids with their nose pressed up against the sweet shop window. Heartbreakingly, they didn't get any pocket money again so they will never buy. Don't let their sadness infect you ;)

Well, I aim to please JAdam- thank you. Embarrassed by my technophobia in not being able to share tweets though- LOL. Nice to see you back on the board. Has been a bit grim sometimes lately. Looks like more of us in the glass half full crew are back posting- hurrah!

Regulator,
Yes. I have pointed out the nonsense of his stats from day 1 and it was clear that epidemiologists disagreed with his understanding on the science all along. Professor Tara Moore who led the independent study and recently the famous Dr Michael Mina has been kicking his arse for weeks now. Bit of a relief that Prof John Bell and the rest of the great and the good have got involved. I guess that's to clear the way for lift off! I can see him getting the sack actually.
But onwards and upwards now hey?

We're going up because
1. Chris Molloy, Chair of UK RTC has told everyone on Twitter to expect more news next week and he's said that he's bringing UK manufacturers together to scale up on lfts.
2. The Public Accounts Committee say we have another £6 billion to spend on tests and that we will continue testing at scale using lfts more than PCRs because they are more effective at getting on top of the virus. PCRs are slow and they are too sensitive. They pick up people who are no longer infectious. Lfts pick up a higher proportion of people who are infectious.
3. We are one of the biggest manufacturers of diagnostics in the UK. The NHS test and trace lead said that we are investing in British diagnostics going forward s that we are ready for any future threat.
4. There aren't many diagnostics firms on the stock market. Mologic is in the mix too. We are producing two of their tests. AVCT may be in the mix. We have said we will produce their test if asked.
5. What is being talked about is working collaboratively with British diagnostics 'in consortia' to scale up lfts. It almost doesn't matter who wins the bids. We will be manufacturing anyway by the look of things.
6. The market are getting the impression at last that tests will be needed to support the vaccine program. It will take too long to vaccinate everyone- we can't lock down for another year. Once vulnerable groups have been vaccinated we will use testing in workplaces across the country.
7. The US are going to be following the same strategy- vaccines and tests to support us out of lockdown. The EU will follow. They are already introducing EU block authorisations for lft tests.

ppeye, we have been invited to play. Chris Molloy, the newly appointed chair of the RTC tasked with scaling up lfts, in line with the PA Consulting contract requirements follows Mologic, ODX, Abingdon, BBI et al. He re-tweeted Matt Han****'s tweet on Surescreen which cited the £2 million contract to them, to say that they are bringing British diagnostic firms together to scale up manufacturing to deliver lfts at scale. I think we are going to be commissioned to deliver whoever gets the best tests to the table. ODX is one of the biggest manufacturers. With the lowest share price at the moment. If you want to bag buy ODX!
Can some-one better than me at IT find that tweet- on the ODX site. Saved it on my phone but no idea where it's gone. Lol. Will try again.

The UK government is aiming to produce 2m rapid Covid-19 tests per day as it seeks to shake off its dependence on foreign producers for its “Moonshot” mass screening vision.

The government has paid consulting firm PA Consulting £6.2m to set out plans to scale up manufacturing of testing technologies in the UK, according to a publicly available contract.

Ministers have been intent on developing a domestic diagnostics industry since early in the pandemic, and set out their ambition to “build a mass-testing capacity at a completely new scale” as part of the UK’s testing strategy in April 2020.

The main focus of the plan outlined in the PA Consulting contract is to find suitable British manufacturers of lateral flow devices (LFDs), which provide results in under 30 minutes, and scale up manufacturing to reach 2m tests a day by April 2021.

Unlike conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, which look for the virus’s genetic material and can take up to a day to process, LFDs do not need to be analysed in a laboratory. The tests look for protein antigens that live on a virus’s surface, and work by adding a liquid reagent to a saliva or nasal swab sample.

LFDs have been the subject of intense criticism after several studies found they miss up to 60 per cent of positive cases. But on Wednesday researchers at Oxford university released a paper which found that the tests pick up between 83 and 90 per cent of cases where a person is infectious.

The authors said that previous studies compared LFDs to the gold-standard PCR tests, which “overshoot” by picking up pre and post-coronavirus infectiousness. The Oxford study found that by contrast, LFDs are very good at finding individuals who have a high viral load and are responsible for the majority of onwards transmission.

The UK has been almost entirely reliant on limited supplies of LFDs from the US, Korea and China and is desperate to scale up domestic production. The department of health has spent £88m simply on transporting tests from China to the UK since the beginning of the pandemic, according to publicly available contracts.

“We’re under strict instructions to find UK-based companies.
Sorry- didn't all copy n'paste. The last sentence is that they will make further announcements about new awards in the coming weeks and there was also acknowledgement about the contract for £912 million last week. I need to check the PAC minutes because I'm not sure that they have allocated all of it though they did say they have made 'a decision' on it.

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https://www.ft.com/content/3df40205-2712-4fab-b0f6-edcc9598ffcc

Mass screening of people without symptoms is set to play a leading role in the government’s pathway out of lockdown © Matthew Horwood/Getty Images
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The UK government is aiming to produce 2m rapid Covid-19 tests per day as it seeks to shake off its dependence on foreign producers for its “Moonshot” mass screening vision.

The government has paid consulting firm PA Consulting £6.2m to set out plans to scale up manufacturing of testing technologies in the UK, according to a publicly available contract.

Ministers have been intent on developing a domestic diagnostics industry since early in the pandemic, and set out their ambition to “build a mass-testing capacity at a completely new scale” as part of the UK’s testing strategy in April 2020.

The main focus of the plan outlined in the PA Consulting contract is to find suitable British manufacturers of lateral flow devices (LFDs), which provide results in under 30 minutes, and scale up manufacturing to reach 2m tests a day by April 2021.

Unlike conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, which look for the virus’s genetic material and can take up to a day to process, LFDs do not need to be analysed in a laboratory. The tests look for protein antigens that live on a virus’s surface, and work by adding a liquid reagent to a saliva or nasal swab sample.

LFDs have been the subject of intense criticism after several studies found they miss up to 60 per cent of positive cases. But on Wednesday researchers at Oxford university released a paper which found that the tests pick up between 83 and 90 per cent of cases where a person is infectious.

The authors said that previous studies compared LFDs to the gold-standard PCR tests, which “overshoot” by picking up pre and post-coronavirus infectiousness. The Oxford study found that by contrast, LFDs are very good at finding individuals who have a high viral load and are responsible for the majority of onwards transmission.

The UK has been almost entirely reliant on limited supplies of LFDs from the US, Korea and China and is desperate to scale up domestic production. The department of health has spent £88m simply on transporting tests from China to the UK since the beginning of the pandemic, according to publicly available contracts.

“We’re under st

To 2 million a day in an effort to control the virus. Article published an hour ago. Getting on the pc now to share loads of stuff.