Braveheart Inv Regulatory News (BRH)

The information contained within this announcement is deemed by the Company to constitute inside information pursuant to Article 7 of EU Regulation 596/2014 as it forms part of UK domestic law by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 as amended.

21 January 2022

Braveheart Investment Group plc

("Braveheart" or the "Group")

Operational update on Paraytec

Braveheart Investment Group plc (AIM: BRH), is pleased to provide the following update on Paraytec, a company within the Group's investment portfolio.

Recent upgrades to the CX300 instrument indicate a five-fold improvement to its limit of detection, following initial testing by Paraytec and the University of Sheffield. Paraytec will next seek to confirm this improvement by the testing of swab specimens from patients with new cases of COVID-19.

Paraytec has designed a short prospective clinical study to evaluate the performance of the CX300, when measured not only against both PCR and lateral flow tests, but also by determining patient sample viral infectivity by culture on mammalian epithelial cells. This trial, which will monitor positive patients daily for up to 10 days, will enable the Paraytec team to establish the performance of the device in determining the presence of infectious virus, and is expected to start before the end of February.

Paraytec's programme to develop a test for bacteraemia, which causes sepsis, is continuing to make progress. This test will be based on Paraytec's the CX300 platform technology that was first developed for the COVID-19 test.

The key to for the Bacteraemia Underpinning Sepsis (BuS) test is the building of a suite of specific macromolecules, each of which uniquely identifies one of the strains of bacteria known to cause sepsis. The work programme, now underway, involves the use of molecular biology to generate a library of one thousand billion different macromolecular structures.

Synthetic virus particles will be tested for their affinity to the target bacterial strain and selected for their ability to bind tightly to bacterial surface molecules and be subsequently recovered from them. This selection process will be undertaken repeatedly to allow for the selection of a macromolecule with optimised binding properties. The precise molecular nature of the selected affinity macromolecule can be determined by sequencing the genome of the virus particle that has the desired bacterial surface binding properties.

Work has started on the construction of the macromolecular library, together with the selection of preferred bacterial surface proteins, prior to the initiation of the selection process. 

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