Avacta Group plc (LON:AVCT) Chief Executive Officer Alastair Smith caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their recent partnership with Adeptrix Corporation.
Q1: Avacta Group recently announced a partnership with Adeptrix to develop a new form of COVID-19 diagnostic. Alastair, could you explain for us how this test works?
A1: The test which Adeptrix calls a BAMS test is to detect the COVID-19 virus antigen so it’s a test that tells you whether you’ve got the COVID-19 infection right now and it’s equivalent to the PCR tests that we hear a lot about on the news.
It will run in a hospital laboratory using saliva or swabs or serum and the way the test works is that the virus is captured from the patient sample using beads which hare coated with the affimer reagents that capture the virus. Those beads are then deposited on a glass slide and put into the mass spectrometer which very rapidly scans over those beads to identify if the coronavirus is present.
For those that are interested, the type of mass spectrometer that is being used is called a MALDI-TOF and it’s very common in hospitals, clinical microbiology labs and so, all around the world.
Q2: What are the benefits of this type of test compared with other laboratory tests?
A2: BAMS tests are very high performance because they combine that capture the virus using very specific affimer reagents with the power of mass spectrometry to detect the virus. So, the sensitivity and the specificity of the BAMS test that we’re developing with Adeptrix should be very high indeed.
The other huge advantage is that there’s already a large installed base of these mass spectrometers around the world, in hospitals, and that’s currently not being used for COVID-19 testing so we’ll be bringing the testing power of all those machines into service by developing this kit.
Q3: How long do you think it will take to develop the test?
A3: These types of BAMS tests are really quite quick to develop so we think a few weeks with the reagents that we supplied to Adeptrix and then, of course, the test will need to be clinically validated as all new tests are but again, that should only take a few weeks.
The approvals process should be fairly rapid and we expect to have an approved test for use, if all goes well, early in the summer.
Q4: So, when the test is working, what’s the route to market?
A4: The test will take the form of a kit of reagents, including the Avacta Group affimer reagents, and it’s that kit that will be sold to hospitals and other laboratories for the use on the mass spectrometer. The manufacturers of these mass spectrometers, like Shimadzu, Bruker, Waters, Agilent, they are the best route to market to supply the kits to run on their installed base of machines.
So, we’re already in discussions with some of those parties to get test commercialised and into use as quick as possible.
