I will get started. Hello, I'm Lisa Clive, the European MedTech analyst here at Bernstein. We're delighted to have Gordon Sanghera, the CEO of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, and Nick Keher, the CFO, with us today. Gordon has been with ONT since it originally spun out from Oxford University in 2005. Before that, he worked at MediSense, which is another Oxford spin-out, that delivered a new generation of glucose technology to the market, which eventually was sold to Abbott, and then he transitioned to Abbott's Diabetes Care Division, where he spent nearly a decade. Nick joined ONT in January, taking over from Tim Cowper, who is now in the COO role. Prior to ONT, Nick was most recently the CFO of BenevolentAI. Before that, he was CFO at Clinigen, which is an organization focused on broadening access to medicines around the world. He was previously head of European Healthcare Equity Research in RBC, so he's been on the dark side before. So thanks for joining us. We have the live Q&A link that you can enter questions if you scan the QR code. So we'll just start. Gordon will give sort of a ten-minute overview of Oxford Nanopore, introduction to those who are less familiar with the company, and then we'll just do a fireside chat Q&A. So with that, I will hand it over to Gordon. Thank you for being here. Good morning, everybody. So, I think there are three key takeaways I want you to have from this introduction, and apologies for you if you're not a generalist, and you've heard this before. I try to make it different every time, but let's see how we do today. So first and foremost, we do DNA sequencing. That's the study of genomics, which is a source code of all living systems. It is now twenty years since the first genome was published, the first human genome, which was a mishmash of North Americans. That took ten years, and it cost billions of dollars, and it was a global effort. Today, twenty years on, we have many, many applications where there is a linkage for predisposition, early diagnosis, drug discovery, and genomics. However, that field is kind of stymied, and I'm going to draw some parallels with the computer industry. So if you are interested in sequencing today and you want to set yourself up to be a sequencing provider, it's a little bit like mainframe computing in the late seventies, early eighties. The instruments cost millions of dollars, $1 million a machine. You need multiple machines to get economies of scale. You need a multimillion-dollar infrastructure. So this is how Illumina and BGI, the two dominant players, Illumina over here, Asia Pac, Beijing Genomics Institute. And they're all based on taking your DNA, which is the source code of all living systems. Just to remind you all, a virus like SARS-CoV is about 10,000 bases. You go up to bacterial pathogens like TB, 4.5 million bases, and this is the code, GTAC, four-letter code. Human, three billion. Plants and animals get into tens of billions. If you take the human genome, the way it was mapped twenty years ago, you chopped it up into two hundred letters at a time, so you completely obliterate it, and then you make copies of it. So what that means is you take this beautiful high-definition color string of three billion bases that gives you phenomenal biological information and chop it into little copies, little bits, and black and white. So you've lost a lot of information in doing that. But that has powered the genomics revolution in the last twenty years. But we've kind of reached a saturation point as to how much you can determine from what we regard as single point mutations. There are some amazing breakthroughs, like the treatment of breast cancer. There are BRCA1, BRCA2 genes with single point mutations that really guide treatment, but these are the exception, not the rule. It was thought twenty years ago, understanding all the genes would be a panacea for, for understanding predisposition and diagnosis and even drug discovery. That hasn't happened. So in parallel with the computer revolution, what we have developed, which we picked up from Professor Hagan Bayley at the University of Oxford 20 years ago, he spent a decade developing something called single molecule electronic sensing. You don't need to worry about any of that. All you need to know is we take the DNA from our human, we chop it up into very long pieces, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of DNA bases in one continuous string. We send it down a nanopore, nano, nanoscale, a billionth of a meter. Pore, hole, very small hole. If any of you have ever had an ECG, we use the measurement of electrophysiology, which is pumping ions across a small protein in a cell membrane. We take that out of a heart muscle, in effect, and we put it into an electronic sensing device, which means that we can retain very long tracks of DNA, that native DNA, which gives us richness of content, so we really have high-definition, full-color biology. Because we are using electronic sensing rather than color and chemistry and photocopying, we look at the native DNA, we can make very small, cheap, affordable, accessible DNA, RNA systems. Here's one I prepared earlier. This is a DNA sequencer. This allows rapid real-time streaming of DNA, RNA information. I mentioned the fact that we're in a mainframe moment. What I mean by that is you have to batch hundreds or thousands of samples to get economies of scale. You have to have these multimillion-dollar infrastructures to get economies of scale. This system can do rapid real-time sequencing of very small organisms in this machine, then we have medium and high throughput supercomputer versions as well. So when you think about why is that important, at the start of the pandemic, we've shipped 200 of these to Wuhan, and they were able to start to really understand the underpinnings of this new virus that was upon us all. When you look at low- and middle-income countries, nanopore sequencing, the MinION device, was the platform of choice. So the revolution and the analogy is mainframe, desktop, handheld. Rapid insights in real-time with native rich DNA, RNA is what we're all about, and that is a paradigm shift. I mentioned the fact that we have come to a kind of plateau in looking at single point mutations. Maybe the way to think about that is you're watching snooker in black and white. The moment you shift to high definition, full color, things change dramatically. And just to give you a sense of what that actually means, 25% of all known diseases, diseases that we have not shifted the needle on in the last 50 years, neurodegenerative diseases, CNS disorders, many, many cancers, pernicious ones in particular, are all wrapped inside what is referred to as the dark genome. With Nanopore sequencing, with this direct reading, we can look at very long reads. We're able to look at something called structural variants, which are important in neurodegeneration. We can look at chemical corruption of your C base, GTAC. That chemical corruption, which occurs over our lifespans, is the smoking gun in predisposition of all cancers. Then we look at central nervous system diseases with something called short tandem repeats. We are starting to see insights, and ten years since we launched our products, there are over 13,000 publications that speak to this new era of biology. What you need to remember from the three points, rapid real-time insights, affordable, accessible, rich content that will drive what is being more widely referred to now as the multi-omic genomic revolution. There are multiple drivers inside that DNA that hitherto have been hard to map, and we bring all of that to the party. Excellent. Thank you for that introduction. So again, just sort of sticking higher level. So today, the analysis of genes, most people think of cancer care. Can you talk about what the market looks like today? And really, this is a market that commercially at least, has been built out by Illumina in the U.S. Although there are other platforms. You mentioned BGI, the Chinese company. There's also PacBio that does long-read, and also Illumina does short-read. Could you just give people an idea of sort of what Illumina has done historically with their short-read, and what long-read can do differently or better, or which other market opportunities are really out there? So I think, a couple of things. We can do any read length. We focus on long-reads because that's a unique value proposition when you're launching yourself into the marketplace as a new disruptor. But we can actually look at very short reads. I just want to talk about that for a minute. DNA actually comes in very long reads naturally, but there are some areas where it can be degraded, and a really exciting growth area is early diagnosis of cancer, which is liquid biopsy. So we know what a biopsy is. We have a tumor, we take a section. But before you get to that point, the cancer cells are in your body, they're proliferating, they're multiplying, and they, as with all cells, go through normal cell cycles to death, and you, you're left with short fragments of the cancer tumor. This is referred to as a liquid biopsy. So these are sort of just proliferating in your blood and sort of floating around. So- So that's how liquid biopsy could work. Correct. -in theory. Okay. Okay. It does. Okay. I mean, this has been proven over- Yeah, not in theory. Both short read. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, it's really nascent but exciting area because before you see a lump on conventional equipment, you can really see early indications of those short pieces. Mm-hmm. So that's liquid biopsy, and we have an application area for sure. But Illumina is very much in the short-read photocopy, so you remove the color as well. So that limits. That's not to say there haven't been many, many breakthroughs in the last 20 years since the first genome was mapped. You know, genomics has been a phenomenal breakthrough area for biology and disease predisposition, but it is limited to mainframe. It. There will not be broad adoption unless we have affordable and accessibility, and rapid real-time insights. Mm-hmm. You know, you can sort of think about mainframe computing, it and the Excel spreadsheet really drove industrial institutions, but it wasn't broadly adopted until it became so fast, cheap, real-time streaming. When you have that, then the applications are exponential, as we know and sit here today, what happened with the information age for those of us who are old enough to remember that revolution. You mentioned genomics and the sort of global uptake of genomics. You recently visited Singapore for a conference, and I think at one point stated that Singapore is living in 2050 as far as its approach to genomics is concerned. Can you talk to us about what is happening in Singapore, how they're actually incorporating genomics into healthcare, and what other countries can learn from that approach? So I think the sort of big grand challenges we all face in developed countries are an aging population, increasing populations, creaking, collapsing healthcare systems, and there has to be a shift away from reactive, offensive. Everybody talks about that. But in order to do that, you've got to be able to develop diagnostic systems that are distributed. It has to be out in the community, and it has to be early. And the thing we talked about with Singapore, they've, you know, they see that vision of 2050. And, you know, I can pull policy report after policy report about the big challenges that are coming. By 2050, antimicrobial resistance due to over prescription of antibiotics will be a bigger killer than cardiovascular disease or cancer. They are actually doing something about it. The PRECISE program, they are looking at Oxford Nanopore's fully annotated genomes, and they're gonna look across their population, and they're gonna start to think about how to be predictive, how to get ahead of the curve, and they just are putting policy into action. So this, you know, instead of having, as the NHS does, you know, everyone over—you know, every female over fifty should get screening for breast cancer, or every male over, I don't know what it is, fifty-five needs prostate cancer, cancer screening, right? Very sort of broad standard screening programs that are not too customized. Is the idea with layering in genomics that you can be more sort of targeted in these campaigns? Absolutely. I think two things. As the price of sequencing comes down, and remember, it cost billions twenty years ago. Yeah. Now, there are vendors who talk about a $100 genome. Right. Just to remind everybody, we need a $1 million machine to do that. Right. Always overlooked. But the price has come down, and the sort of brave new world that we need to be looking at is investing in genomics, in whole genome analysis early, ultimately at birth. So you can... And, and that shouldn't sound dystopian, because it's not. There's a checklist of things that you will have a predisposition to. If you know in your early teens or early adult onset that you're going to have liver fatty acid problems, you can do something about it. If you know you're going to be type two diabetic in later life, you can do something about it. If you know you have cardiovascular risk factors, so genomics offers that policy of prevention. Now, we can't just suddenly flick a switch overnight and just have everybody sequenced. It would cost more than it costs us to deal with the pandemic. But what you can do is to start with our most critical ill patients and work your way through, and start with early genomic, full genomes of these people, to really start to build out predictive medicine. And right now, with the sort of at the dawn of the machine learning AI revolution, we now have electronic healthcare records. We can really make some rapid progress in that space and but it will require fully loaded high-definition genomes. We've kind of rinsed everything out of what we can get from black and white genomes. And so that brave new world, so if you had, let's pick somebody who's had cancer. They go every six months, routine. There is no reason why that couldn't be a liquid biopsy test that they do perhaps monthly. The only people who end up going to see the consultant are the ones that have seen early recurrence. Mm-hmm. Now, you've picked it up early. Somebody came in and gave a talk about acute myeloid leukemia and the paranoia the day after their six-monthly appointment, cancer could be back. So when you get into these distributed nodes, real-time, targeting the right countries, you start with the really difficult and the ones that are of most burdensome, and you work your way through. So acute and critical care settings, real-time insights is something that we're really making inroads with nanopore sequencing, which you cannot do with other platforms. ... So I read about a study. I think it was in the Pacific Northwest, somewhere, where they were sequencing a whole bunch of newborns. I don't know, it was 40 or 50 newborns or something, and they did catch a bunch of sort of issues or, you know, predispositions, and actually, for a few of the newborns that had problems, they did sort of manage to figure out what was going on. I mean, is that an example of how I'm just trying to get an idea of how this sort of real-time sequencing, kind of in clinical application, potentially looks and becomes sort of routine in, you know, five to 10 years from now. Sure, so I'll give you the sort of poster child. Yeah. Which is, and this is actually being used by clinicians. It's just being adopted as a screening tool. But we just provide a workflow that allows the biologist to look at this, high-def DNA. So in real time, during brain surgery, in children with brain tumors, so this is intraoperative sequencing, in 45 minutes, during live surgery, they are able to classify the tumor- Hmm. Based on the methylation. This is tumor classification based on methylation. And from that, it really guides both what they do in surgery and treatment. A very small example of how it radically transforms the landscape. And right now, there are 22,000 children in the UK alone with tumors, and you can radically change all of that. It takes 6-12 weeks to send it to a central lab to get some sort of idea of what kind of tumor it is. Hmm. And that all transforms quite dramatically. The children study, so there are well-known, complicated, multiple genetic abnormalities and rare diseases. So these are the kids that end up with all development disorders, CNS problems. They're all wrapped in this dark genome, and it's an area where routine screening, there are multiple trials going on, U.K., U.S., Europe, some for Asia Pacific, on these children, and to start to initially characterize all the genetic abnormalities. And once you start to build those atlases and these rare disease cohorts, it really then allows the drug companies and drug discovery people to really start to think about how we attack these multiple interactions that go on with these, series of genetic mutations. So, I, I think you referred to your business model as sort of an OpEx model. I mean, I guess you create the tools, but how much is it Oxford Nanopore's job to sort of build out these markets? Or is that the researchers, you know, the academics, the clinicians? How do you...? It's such an interesting technology, but how does it become a commercial offering? I'll just talk about strategy Yeah. and let you two talk about the sort of financials behind it. The, there are kind of two distinct pieces. We want to ensure that DNA, RNA information is available globally, and the reason for that is, you know, the next pandemic is. We already know pandemics are not trying to say, oh, well, you know One and done, right? Exactly. Sadly, not. So it has to be affordable, accessible, and that's something we're very passionate about. And so having an OpEx model where we can bundle the flow cells that are most manufactured is really important. But having said that, as we'll talk later about some of the industrial applications, that's potentially a traditional CapEx model. Hmm. You know, it was just, we wanted to ensure that we democratize access to DNA, RNA information because we were pushing a whole new way of looking at biology, challenging the current paradigm. Having those 14,000 publications, a significant amount done by PhD students, really showing the validation of this new high definition, and that will remain important, but there is, you know, the CapEx model as well. We're not wedded to CapEx, but it was just to ensure that we demonstrated affordable access to start this sort of shift. Yeah, and just to add to that. Completely right, and I think the key point there is democratization of the technology in the early stages was what made sure that as many people could get a hold of it as possible. And a strategic advantage for the company is the fact that our sequencers are materially cheaper than other people's as well. So we can allow people to pick up a starter pack for the MinION, a few thousand dollars, and get going, relative to other people that might have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to even start other people's equipment. You've got PacBio, you've got BGI, you've got Illumina. I mean, PacBio, I think their latest machine, what, is that gonna cost? $1 million, I mean- Question for them. 1.5 million. No, but I mean, I'm just trying to think on a relative basis- Sure. Trying to understand. Obviously, these devices are not directly comparable because they do different things, but I think it's just helpful to understand sort of what the different, you know- Yeah, of course. So, comparability? So if you talk to, say, the high throughput machines that other players have, if you were to choose our highest throughput instruments, then P24s, the P48s, that's a pretty fine range, then you could be talking anywhere from $300,000 - $1 million, if you want to lease the device. But the principle is you get a lot of flow cells involved in that. So we know what the utilization is gonna be for that customer, the target utilization for that leasing that device. Because we can place the device out so much cheaper, it's actually a very profitable business for us immediately. And then once they've gone through that initial phase, their utilization rate can change depending on what they need, and then it's a much higher drop through for us 'cause the discounting on the flow cell stops as well. We just have that ability to lease the device at a much cheaper option because the cost of manufacturing products is just simply a lot lower. Mm. So there is that, but what Gordon's talked to as well is, the pull here, you know, for the research market, conventionally, we have leased the devices to customers, and actually we're seeing more pull from even CapEx from those customers 'cause they have CapEx budgets as well as OpEx budgets. And then with biopharma, applied customers, the industrial customers in general and for clinical customers, they want to own the device. They wanna own the device 'cause like all CFOs or CTOs as well, are looking at both sides of their cash flow, P&L and thinking how they can balance the equation. And so they are looking to essentially CapEx, acquire the device instead, which is fine for us because it just means we get the cash up front- Mm. Then we can just talk about flow cell utilization and price instead. It's a moving trend. Right. And, you're sort of happy with either business model? We're very happy with either business model. Yes. And could you talk about what your business mix looks like today, and maybe just describe in a little more detail what these customer segments actually are between applied and clinical, and you mentioned biopharma and industrial. What that means, what it looks like today, and kind of where you wanna go in five years? And I will specifically ask about bioMérieux in a bit, so I'll ask about sort of in vitro diagnostics, but sorry. I'll give a split first. So the 70% of our business today comes from research. Essentially, that's people who are funded with government grants, public money, to investigate novel research or anything to really investigate that novel research, publishing papers, the whole genome sequencing market, and our distributors as well. We continue to see growth in that market, because of the adoption of our technology is still at early stages, and we still see us growing ahead of peers in this space as well. When we then look at the clinical space, about 9% of our revenues come from clinical today. In the first half, that's what we reported. These are customers who are funded for reimbursement purposes. We have an HLA test out there, for instance, an example. Can you just remind people what HLA is? Sorry. This is for donors, so essentially, if anybody ever needed a donor organ, you have to essentially phenotype the patient to make sure they, when they get the organ, they don't have a rejection. Mm. It's a very important test, and our test is actually being adopted there as well. We've got a clinical market funded by reimbursement. You've also got 9% of our revenues coming from biopharma. The reason why we split this out, because it could be within applied, is because we see biopharma as being a big growth driver on a three- to five-year view, potentially ahead of the other market segments. That's because we can do things that other technologies can't do, such as mRNA, direct RNA reading, essentially. Though Gordon will touch on it, but this is how we are beginning to differentiate ourselves from other people, because this is not just another sequencing play, it's a sensing company. The other sequencing platform will be able to go there. So actually, we're going to be replacing technologies that are used to approximate, mRNA vaccine production QC. We can essentially replace those tests in a much more economic, and accurate fashion, and quicker. Then we have 12% of our revenues coming from what's known as the applied markets. This is where people are using it in industrial settings, so think food, safety testing, things like that, but also where they're offering it as a service to other companies. And we've got a good example in there, Plasmidsaurus, great name. A company essentially, who have started a, a plasmid sequencing company to take on the conventional players in the market, and have done incredibly well, and they've done it just using Nanopore. The reason why they've adopted the technology is 'cause it's quicker, so you can just put your vial in a Dropbox, the next day you'll get your results. It's more accurate than conventional technologies, and it's a lot cheaper. There's an economic driver here, for people to adopt the technology, and it's making the other service providers now adopt it as well, and again, we're not going head to head against the conventional players. We're going up against older technologies. Mm. That essentially we can replace. If we think about sort of a specific application, I mean, I remember the horse meat scandal in the U.K. several years ago. I mean, is this the kind of thing that food safety standards can improve with cheaper testing, or is that sort of a bit of a. Is that not quite the right way of thinking about it? I think that's further out. Okay. But I mean, ultimately, yeah, every, you know, your burger is from Japan, the, it'll have a code mark on it. Obviously, code mark. It will be DNA type. Right. We're just not ready for that... particularly in the food industry, where price points are really challenging. Mm-hmm. But if you flick back to BioPharma, with the advent of the SARS COVID vaccine, RNA vaccine, it's hot, red hot. Right. And it's not just for COVID, they're also looking at mRNA vaccines for cancer. Correct. Yeah. The breakthrough is the COVID vaccine, these RNA vaccines- Right. have been tested. Yeah On a clinical trial, quite big. Yeah. It kind of worked quite well. None of us have turned purple yet. What we've seen for us was an obscure, small, and interesting cohort of people doing direct RNA. What do we mean by that? DNA, I said, was your source code. If we use a music vernacular rather than a computing one, that's your back catalog. Your RNA is your current playlist, and that's really important. What we can do with RNA is switch immune systems on and off. If you want to attack a cancer, maybe you need heavy metal. That's what your personalized RNA vaccine is all about, individualized treatments. Now, what we can do, it takes three months to take an individual and try and develop an RNA vaccine. We can transform that to two months. One month of analysis, eight different instruments, five people in a lab, like $1 million of equipment. Do it in two days because we can measure direct RNA. No other company can do that. Other companies think about RNA sequencing, they make a DNA copy and use a DNA sequencer, so that ability to measure direct RNA is incredibly important in RNA vaccine discovery, but you get a second bite of the cherry, 'cause once you've made that individual vaccine, they have to QA/QC it, so we also have a play in biopharma, quality assurance, and quality control, so that's kind of where it's an implied applied industrial application, and that really speaks to direct RNA, but real-time. You can do it while you're making the drug. And it's a short step from there to look at biologics manufacturing, which is a second area where biopharma are very interested, where we want identity and we want impurity. And again, it's transformative to be able to just go in and scan the biologics manufacturing processes to check that you engineered the right thing, and you don't have impurities. And so these, these areas in RNA, cell and gene therapy, and adeno-associated virals are all hot-button areas of biologics manufacture, and we have a significant and interesting role to play there. They're well-funded, it's transformative, but it is a facile development. It's not trying to introduce a new thing, it's really just transforming what you do today from proxy-based measurement. So I think that's where we'll see early market penetration to industrial market. Ultimately, as we continue to drive down cost of sequencing and ease of use and simplicity, we do see it being, you know, right through into routine environmental monitoring. One of the first things that happened in 2014 when we launched a product in early access was somebody did the wastewater in a hospital in Hong Kong. It showed vast amounts of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens in that wastewater, which speaks to overuse of antibiotics. In the pandemic, people started using that as a way of actually surveying. So I think that's future biosurveillance. So there's lots of interesting areas that we have a unique position that will enable us to create orthogonal revenues away from the research tools market, which is still important and our bread and butter and the foundation of our revenues. So if we think about the way your technology will be applied or utilized over the coming years, it's interesting because, you know, people, I'm sure, ask you sort of who your competitors are. You obviously have Illumina, who kind of built out the short-read market. You have PacBio, who is a long-read player, BGI. Roche is apparently going to come to the market at some point with any like, kind of, sequencer. How much are you... Well, I suppose it's a question again for today and five years from now, if you're in the life sciences tools market, you know, how much are you kind of technically going head-to-head with sort of market leader Illumina? Or, is this not the right way to think about it? It's not about grabbing market share, it's more just creating new markets. I think we do go head-to-head. We compete in the life sciences tools market, and as Nick said, 70% of our revenues come from research markets, and while we've seen competitors contract, PacBio and Illumina, we have grown. Mm-hmm. So we are taking market share, but it is nuanced. Because of the content we create, we're not, you know, they're strong on short reads and single point mutations. I think that will exist. That will be a legacy system in exactly the same way as Nick talked about our ability to take market share from something called Sanger sequencing. Right ... which is a precursor- Yeah -to Illumina. Right. So there'll always be certain bits but we are driving into that market. We are competing directly head-to-head with the big players. As we bring down our costs, even though it's a richer content premium product, as those costs come down, we will take more market shares. So that will continue to happen, and that will be the foundation of our underlying revenue. But we have the added benefit advantage of looking at these other applications, which are unique to us, and Roche haven't launched anything yet. So speaking only to the incumbents out there, we have a unique value proposition that that will really allow us to grow in that space. And you'll hear some really exciting things in the next twelve to eighteen months around deployed industrial, biopharma, and clinical. Could you—I know you can't say much, but can you just describe the current legal situation with BGI and also for the generalists in the room, sort of you mentioned, you know, Beijing Genomics, they're obviously based in China. And also, is the legal situation, is it around China? Is it ex-China? It'd just be helpful, a high-level context. Sure. Let me just take you back to medicines. Yep. So I was there 14 years, and one of the big mistakes we made was not to continually have an evergreen IP pipeline. After 20 years, after we were leaders in electronic blood glucose sensing, but Bayer, Roche, J&J, it's like a big market. Today, Abbott still makes something like 10% of its revenues, which is $5 billion, from blood glucose testing out of Oxfordshire. No revenues for the UK, I'm afraid. But that's a whole different story. What we set out to do was to put in place an evergreen IP portfolio. We have 32 academic partnerships across the globe. And the nanopore that we use today in our platform was developed in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, and licensed from a Belgian outfit in twenty eighteen. And we have a very deep global portfolio, including China. We will protect our platforms, and we will instigate our IP wherever we see copycats. As far as we can see, there are... We have not seen any product, but we've heard that there is a nanopore play coming out of BGI. We will be looking at that very closely. Has Illumina ever been angling at long read? Is this a market they could potentially enter successfully, or have they just built their niche? Um- Obviously, you don't know what your competitors are up to, but- They did launch a long read in silico product- Okay. About a couple of years ago, which was several dollars additional cost. And I think, I'm correct in saying the third time they've tried it, and it hasn't actually happened. While you may know somebody called 10x Genomics- Yeah. a single-cell company. Yep. Their original goal was to make in silicon long reads, but they pivoted away from that So if there wasn't PacBio and Nanopore doing long reads, it would be of interest. Right. But because there are companies that can do actual long reads, it's kind of not really make market penetration. And can we just pivot to the in vitro diagnostics market, right? I mean, these, you know, there's really two sort of broader segments. You mentioned life sciences tools and then in vitro diagnostics, A and B tests, many of which are now molecular-based. You recently created a collaboration with bioMérieux, the French IVD company. They actually bought 7% of your shares. What should we expect from that collaboration over the next five to 10 years? And then I suppose after that, you know, will there be other partnerships like this? In the clinical space, and from my experience with blood glucose testing, very hard to disrupt it. Right. So it's better to look to partner, and particularly infectious disease, where the traditional path lab still is dominant. bioMérieux is a very highly regarded infectious disease company. So we picked a couple of areas to start our collaboration, and that may well lead to a broader relationship. But we, as a small company, wanted to not be overwhelmed by too many projects. So it's very strategic, and probably the centerpiece or the first product that will go out is drug resistance in TB. Oh, yeah. I was gonna ask specifically about that. So, and we're launching that as a research use screening workflow- Okay ... in Q4 with bioMérieux, with the goals to ultimately make it full IVD. Let me just tell you the benefits of whole genome sequencing over PCR. So the TB tests out 80 bases, and they can pick out one mutation for Rifamycin, which is a popular TB drug. There are twelve- And that mutation means that that will be a resistant- Resistant. Strain. Okay. There are about 12 drugs out there. Okay. TB is 4.5 m million bases. Right. We pick out 1,200 mutations. Wow! So we provide a full and comprehensive profile, and we'll be targeting... We haven't commercially talked about it, but we'll have to target relatively low costs. Right, because where it's going to be sold? Correct. Yeah. So it's going to be low and middle-income countries, but there are hotspots. We have trialed this with the World Health Organization in Tbilisi, in Indonesia, Cape Town, South Africa. Mm-hmm. These are large footfall hospitals. We have tried and tested high throughput at 48, 96 samples at a time through our platforms during COVID, getting into the tens of dollars per price point. We think that'll be transformative, particularly making a big dent in drug-resistant TB, because people are just walking away with Rifamycin, and they've got drug resistance. Right now, post-COVID, it's the number one. It's something that we're really passionate about, and bioMérieux, their institute, actually, there's a lot of non-profit institute, does a lot of TB work, as do the Gates Foundation, World Health Organization. We're really proud to be launching this into those low and middle-income countries. It will really help those countries to start to understand that they can get affordable, accessible, and just not necessarily TB. They will be able to target, for example, in South America, there's rampant drug-resistant strains of gonorrhea. Mm. So you'll be able to take. It's the beauty of sequencing. You're not selling a platform with a test. You're selling a broad spectrum scanner that just with the right kit can solve the problem that you face. And we do believe, and we saw a lot of market penetration into those low middle-income country public health laboratories, and that continues to be a really important aspect of what this company does. What about malaria? Very similar. The thing about malaria is there's that great treatment, and so I think that's kind of pushed diagnostics and screening a little bit in the back. Okay. Whereas the drug resistance in TB- Is a much bigger issue. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Maybe just pivoting to your stock. Could you just talk about the recent change to the U.K. listing rules, the FTSE, how that's helpful, given the recent price performance already probably has been? Yeah. Do you want me to do that? No, no. Administration. So, yeah, absolutely right. So there's a change going on in the UK market today, which means there's gonna be consolidation. And that for us means we are looking at our options, putting, going through the process. So this is just for any company that is listed in the U.K.? Premium list, standard list, combination of these things, which means that if you are a large enough market cap, you'll be eligible for indexation. So based on our current market cap today, we would be eligible for the FTSE 250. Right. We have what's known as the latch share, the anti-takeover share. Yeah. It comes off on the fifth of October. This year? This year. Right, and that was a legacy from the IPO, but it completely goes away in October. Exactly. Okay. I'm sure Gordon will add to this, but the latch share going away, we can then be part of that consolidation as well, and be eligible for index inclusion, subject to timeline. If everything went in a straight line, then it could be the end of this year. If not, it could be Q1 next year. Okay. And so the big boost from that could be 250, 250 and- Yeah. And just- I mean, this audience probably knows better than anybody. Right. In terms of if you are part of the FTSE 250, you do sometimes see about 3%-8% buying the market cap based on it just index funds, essentially buying their weighting. For us as well, we think it will open up an even bigger opportunity with conventional UK mid-cap for the managers, actually, because they are all benchmarked against the 250. Right. They have to take views. Right. Right. Whereas now they don't. Exactly. Okay. You know, for a growth stock in a world where growth is not really happening- Yeah It could be an interesting time to look at this. Right. Right, we have really sort of one or two minutes left. Just could you leave the audience with a reminder of what your financial targets look like, your revenue CAGR you're aiming for, you know, any path to profitability? I mean, you know, you're sort of a fascinating startup, which is unusual for this conference. Absolutely. Twenty years, though, wouldn't say startup. I mean, every overnight success is always a twenty-year journey, right? Exactly. So this year, we've guided the market to 20%-30% underlying growth at the constant currency. But we are, you know, reiterated that at the recent results. That's because and one of the kind of key things that's happening as well, P&L this year, is that we are kind of going through a lot of washing through the COVID revenues that we used to have. Yeah. After this year, we actually see underlying growth accelerating to over 30% a year and see that have that visibility to 2027. That's been driven by the, particularly these, the biopharma applied clinical. Research is still growing quickly, but those three in particular are going to be high growth markets for us, so we see that above 30% target to 2027. At that point, we see EBITDA break even. Mm. We see our gross margins increasing to over 62% in that year. We delivered 53.3% last year. We delivered 58.8% in the first half, and if it hadn't been for currency, we'd have been at 60%. Right. You know, we think we can get there to over that 62%, all things being equal. And we see cash flow break even the year after in 2028. So, we have plans and are executing upon it, and we were in line slightly ahead of plan at the first half, actually. Okay, great. Thank you both very much for being with us today. This has been a fascinating discussion, and, everybody in the audience, thanks for joining. Thank you. Thank you.