Shares in diagnostics and innovative cancer therapies company Avacta (AVCT:AIM) jumped 10% to 257.6p on Tuesday after receiving clinical validation of its Covid-19 lateral flow test.
Today’s announcement follows up quickly on the initial successful smaller clinical trial (16 February) of the company’s AffiDX lateral flow test, which is intended to provide a fast, low cost means of identifying individuals with a high viral load and who are considered more likely to infect others.
The important part of the findings is that the test correctly identified 100% of the individuals who had high viral loads. In addition, the test showed strong efficacy against a range wide range of viral loads.
Of the 98 patients with positive test samples in the trial, the test correctly identified 96 positive individuals, indicating a high sensitivity reading of 98%. The test correctly identified 101 out of 102 negative test samples, giving a high specificity reading of 99%.
GAME CHANGER
Lateral flow tests had been considered a poor cousin to the ‘gold standard’ polymerase chain reaction test, which is an established test designed to detect the genetic material in a virus.
These results indicate that a low cost, fast (20 minutes) lateral flow test can be an effective tool in the fight against Covid-19.
Chief executive Dr. Alastair Smith commented, ‘The results are very impressive and marks a major step in obtaining a CE mark for professional use.
‘As part of the study the same clinical samples were tested with two leading, commercially available lateral flow antigen tests, and the data show that the AffiDx® test had better clinical sensitivity across the range of Ct value and in particular at lower viral loads.’
The data from the findings will be combined with stability and other performance data to finalise the technical file for CE marking the test for professional use and is expected to be commercially available from May 2021.
