Oxford Nanopore Technolo... Share Discussion Threads

[p1nkfish] 18/4/2024 16:53

I don't see the need to rush. Traders might be OK but non-traders better off waiting for confirmation that a turn-around is taking hold and in the meantime sit it out. Some have probably been slaughtered here. Who can guarantee the date of a longer term price reversal? First people are stripped of their capital, next they are made to wait for who knows how long for any signs of hope. Both phases are unpleasant. Taking part is not compulsory.

[brucie5] 18/4/2024 16:04

I hope noone sold today... Looks like an attack on the share price has been thwarted. Same again tomorrow? Or will we have new holders on board.
If it can't be pushed below 90p, then £1 is the next obvious threshold. I imagine there will be quite a few new conviction buyers here.

[brucie5] 18/4/2024 14:19

Thanks guys. All grist to the mill.
15.39. Looks like a battle of the Alamo down here.
Better put on my David Crocket hat.
😉

[ih_828197] 18/4/2024 13:51

H2 of this year is when i think the turn-around will happen and the path to profitability will become clearer until then i'll keep avaraging down, ONT reminds me of PLTR 2 years ago, great tech but the market had no confidence on future growth and managment and we know how that turned out.

[74tom] 18/4/2024 13:00

There are no declared positions above the 0.5% threshold right now, although JP Morgan went above that level back in Jan & Millenium were short above that level for a while in 2022. As I said on the KWS board last week, the LSE short reporting disclosures are a disgrace and unfit for purpose vs other global exchanges (NASDAQ & TSX have twice monthly cumulative reporting, ASX daily cumulative). My guess would be that cumulative short positions in ONT are ~5% of share capital (Pacbio was 19% at 28/03). It could be significantly higher, but volume hasn't really been sufficient for that & GIC Private (the Singapore sovereign wealth fund) have been heavy sellers.

Agree on questioning the business model, and I think management should be reporting quarterly to keep shareholders up to date on progress, which is of course the norm in the US, Australia & Canada...

[takeiteasy] 18/4/2024 12:45

just to clarify is this being actively shorted, once we get this low you start to wonder if the entire business model is being questioned as viablequestion is there anything management can do more to more to address this

[74tom] 18/4/2024 12:41

@brucie, there were a couple of 50k buys on the book in the 93/94 region, they've now been filled & now we have 50k at 90.1 and 45k at 88, both placed in the last half an hour

[74tom] 18/4/2024 12:39

Volume simply isn't there at the moment, sellers still offloading into a buy side order book that is unchanged from the last few months, a few 50k blocks every now and again but nothing resembling true support (I'd want to see 7 figure buy orders propping things up to signal a potential bottom).

Personally, I don't think there is any definitive read across from PACB's strategic & financial problems, however given the worsening macro it appears that this has become even more of a 'show me' story, and the value of the IP has gone out of the window for now.

Very interesting to see just how low this ends up going, PACB has certainly thrown fuel on the fire for those who don't believe long reads can commercially replicate the success that Illumina had on the short read side.

[brucie5] 18/4/2024 12:31

Someone appears to be hoovering at 93/94.

[brucie5] 17/4/2024 16:48

Decent recovery, but sub £1 may yet be tested again tomorrow to see how far down this can be taken. The more resilient the support over 90p, the higher the bids may become. I cannot see this as a penny share for long. But maybe that's wishful thinking.

[brucie5] 17/4/2024 14:37

One illustration of the mcap/revenue differential between three pre-profit stories I follow:

Mcap Revenues Rev Multiple

OXB 195 119 1.6

ONT 861 169 5

CWR 257 22 11

All figures from Stocko. I hold 1 & 2 in order of size; but not yet 3.

[brucie5] 17/4/2024 11:45

Maybe a good call, Yas; this is what I thought would happen, with 90p as possible support after £1.
Though who knows.
Too much to expect some major buying at this level?

[yasx] 17/4/2024 11:06

Have started to scale in here, will add on any further declines.

[p1nkfish] 16/4/2024 17:41

4.5x 3M average volume on PACB already and still 3.5 hrs left approx.

If PACB looks so risky would you want to adopt their solutions unless there was no alternative? Needs some deep pockets to step in to stabilise their ship.

Worth waiting to see a sign of reverse in trend before taking any positions.

[74tom] 16/4/2024 17:28

Didn't know that @bamboo2, but it makes sense when you look at their consumables performance over the last few years, it looks like many customers never order beyond the free stuff either... horrendous financials.

As for the UK listing being a shelter, it doesn't really work when a company is on SETS as ONT is, there was huge sell volume in the closing auction which almost pushed the price under £1. Agree on the US market in general though, there are some nosebleed valuations again after the relative reset in 2022

[brucie5] 16/4/2024 17:09

£1 hit. Now let's see.

[p1nkfish] 16/4/2024 16:57

Have to wonder if a UK listing is not so bad after all.
A backwater away from the US slaughter house.

US multiples will come under the hammer and some reality begin to sink in across multiple sectors.

Keep away from areas where much of the upside has been down to P/E expansion.

[bamboo2] 16/4/2024 16:51

74tom, PACB also robs its forward sales of consumables by packaging a load of them 'free' if new customers order a new machine. Aka 'buying the business'.

[ih_828197] 16/4/2024 16:34

PACB is looking like it's going bk.

[74tom] 16/4/2024 16:33

Pacbio pre announced their Q1 results this afternoon, an absolute horror show;



Shares off 46% currently, they look in real trouble with a market cap of just $480m vs $900m in gross convertible debt.

Given ONT updated the market just over a month ago, you'd like to think FY24 guidance takes into account many of the reasons disclosed by PACB, which were listed as;

"The uncertainty surrounding the funding for new capital equipment, particularly in the U.S. and China;

Procurement delays;

Small-to-mid-size existing customers yet to increase their sample volumes to drive an upgrade to Revio; and,

An increasing proportion of the sales pipeline was comprised of new customers in the first quarter of 2024, which have shown they have longer sales cycles compared to existing PacBio customers.

Consumable revenue was also below expectations, which the company believes was primarily attributed to: `

Slower-than-expected ramp-up in sequencing by our small- to mid-sized customers, many of whom are new to PacBio. The time for new Revio customers and new projects to reach full capacity has been slower than previously anticipated;

Sample delays impacting sequencing volume in the quarter at certain large customers; and,

Some service providers in China operating at lower utilization as a result of the difficult funding environment."

Turbulent times ahead in the sequencing market, particularly with a new product from Roche landing in the next few weeks!

[bamboo2] 15/4/2024 21:02

New study finds potential targets at chromosome ends for degenerative disease prevention

UC Santa Cruz inventors of nanopore sequencing hail innovative use of their revolutionary genetic-reading technique

Full article,

April 11, 2024

By Mike Peña


Telomeres are found at the ends of chromosomes and play a critical role in the cell-renewal process.

We depend on our cells being able to divide and multiply, whether it’s to replace sunburnt skin or replenish our blood supply and recover from injury. Chromosomes, which carry all of our genetic instructions, must be copied in a complete way during cell division. Telomeres, which cap the ends of chromosomes, play a critical role in this cell-renewal process—with a direct bearing on health and disease.

The enzyme telomerase plays a key role in maintaining the length of telomeres as chromosomes replicate during cell division. UC Santa Cruz professor Carol Greider has been studying telomeres and telomerase for over 30 years. The impact of the discoveries she has made over that time are why she, along with two colleagues, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009.

So, the findings of Greider’s latest study on telomeres shouldn’t have surprised her. And yet, they did.

Published online today in Science, a new study finds that telomere lengths follow a different pattern than has thus far been understood. Instead of telomere lengths falling under one general range of shortest to longest across all chromosomes, this study finds that different chromosomes have separate end-specific telomere-length distributions.

According to Greider, this discovery means we don’t fully understand the molecular process that regulates telomere lengths. And that’s important because of how telomere lengths affect human health: “When telomeres get to be too short, you have age-related degenerative diseases like pulmonary fibrosis, bone-marrow failure, and immunosuppression,” Greider said. “On the other hand, if telomeres are too long, it predisposes you to certain types of cancer.”

Kayarash Karimian, the lead author on the paper, is a former Ph.D. student in Greider’s lab at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Other co-authors of this study include researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and University of Pittsburgh. Greider, a distinguished professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz, and a University Professor at Johns Hopkins, was the senior author on the paper and led the work.

Why length matters
Without telomerase, telomeres would get shorter and shorter as a cell divides over and over again. Over the past 30 years, research by Greider and others have confirmed that short telomeres lead to degenerative disease—as well as shown that telomere lengths fall within a certain range.

But this paper challenges scientific consensus by showing that a singular telomere-length range is too broad. Measuring the telomeres of 147 people for this study, the researchers found in one individual that the average telomere length across all chromosomes was 4,300 bases of DNA. Then when they isolated specific chromosomes, they found most telomere lengths differed significantly from this average. In one case, lengths differed as much as 6,000 bases, which Greider describes as “jaw dropping.”

Further, they found across all 147 individuals the same telomeres were most often the shortest or longest, implying telomeres on specific chromosome ends may be the first to trigger stem-cell failure.

Innovating on nanopore sequencing

To make such precise measurements at the molecular level, Greider’s team used a technique invented at UC Santa Cruz called “nanopore sequencing,” a revolutionary method for reading DNA and RNA that has had an immense impact on genomics research since its 2014 debut on the market as the commercial product MinION.

Nanopore technology has enabled some of the most significant advances in the genomics field, such as the completion of a gapless human genome, and sequencing of COVID-19 genomes—making it crucial in the fight to end the pandemic. UC Santa Cruz licensed the concept for nanopore-sequencing technology to the UK-based company Oxford Nanopore Technologies, which made MinION, the first hand-held DNA sequencer.

Notably, in the eyes of nanopore sequencing’s inventors, Greider’s study proves that the technique’s ability to advance scientific research continues to unfold. Mark Akeson, emeritus professor of biomolecular engineering at UC Santa Cruz, notes that two preprint studies that corroborate the basic findings of Greider’s paper have also been posted online.

“In my opinion, this is the most important nanopore-based paper focused on human biology since the MinION was introduced,” Akeson said. “It is easy to envision broad use of their telomere-length assay in the clinic.”

Akeson and David Deamer, also an emeritus professor of biomolecular engineering at the Baskin School of Engineering, were honored at the Library of Congress last year for inventing nanopore sequencing. Their colleague and friend Daniel Branton, a Havard biologist and co-inventor of the technology, was honored as well.

Implications for disease prevention
Such precise DNA reads allowed Greider’s team to pinpoint the sequences adjacent to telomeres and hypothesize that those areas are where telomerase is regulating length. And if that’s true, Greider said those regions, and the proteins that bind there, could serve as potential targets for new drugs for preventing disease.

In addition, their process of “telomere profiling” via nanopore sequencing could serve as a model for the development of additional MinION-based assays for high-throughput drug screening.

“This accessible technique has widespread potential for use in research, diagnostics, and drug development,” Greider said. “This work indicates that there are yet undiscovered mechanisms for telomere length regulation; probing these mechanisms will inform new approaches to cancer and certain degenerative diseases.”

The study, “Human telomere length is chromosome end-specific and conserved across individuals,” was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R35CA209974 to Greider and R01HL166265), the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship, and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

[yasx] 15/4/2024 18:20

74Tom,

You do not need to try and convince me. Even if you were to try, the evidence is all too clear. Jam tomorrow, pre revenue stage Co's appear to form the bulk of your (dwindling) portfolio. Those with sense buy solid Co's with strong asset backing, cashflow and producing an income. A bit of speculation within a portfolio is fine, but when almost every stock you back is an early stage worthless tiddler, the writing is on the wall. I did caution you at the highs about EXR, RENX, AMTE, STX but you indulged in hurling a cannonade of profanities. Oh well.

I will leave it at that to allow discussion on ONT to resume.