Member Info for Unprecedented

Absolutely Amg - why else emphasize that the AffiDX® antigen test has been developed in the UK, and is based on UK technology and manufactured in the UK.
That’s hardly going to help our European sales these days…..

Amg - she actually calls it a U.K. made test and describes it as a real milestone on the progressive journey of the UK diagnostics and life sciences industry.

Dave I think you may have left out the best reason why it could still be us - we now finally actually manufacture real tests….
And I agree with your point about odx - I suspect that at that time the government were simply trying to find out from odx how difficult it might be to use their equipment to produce one of the established tests - as a theoretical possibility only.
In all the finger pointing and accusations of government corruption (unlikely IMO) and incompetency (very likely) we perhaps forget that whilst avacta didn’t manufacture any tests we didn’t give the government many options to actually choose us.

Forgot link https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2021-06-18/18511

Apologies if already posted:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, when the Government plans announce its choice of British lateral flow test after the signing of contracts in March 2021 with Omega Diagnostics and Global Access Diagnostics in order to meet the target of having the majority of UK lateral flow tests produced in the UK.

ANSWER: The Government continues to explore different operating models to make best use of the capacity created in the United Kingdom diagnostics manufacturing industry. There are a number of ongoing conversations between Global Access Diagnostics, Omega and third party test developers which we hope will provide opportunities to further increase UK manufacturing output of lateral flow tests.

Sounds to me that GAD are using a third party contractor for part of their operations and ODX are not. I’m not convinced of the significance of these contracts in terms of the identity of the test developer - but it is significant in that matters are clearly still progressing and possibly about to reach a conclusion.

Brilliant post Pottery, so Mologic/ODX is best in class only when benchmarking against second rate PCR equipment!

Thanks Timster. More evidence of the benefits collaborating with the U.K. government brings. The whole world is looking at this and what is needed is a highly sensitive lft at low viral load that can detect Covid in the first three days.

Interesting point about the cost of affimers PAHOO. Do you know the cost of the antibodies we would be replacing?

Looking at those reports specificity of the Mologic test is not perfect either - and pretty poor according to the odx figures

I’m sure your German is better than mine Ben!

I’m also confused by the difference in what was reported by odx and what is in the find report. And the find report refers to AN as the sample method but is that in addition to a throat swab as per the instructions https://mologic.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ML210309-Covid-19-Rapid-Antigen-Test-IFU-GERMAN.pdf

Thanks SoleBoy, very interesting. Yet more evidence, if it was needed, that the UK government is progressing with producing its own sovereign supply. It states that the remote monitoring service commenced on April 27th - today. This type of software is possibly more suitable for resolution of fairly simple ad-hoc issues rather than an intensive collaborative exercise like tech transfer - my opinion only. Seems ideal especially where very little onsite expertise is available because services have either only recently been ramped up, or are provided from multiple remote sites or are running 24/7 or all of those.

Perhaps a better name for this thread would be "Sovereign LFT production started today"!

I think phe are actually helping to validate against variants - this will be crucial to us with an S protein test and shouldn’t be seen as negative at all in my opinion

This stood out for me and would explain the delays with the sovereign test. « The test detects the D641G mutant of the original coronavirus, and the Group expects that the test will also detect the newer coronavirus variants. Work is ongoing with Public Health England to confirm this. »

Paul Hill https://t.co/d4eekJvoNY?amp=1

Agree - you would think the premier league would have more important things to worry about if there was no connection

Fantastic sensitivity - and remember thats based on anterior nose samples whereas most competitor data is derived from brain tickling. Seems to genuinely position us as the only lft that will be able to provide sufficient reliability for opening up flights, clubs etc without PCR or awkward sampling methods.

1% specificity - I'm sure Sir Al is disappointed with that. Also very surprised by this, could it be wrong? Specificity seemed to be affimer's key strength. Is there even such a thing as a false false positive? It was only one case... If correct though, it will allow Deeks to repeat his mantra on false positives, so perhaps not (yet) ideal for mass testing. Would be really interesting to know what was reported for that one false positive when retesting with the other lfts - and even more so when retesting with the Avacta lft. Maybe we will hear in the presentation.

Still really happy overall, opening up travel and hospitality is probably the most lucrative part of the market. And perhaps the sovereign test is configured differently (S&N or N only but using affimers) and will be the test targeted for use in Mass Testing.

Mr Han**** replied: “We have managed to reduce somewhat the turnaround time for the sequencing of positive tests, but we are also introducing a new type of test which can detect not just whether you’re positive, but whether you have one of the known variants, without having to go through a full sequence and that can give you a snapshot much much faster, within a matter of hours, as to whether a positive result has one of the known variants, before sending it off to sequencing, so that you can see any new variant that you don’t know about’

Doesnt sound like an lft.

@neutronic - yes it just seems unlikely to be a coincidence that none of the rtc members are on the framework - ie abingdon odx mologic gad avacta bbi and ciga - when most other diagnostics companies are. Makes me think they are already contracted in another way.

Most interesting is who is NOT on this list - ie avacta, Mologic, gad , odx, abingdon....