2005, a pivotal year for Axis-Shield, with strong growth and profitability

Alftupper...Thanks for your thoughts. First and in reply to your, I told you so comment. I thought that ASD had clearly highlighted at the previous analysts meeting that there were minor scale up issues that would affect the roll out, although the Nomura analysts thinks not, but I distinctly remember ramp up/roll out proper as being indicated for the ‘second half’ of 2006, so not a great deal appears to have changed? It is important to realise that those issues, as I understand it, are scale up issues and not a fundamental instrument issue.

I have previously checked/run the rule over the Boditech system, I-Chroma. The system has been around for a while (2002), and they had booths at the recent medical shows that I highlighted on here ie Medica and the IFCC/AACC 2005 Annual meeting, in other words ASD are aware of the system and Svein would have included the i-chroma when he said Afinion was "far in front of any competition". Furthermore technology that requires sample preparation/reagent mixing etc is 'far' from leading edge or compelling.

The main competition that I can see is from automated tests for 'just' A1c and certainly not from POC 'multi-assay' platforms. I said previously that I am not an expert, but I can tell that a POC system capable of testing multiple assay's that also includes PT-INR is quite unique, not to mention Homocysteine (For example Roche - CoaguChek $1500, HemoSense $2000 and ITC's -ProTime $1500 all manufacture a separate single test devices for PT-INR. NB a ‘huge‘ market!). You will see below that the system you highlight as providing considerable competition leaves a lot to be desired, and is probably why it will not featured loud -



For the complete procedure (an eye opener compared to the link above) -
1

For those interested -
Boditech's website -

I-Chroma and has not attained FDA clearance or obviously CLIA waiver and is not even NGSP registered.

As I said the I-Chroma has been around for a while, to date they have raised the grand sum of $2m, if it was such a compelling technology then I am sure someone would have come up with more funding or had distributors banging on their door keen for an agreement etc.

To close, Abbott chose Afinion with good reasoning, which would have included knowledge of present and up and coming competition, not to mention the inclusion (and further technology vindication) of making reagents available from their Axsym and IMX systems.

Regards, wan