Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the StageZero Life Sciences Limited First Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rebecca Greco, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you, Ariel. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining the StageZero First Quarter 2023 Investor and Analyst Conference Call. Joining me today is StageZero Chairman and CEO, James Howard-Tripp. Please note that management's discussion today will contain forward-looking statements about anticipated results and future prospects. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties. StageZero's results may differ materially from those discussed today. Investors should consult the company's ongoing quarterly filings and annual reports for additional information on risks and uncertainties relating to these forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned not to rely on these forward-looking statements. Company disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements except as required by law. On today's call, management will refer to non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA. The metric excludes certain items discussed in our press release under the heading Discussion of non-GAAP Financial Measures and any other items that management believes should be excluded when reviewing continuing operations. The reconciliations of StageZero's non-GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP measures are available in the financial documents the company has filed on SEDAR. With that, I would like to turn the call over to James Howard-Tripp, StageZero's Chief Executive Officer and Chairman. James, please go ahead. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you for joining us. We're beginning to build momentum, and it's good. We've got a mix of new investors as well as current investors on the call today. What we'll do is we'll look for a balance in terms of discussing where we are and where we're going. We'll start with the current cancer crisis. I think as I was reading very early this morning, we're actually shifting patients from various geographic regions in order to try and get them radiation therapy. Why? Because there's a lack of oncologists, because there's a lack of nursing staff, because there's a lack of radiation equipment. Everyone's scrambling as we're still coming out of COVID, and I think that's an absolutely critical piece. If you remember, as we've often talked about, the issue that's currently facing us is not only that about 2 million people in North America will be diagnosed with cancer this year, but the vast majority of them, more than 50%, will be diagnosed late stage. That's when they're symptomatic. That's not when you want to be finding cancer. We've seen this massive reduction in screening during COVID. We know we're all coming back with that, but it's still not fully in place. We'll talk a lot about the different modalities. We'll talk a bit about some of the accuracy as we talk about it, and particularly as we position what it is that we're doing. It's critical. COVID had a dramatic effect on everything. Coming out of COVID is again having a dramatic effect on everything. Cancer is not the only disease that we have to be concerned about out there, but it currently is the number 1 catastrophic health claim for self-funded healthcare plans. We'll talk about why that's so critical in just a short while. A number that's absolutely staggering is the national economic burden. You know, it's $150 odd billion in the U.S. alone in terms of lost productivity, in terms of healthcare costs, in terms of absenteeism from work, in terms of all of the costs that go with that. It is right now, I believe, the number 1 driver of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Being able to deal with all it is absolutely critical. How do you do that? Well, we've talked about this very often. Early is clearly better. The 5-year survival rates are just huge. We talk very often about colorectal cancer. With colorectal cancer, if you've got about a 90% chance of surviving five years. To find it late, you've got about a 10%-14% chance of finding it five years. That's not what you want. The same applies pretty much across all of the cancers. The cost savings, too, is just huge. The cost of treating a late-stage cancer is typically 2-4 times that of treating an early-stage cancer. Again, go back to the personal bankruptcy aspect. Go back to the costs that the self-insured, the healthcare plans carry, and you can see why it's critical to be able to get to it early. It's not just the benefits to the patients, it's the benefits to the employers as well. We have to do this through a relatively complex process. Complex is not always good, but sometimes complex is necessary. The thing that's become abundantly clear the further we go down this, is that you can't just be a lab reporting lab tests when it comes to cancer. People want more than that. They want to know that if they presumably have cancer, that they can get worked on. They want to know they can get referred through. They need to see those pathways. If they flag at risk, and bearing in mind that about 40% of cancers appear to be fully preventable, you need to have risk modification programs in place that you can offer. If you're dealing with larger institutions, and that will literally go from your healthcare systems to lab systems to particularly employers, this is what they're demanding. Don't come to us without an end-to-end solution. We're literally the only group that actually currently has the end-to-end solution. It starts with Aristotle today, yes or no. I should say potential cancer today, yes or no. It goes to AVRT which looks at two things. One, the potential for developing cancer tomorrow, but also has the risk modification program that allows you to try and head it off. In addition to that, if you are diagnosed with cancer, you can actually have the adjunctive TREAT Program, which looks to improve outcomes. We're bringing a full package. It is critical. I think it's worth jumping through the value propositions and particularly the market opportunities with a fair amount of detail. We'll walk through this fairly slowly. I think a number of you have seen this slide before, but it's critical. The size of the self-funded employer market is huge. It is huge. It covers approximately 157 million people in total. It covers more than 100 Americans, and this is the U.S. that we talk about. It covers more than 100 million Americans in self-insured healthcare places. It's about 64% of employers that insure their workers under self-funded or self-insured arrangements. Why? It's more economical. Two, the insurance companies are also pushing you in that direction. As small as we are, we actually have been approached by our carrier to look at self-insuring some of the plan. Companies are carrying more of it. It's interesting too, to see where the bulk of the self-insured are in terms of number of employees within the company, and that makes it very attractive to be able to reach. More on that in a moment. If you look at the self-funded employer market, as I said, the bulk of it, take your 67%, which is your 100 million employees. What we're doing is focus directly at that. You can look at the bars on the right-hand side, which shows that the bulk of where we need to go is with the sort of reasonable side employers all the way up to those that are gigantic, and that's the market. What is the scene. James? In terms of penetration? Yes. I apologize for interrupting. My slides are not moving. Just make sure you're moving the slides for them. I can't see movement. Yes, my slides are moving. Can you see them? Great. Yes. Okay. No, thank you for... Yes, my slides are moving. Great. Just hope that it's actually staying current with all the process. Sorry to interrupt. If we look at penetration, so going to the penetration side of it on the self-funded, you can see that we need an absolute sliver of this 100 million employee market to actually start doing very well. In actual fact, if we have just 10,000 employees into our program, and we'll work through the pricing in a moment, it's over $12 million in revenue to us. If you look at 10,000 employees within 100 million, it's a very, very small slice you have to take to begin. Obviously the potential to grow is huge. That's the key market for us. Why would self-employed, sorry, self-funded employees want to speak with us? Well, we've talked about the breast cancer case study before. If you drop to the bottom of it, you can see that the savings is in excess of 50%. In terms of managing costs, and healthcare costs are extremely high at the moment, they're a concern for everyone. Everyone is trying to provide equal or better healthcare for their employees, but at a reduced cost. This is one way to actually make it work. Remember that cancer is the number one driver of catastrophic healthcare costs within self-funded employers. It's the same for the reinsurance that work with them. Everyone is looking for ways to be able to contain this. We come to them saying, 1, first of all, we can reduce your costs. Two, we come to them saying, we can improve the healthcare for your employees. By finding cancer early, we get to deal with it early. That's a huge benefit to the employee, as we talked about five-year survival. In addition to that, we have an impact on that productivity number. We reduce absenteeism. We reduce time off work. We reduce the time off of benefits. We improve the healthcare of the individual. All of that contributes positively. It's extremely important as we take it through. We get to move it further when we go to, for example, firefighters. Firefighters are key for us because firefighters are a higher risk population. In actual fact, if we work through this, you can see that certainly within the Canadian side, 86% of all claims for firefighter work-related death is from cancer. I'll say that again. 86% of all claims for firefighter work-related death is from cancer. It's the number one issue that they're concerned about. It's pretty obvious when you think about it, but there's a lot, sorry, pretty obvious in terms of why when you think about it, but there's a lot that we need to do. We need to keep the firefighters safe. We have firefighters in our own families. We all know them. They. We need to make sure we do everything possible to protect them. It extends out to all first responders. Police, ambulance are only slightly behind that in terms of where it is. They too attend the same situations. Working with the critical, but you can also expand it out because airline workers, though the ground crew that are around airplanes, the flight attendants, the pilots, all carry higher risk. They're only slightly below this group. You can expand it out. We go to steelworkers, and then we go to coal workers, and you can see where we go. If we look at what we're doing in the Ontario side, and we've talked about this before, there are approximately 30,000 firefighters in Ontario. The nice thing is it's Ontario. It's encapsulated. What we're trying to find out within this, since they're working through legislation, and there are various pieces of legislation going through Canada right now, U.S. is ahead of the Canadian side. Some of this went through Congress some time ago. It is also mandated by the unions in terms of the firefighters being screened annually. There are still issues about when, who gets screened when, what you screen them for, what kind of cancers carry benefit. Is it durational service or age that's important? Is it both of those that is important? It's all of that we're actually helping try and answer. We're doing it in a rather novel way. Remember that part of what we're doing. Well, let me move over to the solution. Remember that part of what we're doing is Aristotle. We're screening them with Aristotle, which is essentially, do you have the flags for having that particular cancer today? Yes or no? It's the immediacy. The AVRT Metabolic Pathway Panel would indicate whether your pathways, metabolic pathways that lead to cancer are flagging red or amber. If they are, then it needs, one, continuing monitoring, but two, you can intervene in it. The AVRT part is really critical. It also allows, if you think about, building health economic data on all of this, a critical piece with it. The next thing that we found as we've talked with them is they've said, "Yeah, okay, so you're giving us a result. We're ositive on one of these. Well, what do we do with it? Can you deal with all of the physicians that we might deal with? Can you educate all of them? Can you make sure that we get triaged, that we get taken up through proper workups, the proper diagnostic procedures that will either confirm or not confirm that we have cancer, but also put us into the right programs?" We've had to build that. We've had to make sure that's there. One, Care Oncology on our side is an absolute critical piece of this. Without that, we couldn't do this. Care Oncology actually spins this. It triages. It drives a lot of it. In addition to that, if we take the Ontario situation, which we're talking about here, we have established relationships with the teaching hospital units tied into cancer in the GTA. As a result of that, we've established pathways by which we can now refer people that test positive through. We can also refer them for educational aspect, for guidance, all of it really critical. The final piece is we developed a health economic analysis. Remember too with this, it's not just that we'll be reporting on individual firefighters, but we'll be able to contrast one fire hall against another, different parts of the city. Sorry, different parts of the province. We'll be able to look at the various fires that they've gone to. We'll be able to see whether certain fires over long term actually indicate higher risk. We'll be able to actually evaluate length of service versus age so that we can begin to build that out. For example, defining cancers in young firefighters, we are finding cancers in 30, 35-year-old firefighters. Typically, you would not think so, but we are. Don't forget that a number of firefighters come out of the armed forces as well, so they've had previous experience on this. All of this builds in terms of what you want. You need to have this in place and take it through. The final piece in this is, we've gone for city funding, so it's multi-year. We don't want a single event, just a single snapshot event. We want it to actually run year after year, we build the data. Together with that, fire halls have discretionary funding. Individuals want to begin and not wait for all of this. Those are the programs that are going into place now as we build and will continue to build throughout the year. This is interesting for us because this is called perceptual mapping. What it is it looks at our competitive advantage. Yeah, we've chosen to just look at Aristotle. I think it's really important. One of the key things is we're very often asked, you know, how does the accuracy of our test, for example, compare to others? I think what everyone forgets about is the current tests that they use, they use singly. Almost without doubt, they find later stage cancer. In actual fact, the circulating tumor cell-free DNA aspect is, plus methylation, is in actual fact much more, I won't say accurate, but much more able to pick up late-stage cancer. It's much less able to pick up early-stage cancer. What you do is you look across existing tests and what we've accepted as being good tests. You can see how clearly we stand out above the others. That's an absolute critical competitive advantage as we take it forward. In addition to this, we can add AVRT, which is for flying ahead of that, and we'll continue to build this as we go on. Really nice, really unique competitive advantage. The final piece in all of this is that our process is different, and we talked about this. Remember that with the Care Oncology Group, as we put it through, and telehealth plays a very big role in all of this as well, that the abnormal findings are addressed by knowledgeable physicians. It gets triaged and pushed through our system. You need help, we can provide help. You need programs, we can provide the programs. As a result, it is, it allows us to engage with employers in a way that currently no one else can. Q1 was actually for us pretty decent. I think a lot of groups have had a very difficult Q1. For us, you see we contrasted Q1 with Q4. We think that's the correct metric as we're returning to cancer. It's the obvious build as we build on up, and you can see that we've shown about a 15% growth over Q4. We're comfortable that that growth continues, and we're looking to continue to build momentum as we move on out through the rest of the year. If you look at the COC Protocol, what we did we've launched the new protocol two in the U.S. and Canada. The initial uptake has been very positive. This is important for us, not only because of dealing with patients, current and prospective individual patients, but it's a critical piece in terms of what we're learning as we drive it through the AVRT risk management program, and we apply it to groups such as firefighters, as part of employers. All of that, critical. Everything is formed together. We highlighted the METRICS study during this, particularly the fact that within the sort of first 18 months of treating glioblastoma stage 4 patients, we essentially saw a doubling of overall survival. We're planning METRICS 2, multicenter as it goes through. METRICS 2 will not only provide additional information on this with patients, but we will introduce neuroimaging. In addition to that, it will be the beginning of introducing glioblastoma screening into Aristotle. That is in the process of going together right now. We're on track. We've done a lot of work with the COC clinic since the acquisition. We're on track to full profitability, we believe by the end of Q3, so we look forward to continuing to eeport on that. That obviously makes sure that it's a very positive contributor all the way through the process. We're initiating additional programs as we build it out. We're moving from what has been essentially a oncologist-centered program to where the oncologist now drive it together with additional metabolic specialist physicians who are not oncologists, together with nurse practitioners. We're bringing in a mental health support program. We have linked with a pharmacy group of PharmDs to provide ongoing education and we will shortly likely be entering into a nutritional program as well. All of it builds out. Again, think individual patient, but absolutely think what it is that we're taking to employer groups. Finally, the Aristotle employer programs are gaining traction. These take a while to get them fully up and running. They're complex, as we've talked about. They require a fair amount of setting up. We're building out, and we're building up not only across employers, but we're building up across healthcare clinics. We're also building up across lab systems. We'll talk about this a little more as we go through the next few slides. 2023, we will launch the new COC Protocol, so COC Protocol 2 in the U.K. in the next short while. In addition to that, we intend to have a launch into the European Union before the end of the year. That is on track. From the profitability perspective, we talked about that a moment ago, but I want to take a little while just to work through the revenue side. Remember that patients stay with us a reasonable period of time. Patients, we've got patients that have been with us anywhere from months, to literally many years. I think the longest duration patient with us is about eight years. Patients stay with us. If the program works, you stay with you. We have taken the fact that if you look across essentially a 12-month period, the pricing as we've, as we've now laid the whole program out, the enhanced program out, will essentially deliver about $4,075 US dollars to us. You get patients in, you keep them in as long. You need to contrast this very strongly with what might have been a typical lab model. Single test, single result, single payment, they're gone. You have to go and acquire an additional patient. In this case, as patients come in and work with us, and bearing in mind that the patients will come in through multiple routes, they get to stay with us for the considerable time, and the revenue is therefore repeating. Although our focus is primarily the U.S., Canada is in fact a significant market. We're making fairly significant inroads into it. We in Canada typically have fewer options than patients do in the U.S. People are finding it very, very attractive. The Canadian side is actually building very well. We've talked about the pharmacies services and mental health support groups, but we're actually expanding out quite dramatically on the Canadian side as well, and there'll be, you know, future announcements as all of these drop into place. The METRICS study, really important. If you think about what it does, if you think about a doubling of overall survival rate within 18 months. Glioblastoma is one of the deadliest of the cancers. There are relatively few options in terms of how to treat it. I think sort of 12-month survival is typically well below 20%. Any true activity that you have, any true benefit that you can have is really important. There's two things. One, we did the study in glioblastoma 4, which is late stage. Unfortunately, that's mostly when glioblastoma mostly manifests itself. It's the symptomatic aspect. Moving to putting glioblastoma screening in Aristotle will be important. It'll be one of the first times that we can actually screen this particularly deadly cancer. It remains a very clear objective. All we need is patients, and that comes as we, as we actually initiate the study. The second thing is, as we've worked with the healthcare systems that will be involved in METRICS 2, they've indicated a very high interest in the adjunctive protocol that we bring to bear. It's not only the possibility of finding it, but if we can improve outcomes in this way and do it adjunctive to them, in other words, working with standard of care in terms of looking for better outcomes, it's very valuable. There's very high interest in working with us on that. That's part of the process that we're taking forward. We talked about the employer cancer screening program, the 100 million employees in the U.S. alone. It's very clear what our objective is. Remember that pie chart. We need an absolute sliver of that market to actually do relatively well on revenue. Clearly, every 10,000 patients we do, if our numbers hold correct, and we believe they will, it adds CAD 10 million-12 million to our revenue stream. It'll be trackable because we'll be able to announce these pieces going forward, and you'll be able to measure where we're going. Finally, your first responders, key as we go through all of this, that is actually moving into high gear as we go through. It's both the U.S. and Canada. It always takes a little bit of time just to get all of the pieces in place, but it actually is scaling up quite rapidly at the moment, and we're looking forward to building that out. Also, as we continue to work through, don't forget that the pricing is attractive as well. If we simply do the tests, that's one thing. We expect the firefighters, the first responders within all of this, a number of them to actually look at the risk modification programs. Don't forget that we would flag things like metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome, very often a precursor to type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes, quite often a precursor to developing some of the cancers. By flagging this and intervening in it, we have a means of being able to work with it. Therefore, we fully expect that the patients will stay with us, and you can see the difference in revenue. It moves from example, CAD 949 to CAD 2,385 at the top end. That's what it is. If people come to us, if they will stay with us, it's recurring revenue. In summary, cancer is the number 1 catastrophic cost for self-funded healthcare plans. We know that early cancer detection has an absolute marked effect on cost, as we showed in the breast cancer case study, better than 50%. The other cancers are very similar to that. Remember that employers will actually engage if the cost savings is 2% or better. This is a marked improvement on where they are. They'll markedly improve overall employee healthcare, their wellbeing. We have a marked impact on productivity and all the costs associated with that. Equally as important, and as I was just talking about, don't forget that within the AVRT program, we're not just flagging cancer, we're flagging the precursors to cancer. I think if you're talking to a group of oncologists, they would tell you that it's seldom that cancer is not preceded by a major chronic disease. We will flag, in most instances, the chronic major diseases, which means that we can have intervention programs that begin to work on that. That's how you get to where 40% of the cancers are avoidable with the risk modification program. Again, it is critical to employers. Telehealth, critical. Metabolic oncologist oversight, critical. We need to be able to do that. We have patients all over the world, in countries all over the world. The only way that we can do that is via telehealth. Remember how many employees are covered by self-funded insurance plans. $100 million in the U.S. alone is a very large number. We know the companies to target in terms of where it is. We are working with them. Finally Aristotle is extremely novel. AVRT is extremely novel. Treat is extremely novel. The way we've been able to put it together is unique, and it's a very significant advantage at this point. We look forward to reporting on progress as we go forward. Ariel, we can go to questions if there are any. Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Once again, to join the question queue, please press star then one now. We will pause for a moment as callers join the queue. Thank you, Ariel. We have a couple already submitted via webcast. We can start with there. James, we have a question about how many self-funded employers has StageZero had meaningful discussions with, regardless of a positive outcome of such decisions, and whether we're able to identify the breakout discussions per country, and whether we have any contracts signed that we're able to comment on and what the pipeline looks like. I'll stop there. Yeah. Good, good set of questions. Let me see if I can go through. We're typically not about to say how many we're working with. I can say that we're talking with a significant number. On a decent number of these, we're down to where I would say contract negotiations. That, be careful, that doesn't automatically mean that everything just drops into place. But I think we can confirm that a number of them have moved down to that level. We would expect them or a significant number of them to come to fruition, and we'll obviously be able to announce those in due course. I would say they span U.S. and Canada, bearing in mind that on the U.K. European side, we don't have the full setup that we have on the Canadian or U.S. side. For example, Aristotle has not yet been introduced into the U.K. or the European market, so therefore the discussions are primarily North American. In terms of disclosing who the groups are, it's going to be a mix. I mean, for example, some groups that we're already working with, under no circumstances will they allow us to disclose who they are. They're just very blunt. They're not a marketing machine for us. It's for them and their employees' benefits, and they want it to remain that way. With other groups, it's of benefit, particularly if we take out new programs that work with them. For example, that might be clinic groups or that might be labs as it goes through. I'll explain a little bit on the labs because I know it's a question we have had. Bear in mind that it will be very useful for us if we paired together or partner together with labs that have multi-city or multi-jurisdictional exposure. In other words, we would work together with programs on them as we take it through. It's interesting too, as we've gone down, the labs are not just in terms of, okay, they would offer Aristotle, they would draw for Aristotle, it gets sent into the Richmond lab for processing and then your results reported out. People in actual fact want that end-to-end solution. being able to refer back up into the oncology network, being able to offer the TREAT Program for patients that are confirmed with cancer or being able to offer the AVRT program for patients that flag at risk is key, too. Don't forget, it's not just Aristotle, it's also the AVRT Metabolic Pathway Panels. We run it through. All of those run through. Those are the lab partnerships as we move on out. Thank you, James. Thank you. We have a couple more webcast questions, but I believe we also have a caller on the line. Ariel, you wanna start? Our first question comes from Thomas Hellman, private investor. Please go ahead. Yes, listen to you talk there. A lot of info. It's a lot of info that investors have to trust is coming down the pike. The only solid 100% info that we can trust is what you report numbers-wise. Going back when Care Oncology was purchased, we were told they alone brought in revenue of CAD 1 million per quarter. Now looking at the revenue that the combined company brings in, I don't know how we should look at that math. Has Care Oncology lost CAD 200,000-300,000 per quarter since taking over? If so, what portion does Stage0 bring in? I would just like some of that explained, if you can. Thomas, I don't believe I would have to go back and check on all of it, but I don't believe we ever said that Care Oncology did CAD 1 million a quarter, because that would have been incorrect. That would be starting from an assumption that was not correct. In actual fact, when we look at what the earn-out was, they didn't make their earn-out. I don't believe, I don't know that we have actually disclosed what the earn-out was, but it wasn't too far from where you are. Therefore, I think it starts from the wrong assumption. The key thing with Care Oncology as we got it, was we expected Care Oncology to be a positive contributor. It did. We had to sort out a series of things within Care Oncology when we first took it. You'll notice that we've slimmed down. If you look at the costs across the organization, we've reduced costs very significantly as we've moved through. Part of it is their environment, notably coming out of COVID, then the Ukraine-Russia war, the financing situation. I think everyone has gone through that, so we're no different. We put our house in order as rapidly as possible. In addition to that, as we've built the systems and we've expanded it out, as I'm explaining what we've done with the clinics, as to how we've built them out, also introducing the new protocol 2, that is showing growth. No, we haven't done that. We don't break out the various pieces within revenue. We see it as a single unit, that is because in lab testing, it's not just Aristotle, that is the Metabolic Pathway Panel test. On the Care Oncology side, part of it is Treat, part of it is AVRT, some of it's short-term, some it's long-term, and it just becomes a nightmare. Of course, you're gonna have different pricing across the units. We've chosen to report revenue in total. I think if we go to it, unfortunately, Q1 of last year is not a good comparison because it was virtually entirely, I won't say virtually entirely, but was very heavily influenced by COVID. Clearly, there was Care Oncology revenue that went with that. The build-out is, as we talked about, as we started to get back into the swing of it. Q4 was the real first solid quarter untainted by COVID. Q1 is the next. We will continue to report on that basis. I don't know if I can ask one more question. Is that possible? Sure. Go ahead. What is the plan for the items that we're voting on? Why did you want those to be passed? Oh, you mean at the AGM? The 25%, the GEM, and then the, I guess 10 million shares to the insider. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, good question. The CAD 25 million to GEM, TSX gave approval on GEM for essentially a single, normal 3-month period of dilution, which is 25%, so up to 25%. If we don't get approval of the GEM financing, then essentially we can only take an absolute fraction of the money that's there. We think, particularly in today's environment, if you look out there, you'll find that very few companies are financing, particularly if you're smaller like us, getting money is incredibly difficult. Without money, you die. It's as straightforward as that. While everyone's building, the more money you have, the faster you can build. We've always been short of money, notably because where we sit on the Canadian side and the regulations we work within. We're competing with companies that have hundreds of million, and we've got tens of thousands. We need money to be able to fuel this to take it out. We see GEM or the GEM deal as we have it, as actually being the best of the options that we have. It's actually something we did before that worked extremely well because we will dilute less and less with higher share price. As it moves up, we expect to have higher share price. We think the GEM financing is very important for us. In actual fact, if the GEM financing is not approved, we're in trouble because we then don't have financing. Getting it approved is incredibly important. The second thing is a group of directors. One particular director has been extremely supportive of the organization, as we've gone through this is capital. This is funding that has been given to us that has been non-dilutive through all of this. We now are at the point where we need to either begin to pay it back in cash or to pay it back in shares. The individual has agreed to take shares, which means it's better for us in terms of keeping the cash inside the company. We're looking to, in actual fact, exchange the debt for shares. In addition to that, it gives us a really strong insider in terms of this, which is obviously useful for us for a whole variety of reasons going forward. Again, that's why we would ask for approval of that resolution. Okay. Thank you. It also protects our intellectual property. You'll note that a lot of this is being secured against the IP. Okay. Rebecca. Thank you very much. Any further questions? Yeah. We have a couple more on the webcast. Two of them are asking about, how we position ourselves. How do we actively get the competitive advantage that StageZero has into the market? To go along with that, what are the main differences between Aristotle and GRAIL? How are we superior to them? Yes. Okay. kind of a little combined, which is good. Let me start with the Aristotle GRAIL one first, because I think it ties a little into the competitive advantage. It's not specifically so much about GRAIL. Let's talk about the technology that underpins what GRAIL is doing, because a number of others are in actual fact, walking down a similar path. It's all to do with circulating tumor cells and cell-free DNA. If you think about it, what you're doing with tests like GRAIL or some of the others, is that you're looking to be able to pick up fragments of a tumor circulating in the blood, freely circulating in the blood. Clearly, that in itself is a very difficult thing to do. The technology, as you notice, it is continually changing, literally month to month, 6 months to 6 months. The approach to what groups like that are doing is changing. That is because the technology is still evolving. As you can imagine, if you have a tumor that's relatively large, it's gonna shed more cells, more, you know, DNA. Therefore, you have a, still a difficult chance of picking it up, but you've got a much greater chance of picking it up. The methylation too. Methylation actually increases, or the degree of methylation increases with the growth of the tumor, with the age of the tumor. Both of those push towards detecting late stage cancer much more easily than obviously early stage. Early stage, tiny tumor, it's not shedding very much of anything. The methylation aspect is much less there, so it just gets much harder. That's where our big advantage really comes in. We can find early stage one and stage two cancers equally as well as we can find stage three and four. In fact, as we're building out the colorectal cancer test within Aristotle, as we bring the next iteration through, we'll be able to differentiate between or report back in terms of it's not just colorectal cancer, but it's either stage one or stage two colorectal or stage three or stage four. We also know we can do it at the polyp stage, so it's just a matter of having sufficient patients through with the data, and we'll be able to report it out. That is very unique to us. That's a very clear competitive advantage to us. Remember that, part of the criticism on the cell-free aspect, too, is that people are saying is there's relatively little point in being able to highlight a symptomatic cancer. I can already see it. It's already there. What I want is I want the much earlier stages, and it's finding that. Go back to ColonSentry. Remember the work we did with ColonSentry. It can find right-sided lesions equally as well as left in colorectal cancer. The right-sided lesions of the flat sessile polyps, they're more difficult to see. We know that if we flag that for the colonoscopists, they find anywhere up to about 4.7 times as many cancers. Why? Because we've told them it's there, they go and look for it, and so you build it out. Those are that's one of the key advantages that we have. We're more specific in terms of being able to find the early stage. We're also able to report back on it in terms of this cancer, not that. Remember that the circulating tumor cells of the cell-free DNA mostly rank the cancers. They're less specific. They'll say it's either this or this or this. What you got to do is you've actually got to go and work the patient up in order to determine what it is. The second key advantage we have is everything that we were talking about with respect to having a full end-to-end program. It's not just Aristotle. It's coupled with the AVRT Metabolic Pathway Panel. It's then coupled with triaging, through the oncology group and from there back into either retreat or AVRT program that we can offer. Those are key. Okay. I think, that's how I would categorize it. Thank you, James. We have one last question here about marketing. It's twofold. Just sort of what are we pouring our energies in terms of promotion, whether we're offering any free tests to help promotion on, and maybe how we're focusing our marketing efforts, say, for the next 12 months? Yes. Good, good question. Are we offering free tests? Yes. Yes, we are. To certain groups, we are. We actually have a couple of pilot programs going through with groups right now, all the way through so that they can see it and manage it and report back on it. Two, we're working with a series of external groups, for example, that we've been introduced to that are bringing partners to the table. Don't forget what we did during COVID. We worked with a significant number of people that brought big deals to the table for us. We're doing the same thing there. Two, we have a lot of outreach. Sorry, three, we have a lot of outreach within our own organization as we go through it. Don't forget that COVID did a lot of things for us. We had a lot of very good partnerships with a lot of major organizations. Pushing back into those major organizations has been an obvious as well as using the networks. That is how it runs. We've actually also had a lot of spontaneous approaches. It's actually interesting what's in front of us in terms of what the opportunities are. They're everything from healthcare systems to insurance groups to lab systems, to clinic groups, to employers. I know there's always a degree of impatience in terms of wanting these to come forward really, really quickly. They don't always come through really quickly. Therefore, it doesn't mean because you're not seeing announcements all the time, doesn't mean there isn't a lot of activity in the background or the deals aren't going together. We'll report on them as and when we can. I think that's it. We have one last question actually. Sorry. Go ahead. Quick question. They just want a reference to the GEM. Is GEM the Global Emerging Markets? That is our fund. GEM is. Yeah, GEM is the Global Emerging Markets. GEM from our perspective is actually a very clever form of financing for us. GEM has committed CAD 25 million to us. That kind of money that we need access to as we move on down looking to compete with groups like GRAIL. Don't forget, we're competing with GRAIL. GRAIL's got huge amounts of money. We've got tens of thousands. If we wanna compete, we've gotta have money. That's one. The second thing is, we dictate when we draw money from GEM. It's there. CAD 25 million is there for three years. We dictate when we draw on GEM. The intent here is what you do is you take it on out across the three years. You decide when your share price is right into your volume is right, and you actually take it. It's key. If you contrast it with how other groups are funding at the moment, oh, the other thing too is don't forget that it's pre-prescribed with GEM. GEM gets shares at a 10% discount to market. Bear in mind, we call it what? Share price invented whatever it is. Let's just use an easy number. Share price is $0.20. GEM would get it at $0.18. We decide when we want to do it. There's no interference in the market. We decide when to do it, we do it. We haven't got the money up front. GEM gets the shares after we have got the money, we take it. If we were doing a deal in the marketplace today, you can almost certainly bet that we're gonna be doing it at a 25% discount to market, and the warrant coverage is gonna be extremely steep. They are much more onerous deals to try and do in the marketplace today. We think we've actually negotiated an exceptionally good financing deal, and it works very well for us. Additionally, I can say that GEM is actually bringing partners to the table with us. They're being very instructive in all of this. They are actually lining up discussions for us with key groups. They're very instrumental. They push on all of this is to help build it as well. GEM sees us as a multi-hundred million dollar market cap group. Their intent is to see if they can help us get there. That's where they win as well. Rebecca, that's it. Great. Thank you. Operator? Ariel? This concludes today's conference question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Ms. Grace for any closing remarks. Thank you very much everyone for joining us. Have a good day. This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.