Well, good morning, everyone. Welcome to Syncona's interims. I'm Martin Murphy. I'm joined today by Chris Hollowood, Chief Investment Officer for a few more months, and Rolf Soderstrom. We're very much looking forward to talking you through progress today over the recent period and providing an update on strategy and our growth plans for the next decade. We've been thinking very hard about this, and we think we've got some exciting ideas to share with you. Before we get into those, I wanted to just talk through a significant announcement we made today about leadership and to really talk you through those changes. I've decided to move to be Chair of the investment manager, and I'm really delighted that Chris is gonna become CEO from January next year. Chris has been involved in Syncona from really the very earliest days. As you all know, he's an exceptional individual, and we've worked very closely together and really worked hand-in-hand to deliver the progress that we've had so far. The business is gonna benefit very greatly from his leadership, and I look forward to working with him and supporting him going forward. For myself, I will continue to be Chair of SIML. The investment manager will remain operationally involved in the business, manage existing companies, serve on the investment committee, and continue to dig out and source new opportunities. We've worked very closely with the board, particularly with Melanie as Chair, on these plans, and there's universal excitement around the strategy that we're gonna talk you through today, the organization and the leadership changes that we've put in place to continue to grow Syncona for the next decade. With that, we'll get on with the presentation. I just wanted to start really right at the beginning and remind you what Syncona is all about. Our purpose is to invest, to extend, and enhance human life, and our vision is that by doing that, we will unlock the potential of truly innovative science to transform patient lives. The strategy is to create, build, and scale a portfolio of globally leading life science companies that have the potential to transform the lives of patients and deliver strong risk-adjusted returns for shareholders. That's what Syncona is about. That's what we've been doing for the last decade since 2012. What I'd like to do is just look back on some of the achievements of that period. It's been a very productive 10 years, and I think that we've really set out to change the ecosystem, particularly in the U.K., for how businesses are built to translate innovative science. We founded 19 companies in that period, and we have 12 companies on the books today. We have over 1,000 employees across the portfolio, many of them in the U.K., almost all of them in high-skill employment. We've really changed the landscape in the U.K. and the ecosystem in terms of the quality, the scale, and the ambition of businesses that are being built to translate innovative science. We've invested just under GBP 1 billion over that period, and we've returned just under GBP 950 million of capital at a 4.6x return for our multiple from three exits that we've had during that period. We have another GBP 600 in the ground today, just over in the life science portfolio. We've shown we can invest that capital well. We've delivered a 26% IRR since 2012 on that capital in the ground. That's important, but equally important is what we've done for patients. If we take our first approved drug, Axumin, which was a imaging agent for prostate cancer, that product has been used in over 165,000 people now. That's not just the people that product's been used in, but it's also the families and the physicians around those people who've been impacted by the output of that product. That's really what we're aspiring to do. As our portfolio increasingly matures, what we're looking to see is more products taken late in development all the way through ideally to be approved drugs. Consistent with that, we now have taken three products through to pivotal trial, and we have 15 programs progressed through to the clinic. These are all innovations that came out of an academic base that are moving through the clinic, and what we're looking to do is to see increasing maturation of the portfolio and increasing translation. This isn't just for small numbers of patients. If we look at the addressable markets for our portfolio, it's hundreds of thousands of patients that we can impact. I think we can get to a virtuous circle here, which is we can do something fundamentally important for the ecosystem, we can do something rewarding for shareholders, and we can do something fundamentally important for patients. If we get that right, that's a very fulfilling thing to do. That's really the last 10 years, and we've got to look forward, not back. When we look forward, we're thinking about what we might do at a similar level ambition for the next 10 years. We've spent the last six-12 months really going back to basics, thinking about strategy, thinking about organization, and thinking about leadership, and figuring out what we're gonna do for the next 10 years and how we're gonna drive future growth. It starts at the very heart of what we do, and the real kernel of Syncona's ability is to go to a scientist, typically a key opinion leader who has spent many years working in their field, and be able to understand their science and figure out whether that could become a drug. What it would take for that to move through development, to move through regulatory approval, and when you get there, where it would sit in the standard of care for those patients, how it would be reimbursed, and how it would deliver for patients and physicians. That's the core kernel of Syncona skillset. And what we've done, and we've talked many times to shareholders over the years, is attach that to a strategic balance sheet. es. Never has that strategic balance sheet been more important than it is today. But strategic balance sheet been more important than it is today. But it's that long-term capital capital that allow us to take those early steps, but then back these businesses all the way through their life that's so fundamental to our model. What we've done during the strategy process is to go back and look at, frankly, where are the way that we can improve. And there's a number of pieces that we're going to talk to you about today. The first is scaling the team. The second is how do we increase the run rate of companies. Historically, we've done one to two. How are we going to increase that, and what's a sensible target for us going forward? How do we think about optimizing the finance approach for individual assets? We've learned a lot over the last 10 years, and I think there are some real lessons that we can translate going forward. One of the great lessons has been how to attract world-class leaders to our portfolio, and over time we've got better at that. I think we can get even better, and that's gonna become a core requirement to scale our business. Lastly, how do we improve the execution of our companies? Frankly, we've been great at spinning things out of academic institutions and founding them. We think there's scope for us to improve the way that we manage our businesses and help them to execute in their third, fourth, fifth, sixth year. Those are the sorts of themes that we've been working on. That's come together, I think, into a very exciting strategy and vision for the next 10 years. I'm now gonna pass to Chris to talk you through it. Terrific. Thank you, Martin. Just like to start by saying what an honor it is to take up the role of CEO of what I think is a fantastic company. I'm very proud of what's been built here, very excited about what we can do over the next 10 years. Look forward to telling you about that, and very grateful to Martin and the board for their support of me in appointing me. I really look forward to the fact that Martin's gonna hang around and be a big part of what we're gonna do over the next 10 years as well alongside the team. When you look back at Syncona, when it was founded, it was founded on really two central tenets. One tenet was that the U.K. has one of the greatest sources of life science innovation on the planet, and that life science innovation coming out of the institutions here was really the only ubiquitous source of finding cutting-edge science that could be translated into commercial medicine. Actually, in our industry, you only get the out return by taking that innovation to late-stage product. What the chart on the right shows you that actually there've only been four billion-dollar plus acquisitions of biotech companies that are more than four years from approval, and yet there've been 50 when you're closer than that. That meant that the capital structure to address that was broken, 'cause the capital structure sits in traditional venture capital funds that tend to have a six- to eight-year time horizon, and you cannot connect those two points in six to eight years. You can't take true innovation and make late-stage product in a time course like that. We uniquely can. Our balance sheet allows us to do it, and that's one of the reasons we keep telling you it's so strategic, because it allows us to build companies that have capability and autonomy to drive all the way into late-stage development. We're announcing today that we're gonna target to grow Syncona to GBP 5 billion over the next 10 years, and we're making a number of changes that are very consistent with our historic strategy, but evolve it to bring the scale that we need to deliver it. This has been a process that's been year-long with the team, with the leadership team, and so we're all very aligned behind delivering this. As Martin mentioned, we have traditionally founded about one to two companies per year. I think that goes to show that it's a very, very heavy lift thing to do. It's not easily replicable by anyone else. We believe, given the experience we have and the learnings we have, that we can now move to starting three companies per year. We're gonna tell you how we're gonna do that. In starting three companies a year, we're gonna move our steady state guidance of the overall portfolio from our 15-20 guidance to 20-25. We will still be maintaining our target of hitting top quartile returns. On the first slide, you saw that we've done 26% over the last 10 years in our life science portfolio. That is where we're gonna target going forward as well. We'll talk to you about the financing strategy that we're gonna use to underpin that, and we actually trailed that at the year-end back in June. Our capital base is absolutely fundamental. There's no change to the strategy there. We're gonna keep at least 2-3 years worth of capital on the balance sheet because it's only knowing you've got that capital that allows you to make the brave choices around strategy to build ambitious companies that can actually be global leaders and not become also-rans. That two years-three years runway means there's a minimum size balance sheet that we need. What we plan to do by growing NAV is not grow that balance sheet at the same rate. Overall, we're gonna get much better capital efficiency. If we can maintain that 25% IRR at a life science portfolio level, the shareholder IRR will get much more exposure to it and drive up. We shouldn't forget that in doing all of this, with our exits, that we've driven companies to that late stage, that we have exited, we have returned capital, and we haven't raised money since we did the reverse takeover to become listed back in 2016, and we believe that we can fund ourselves to a very great degree. What that means in 2032 is we will have built a company of real scale and capability. We will have expanded the portfolio, we will have shown that we can routinely deliver three companies per year, and we would have changed the operating model by which we do that, such that it is spread much more across the team with additional capabilities brought in, and therefore there is redundancy in that, and therefore less risk. Martin's already touched on the fact that I think we have a great track record in taking companies out of universities and building them to clinical entry. When we look across the portfolio over the last 10 years, from clinical entry onwards, we've had some great successes in Blue Earth, Nightstar, Gyroscope. We've had some more mixed results in Autolus and Freeline, for example. We think there's things we can do there to really optimize execution. Because when you look at those two companies, actually the science is still very good. We will get Autolus' readout very soon, and we're very optimistic about that. That product seems to really be working. The hard bit about investing in this sector, we do really well. We should be optimistic that if we solve that second bit, we can really drive returns. The targets are gonna change to three companies per year, steady state at 20-25. We are still gonna deliver 3-5 companies to product approval as a goal. That one remains unchanged. All of that combined, we think will take us to a five billion-pound value company over the next 10 years. I'm gonna remind you about the model. We're gonna change a little bit of how we talk about it because I think the essential essence of what we do is lost in the word found. What we do is we create. That creation comes from finding the KOL that Martin talked about, really understanding their science. The team in this room is exceptional at talking to these KOLs and really spending that time to understand the detail, what is differentiated, and what its capability is. We then bring the commercial vision, and that is a creative event because that scientist is unlikely to know how best to place that as a commercial medicine than we are. That's not what traditional venture capital does. Through that means that deal flow is proprietary to us because we create it. Proprietary deal flow is the golden seam of venture capital, and we have it embedded on our model by default. From that point forward, we build aggressively to make sure that therapy makes it into clinic to be tested, and we apportion capital against it to de-risk it appropriately. When we think we have something, we scale it ambitiously. That is something that I'm proud of what we did over the last 10 years because that was the risky bit in my view, and we changed the model. Because quite often in the U.K., companies would get to this point, and they would back off a bit, and a U.S. company would come over the rails and beat them. What we want to do is make sure that when we start a company, it will be the global leader in the space that it's trying to occupy. If it does that, it garners a much bigger premium as a result. To deliver all of this, we need to change the way we operate. We have announced today promotions to Lead Partners and Senior Partner of Ed, Elisa, and Magda. They will take on the day-to-day leadership of forming new companies and driving that aspect of the model. Martin and I will remain on the Investment Committee. We will provide oversight of the investment decisions, and we will bring our new ideas to bear. Martin's gonna spend a lot more time sourcing the new science now. We will also bring our networks and judgment and experience to wherever it's needed within the portfolio to really leverage the team. We're launching two new capabilities into the models. We're building a team which we call the Launch Team. What the Launch Team are there to do is when we start a company, embed best practice from the start. There's lots of sort of crunchy operational things you have to do, like HR systems, finance, governance, reporting. We do that a little bit ad hoc to date each time. What we can do is we can have a team that specializes in it, works alongside the investment team, and drives best practice and increases the speed at which we do that. Increase the speed at which we do that, we get to R&D quicker, and therefore, we get to value quicker. We're building an advisory team. This is a team of people that bring the key domains that we require when assessing opportunities and when actually helping to manage companies. These are things like commercial, regulatory, clinical. This advisory team is available to the investment team for anything they need, whether that's diligencing a new opportunity or whether that's in a portfolio company. If there's an issue, they can go in with a senior experienced team and really diagnose it and come up with recommendations of how to fix it and drive that company forward. That's very leveraged to what we're trying to do. In the configuration that we now have and the people we will add to it, we feel confident we can hit the three companies a year. That's a key part of driving growth and actually improving capital allocation decisions, which improve returns. What we will end up with is an institutionalized model that can deliver at pace. The world-class science that we source, that will continue. The investment team, 'cause they have this satellite help around them, can spend a lot more time focused on that. They can drive the investment once they've decided it's one they want to do. They can then leverage off a team to help them launch the company, then they can work alongside a team that will help them understand what's going on and course correct as we go forward. This will address what we see as the big win in improving our investment returns is that clinical entry to pivotal entry execution. We talked a little bit at the year-end about optimizing the financing strategy. What we have found is although everything we do is started on a single model of groundbreaking science where we have a commercial vision for a product that's gonna be highly impactful, the capital need to get them from there to product approval is different. Some super exciting, but in order to fulfill their maximum potential are gonna need capital way beyond what we can provide on our own. We'll cornerstone that, but we will syndicate that out relatively early. That's what we call a fully syndicated investment. There'll be a set of companies where we think given business model or other aspects around it, that we can actually hold that privately to proof of concept. Our desire to do that is what we found is you can have much more nimble governance in a privately held company. When we see that the big win where we can improve in our model is that clinical execution, holding it privately to proof of concept allows us to do that. We might do that on our own in rare occasions. That's a strategic hold. In some occasions, there is actually quite a lot of capital out there that's aligned around building companies now. They look to us for leadership in that, but will quite happily sit there alongside us and hold a company private. That means that our shareholders also participate much more in the upside of the successful ones. We're doing all of this at a time that I think is every bit as exciting as it was 10 years ago. These changes, strategic changes enter a market where there's still plenty of opportunities and still plenty of unsolved diseases. When we started in 2012, we didn't start as a cell and gene therapy company. What we did is we took our fundamental ability to understand science really fast and understand its commercial potential to go out there and meet people and find out what was the cutting edge. What we found was cell and gene therapy, and what we recognized was that was a modality that was gonna be hugely disruptive to this industry and drive growth for decades to come. And we saw it first, and we put a strategy around it, and that has actually been a core element of our success over the last ten years. But the world's different now. Other people do cell and gene therapy, and whilst I think we do it much better, and so have differential capability, then it was binary. We did it, no one else did it. Now it's we do it better, but some other people do it. And actually, we're moving into a world where data and genetics is linking to biology and disease in a way we've never seen, and it's gonna unearth new targets that offer new avenues to diseases. What's really gonna count in order to make sure you win is you actually pick the right modality. We're moving into a more modality-agnostic world. In some diseases, that might be a small molecule. In some diseases, that might be an antibody. In others, it might be a gene therapy or cell therapy or even RNA. What's great is we've shown we can do biologics, and we've shown we can do small molecules. We've already got those in the portfolio, and you all know that we can do cell and gene therapy. Whatever we encounter, we believe we have the skill set, the experience and capability to put the right modality against it, and we think that's a key decision that I think others will miss. I'm gonna talk to you about two opportunities now that are things we're looking at and have actually completed on one. I'm gonna start, and Martin will do the second one. First one is showing how we've leveraged our gene therapy expertise, and then Martin will show how we're using our fundamental core principles to move us into a different area. You will have seen that we've announced a tender offer for a U.S. company called AGTC. If you go back to the central tenets of our model, it is that the out return is only really available at late stage near product approval. Our strategy to address that is to build companies out of universities. Actually, sometimes in the market, really cutting-edge products are made available at a late stage. We've had one before, Blue Earth Diagnostics, because of a strategic choice within GE. We have one now because the macroeconomic environment has basically put companies in a level of stress that is not correlated to the underlying quality of the asset. This is an area we know really well. This is retinal gene therapy, and clearly we've had a lot of success here. The disease that's the lead indication is X-linked retinitis pigmentosa, which is actually a disease that Nightstar had in their portfolio. It is a devastating form of blindness. You inherit it at birth. You'll start getting visual defects in your teens and you'll be legally blind probably in your 30s. Nothing stops it. Nothing slows it down. There's no therapy for it. What AGTC have is a gene therapy that puts in the missing gene. The remarkable thing about the data here is the original promise of gene therapy was to slow progression of blinding disorders. What blew everyone away when they saw this was actually there was an improvement in vision, and I think we now understand biologically why that's the case, but it was a surprise at the time. This therapy actually takes a patient and gives them vision back, doesn't just arrest the progression of it. We've tendered to buy the company. That tender offer is ongoing. If successful, we'll take over ownership, probably sometime in early December, and we look forward to telling a lot more about it when we get there in Q1. Back to you, Martin. We're now gonna tell you about a new deal. First thing to say is it shouldn't really be me up here talking to you about it, because it should be Magdalena Jonikas actually, because she's done all the work as supported by Raghd Rostom in our team and also Alice in the early days. They're the guys that have done the work. Chris, one of the great joys of being CEO is you get to talk about other people's work and take the credit for it. I'm gonna enjoy this. Kesmalea is a new investment. It's in the field of what's called protein homeostasis. As you know, proteins in biology are the executive arm. They're the things that do stuff. Historically in the industry, what we've done is we've developed small molecule drugs that inhibit the function or activate the function of those proteins. That works and most of the small molecule drugs that we have around, if not all, work in that way. Unfortunately, there's a set of targets that are very difficult to inhibit functionally with small molecules, and we call those intractable targets. What you'd really like to do is to find a different way of hitting those targets and turning them off or in making them work better and more. The way to do that is to increase the levels, either reduce the level of that protein or increase the level. Rather than maintaining the level of the protein by hitting it functionally, what you're doing is you're now just taking it away or adding it back. That is what protein homeostasis is. There's a whole set of technology that's really broken over the last three years-five years. Magdalena Jonikas, three years-five years? That basically shows that that is now a potentially tractable route. It's very complex to do, and if you could do it reliably, we think it has incredibly broad application, 'cause there's a whole bunch of so-called intractable targets which you can't hit with existing modalities. What we like about this is it's an opportunity of huge breadth. What we've been working with is an academic called Harry Finch. He's a true world-class medicinal chemist. We've known him for several decades. He was actually the co-inventor of one of GSK's blockbuster respiratory drugs called Serevent. We've been working with Harry to write a plan around his core insight and his core technology. This is gonna be a sort of classic Syncona play where we will work alongside an exceptional scientist. In this case, it's an industrial scientist. It's not an academic scientist. To take technology and write a plan for how we can develop that over the next few years. You will hear more about this company. We've closed a GBP 20 million Series A. We did GBP 16 of that, and that will fund the business for the next year or so. It will be heads down. Magda and the team will be working hard to really write that plan, do the initial de-risking experiments, and I think you should expect in the next 12 months-24 months to be hearing more about Kesmalea. We're excited about this opportunity. Moving then to the interim results. First thing to say is that, you know, biotech is a cyclical business, if you didn't know that. I think this is the third cycle that I've been in in my career. We're currently in a challenging period in the market. The universal truth of our sector is that during tough times, what matters is data. Can your businesses deliver clinical data? Those clinical data which underpins a product and demonstrates why it's useful and why it's safe, that's the universal currency of the industry. What we've been very focused on and what we've talked to shareholders about in really the last six-12 months, has been ensuring that we are well-financed, both at the portfolio company level, and frankly, many of the decisions that we took last year in terms of getting capital into the portfolio. For example, the Autolus deal with Blackstone, the Anaveon financing, and the Quell financing. You know, we feel really good about those decisions, and those businesses are well-funded. Of course, as a consequence of the Gyroscope exit, we remain incredibly well-funded at the Syncona level, as Rolf's gonna talk to you about. That's where we've been focused. We've had seven clinical readouts so far. We think there'll be 12 by year-end. What we're gonna do now is just talk to you, call out one of those readouts in particular, which is from Anaveon. Anaveon is a company that we've been invested in for, you know, three or so years now. Actually, where's Alice? Alice Renard and I work on that, and Alex increasingly as well, Alex Hamilton. This is a company operating in a so-called IL-2 space. IL-2 is a growth factor. It's a biological drug, and immune cells need it to grow. It's an approved medicine. What happens is when you provide IL-2 to a patient, you stimulate their immune cells, particularly 2 flavors of their immune cells, the T cells and the so-called natural killer cells or NK cells. They're good guys because when you have cancer, T cells and NK cells can attack the cancer, and that's why IL-2 is an approved medicine. IL-2 today is used for the treatment, rarely, but it is used for the treatment of a melanoma and of renal cell carcinoma. It, actually, in very late-stage patients, it leads to long-term complete responses in these patients. You might ask, well, why isn't it used much more regularly? The answer is, it's incredibly toxic. When you give this drug, a significant proportion of these patients will get vascular symptoms, particularly vascular leak syndrome, which is basically where they drown in the fluid in their lungs. Actually, they leak fluid into their lungs. When they get that, they need to be near an intensive care facility, so you can only administer this in a hospital setting. The administration is very demanding. The standard regimen for IL-2 is basically three doses a day, infusion every eight hours for five days, nine days off, same again. That's a cycle, and that has to be done in a hospital setting. The drug is used, it's effective, but it's very complex to give, and it's very toxic. The Holy Grail, if you like, would be can you create an improved IL-2, which would be a selective IL-2, which gave you the good stuff, natural killer cells and the T cells without the bad stuff, which is the toxicity in the administration cycle. That's what Anaveon's trying to do. When we were walking around Zurich, Alice and I went on a weekend actually to go and walk around and meet the founder of this, Andreas Katopodis. That was his idea, and it's quite exciting that we've now funded that business all the way through in the clinic, and we're in the first phases of that, which is so-called dose escalation, which is when you go into end-stage patients. These are very late-stage patients who have progressed through multiple rounds of therapy. What you're looking for primarily is safety in those patients, actually. You're looking to understand what's the toxicity profile, and if you're lucky, you might get to see some efficacy in those patients as well. We've done that in 20 or 30 patients now. We started at very low doses, 3 micrograms per kilogram. We've escalated to high doses, 364 micrograms per kilogram. We think we've understood the right dose to take forward into the big studies now, and we're very encouraged by the safety profile that we see. This relative to the natural approved IL-2, we are not seeing these side effects that would really limit the application of this therapy. That's good. We seem to have ticked that box. The question, of course, is, well, have you also kept the good stuff? We have to be careful. This is early data, and therefore this is not definitive, but the direction is encouraging. I'm gonna call out two things here, which is when we get to the higher doses, as you would expect, about two-thirds of those patients have stable disease. These are patients who have escalated through their therapy. In the last three months before they're dosed, they have progressive disease, which means their cancer is growing. What that means, therefore, is you're taking a late-stage advanced patient population, you're treating them, and you're getting stable disease in 2/3 of that patient population at the higher doses. That's sort of encouraging. We're very encouraged by one patient in particular that we show you here to make this sort of very real. This is a 63-year-old woman with non-small cell lung cancer. These are PET images, which is an imaging modality. In the two panels on the left, you see this individual on the 11th of May, and in the two panels on the right, you see the same individual 12 weeks later. What happened, this patient, just to give you a bit of flavor, this patient has had lung cancer, was treated with multiple cycles of chemotherapy and checkpoint inhibition, so immune therapy, and had progressed through that, so was a progressive patient. What you see, the black spaces in the middle of this is the air pockets in the lung, and with the red arrows, you can see the tumor in this patient. You can see the patient pre-treatment and post-treatment, and it's very clear that you're seeing a significant tumor response in these patients. That response is about 60%, 56% at 12 weeks. The observant of you will say, of course, well, that looks a lot more than 56%, which of course it does. What you're doing is you're taking multiple slices through the patients, and there are some slices further down where you haven't seen a similar level of response. This is early data, and I reiterate the caution. There's nothing definitive here, but we're encouraged by the direction of travel. We've got a fantastic team. It's operating very well. This is a world-class team managing this company. They're operating well, they're executing well, and the trends that we're seeing, the clinical data that, you know, we are mildly encouraged by this data. Gonna pass now to Rolf to talk you through the financial performance. Thank you, Martin. Having looked at 10 years forward, I'll now bring you back to the last six months. We ended the first half with net assets of GBP 1.37 billion, and that comprised a life science portfolio at GBP 603 million and a capital pool at GBP 763 million. Overall, we've seen a positive tailwind from the strong U.S. dollar, which has given us GBP 112 million of foreign exchange gains. This has offset falls in some of our listed life science portfolio assets of GBP 49 million, which net overall gave us a 4.3% increase in net asset value. During the first half, we deployed GBP 59 million into new assets and investments. We have good visibility on both existing portfolio funding and potential new investments opportunities. We reiterate our guidance of GBP 150 million-GBP 200 million for the full year. I would say that the upper end of that guidance will be driven by new deals and the timing of funding into our existing portfolio. We've talked about the volatile markets. You know, access to capital becomes increasing strategic advantage in these markets. We really maintain our focus on maintaining that funding in our capital pool. I would like to talk a little bit now about how we think about our capital pool in volatile markets. Our primary focus is really about protecting and access to liquidity. To that end, we keep 12-24 months of funding in cash and treasuries. Recently, we've seen a pickup in treasury yields, which we've benefited from. As we all know, we're living in an inflationary environment, and to protect the value of our capital pool, we seek to mitigate some of that risk. To do that, we've allocated some of our longer-term capital allocation into low-risk, multi-asset, daily liquidity funds. We spread this across three different managers with different strategies, so we have both manager and focused diversification. We've been considering this approach for some time now, and we've taken a cautious approach to deploying capital. Recently, we paused activities given the market uncertainty. To date, we've deployed around GBP 200 million into these funds. We do hold U.S. dollars as a natural hedge against our near-term U.S. capital allocations. The U.S. dollar strength has resulted in the GBP 48.8 million unrealized gain in the first half in the capital pool. We remain very focused on protecting the value of our capital pool. As both Chris and Martin said, this is fundamental to our business strategy and a real strategic asset. I just wanted to sort of touch on the strategy 'cause Chris and Martin have talked about how we want to grow the business, and I just want to take a moment to touch on how that impacts our cost base. We manage our cost base very tightly in Syncona, but to deliver that ambitious growth, we are going to invest in people and capabilities. We've already started that investment in the year, as Chris mentioned, by bringing people into the advisory and the startup activities. To give you a flavor, we expect our full year cost to be in the region of GBP 12.5 million-GBP 13.5 million. For context, that's about 0.9%-1% of our current NAV. Martin, back to you. In summary then, we think we have a great opportunity in front of us. As Chris has pointed out, the landscape of opportunity has never been more exciting. We've spent a lot of time in the last six-nine months thinking about how we really set out the next decade in Syncona with the level of ambition that we had when we started back in 2012. We think we're putting out a set of targets that are ambitious but achievable today. Chris has covered those in some detail. Really, if we deliver this plan, I think we'll have done increasingly exciting things for the ecosystem, particularly here in the U.K. We'll have delivered for shareholders. I think it will be exciting for shareholders. Probably most important of all, we'll have really moved the needle for patients as well, and that's something that motivates us. In parallel, we will have continued to make substantial contributions to our foundation, which since inception has given away over GBP 41 million now to a very extensive set of charities that we're very passionate about. With that, thank you for coming today, and happy to take some questions if there are any. Simon. Thank you. Simon Budd from Redburn. Three questions if I may. From looking at SEC filings, you were in talks with AGTC a while ago. I was just wondering how your appetite and the opportunity set for similar deals has evolved since you first started talking. The sort of biotech market in the U.S. has been pretty volatile. Where do we stand now there? Also at this juncture, as you're both looking backwards and forwards, and I know you touched on this a little bit, Chris, how has your view on the relative attractiveness of modalities and therapeutic areas evolved, and how should we think about that going forward? A more specific question on Anaveon. Looking at the phase I data on the poster that was presented, there were cases of both elevated liver enzymes and elevated bilirubin. Were there any judged cases of Hy's Law there? Also, obviously it's early data, so there were a lot of doses and a lot of tumor types. It looks like there's quite a clear dose response there. I'm just trying to get a feel for what you see as the tumor scope of IL-2. It looks fairly broad, but any data you have on that would be really interesting. Thank you. Chris, do you want to take the first question? Yeah. Well, you're right, Simon. There are, you know, lots of U.S. biotechs in particular, well, NASDAQ-listed biotechs trading underwater right now. I think our view is some of them deserve it. In that maelstrom, there's a number of companies that have been swept up and actually decoupled from their fundamentals. We believe AGTC is one. The reason we can have such conviction around that, it is an area we know super well. I think in areas where we have real diligence insight, we would certainly take a look. It's not one and done here, but nor are we guaranteeing we're gonna do a second one. It requires those special ingredients to align around it. Secondly, you know, our model is not to go around sticking $10 million in 10 different public companies. I think the deal has to be one where we can take the level of control that allows us to work closely with the team and reshape strategy and execution, frankly. Clearly, a tender offer allows us to do that. There are other constructs, but I don't see us sort of just trying to take advantage of price points and standing back. I think on the modality question, and we should both pick this up, you know, I think it's horses for courses actually. You know, history teaches you there's no universal modality. What there is a universal supply of targets, which is what's coming from genetics. What we now have is really by historical precedent, an unparalleled range of ways of hitting those targets. That could be cell and gene therapy mediated. It could be a classic small molecule. It could be a protein homeostasis molecule as we're moving forward with Kesmalea. It could be an RNA platform. It could be a biologic. I think that we're moving to a phase where the target pool will be so rich. What you're gonna need to do is get choices in modality. Yeah. I 100% agree. I think, you know, there was a moment 10 years ago where there was a modality disruption. Well, as we spotted it, and we put a strategy against it, and made investments and built companies. That's a rare event. Actually, the fundamentals of this sector are picking great targets that you think are gonna impact disease, and that's what I think is the next 10 years of us. Maybe the next five years, and then we'll see, and what we're trying to highlight today. In that world, given there are so many modalities, you run the risk of being disruptive unless you pick the right one for that disease. That, I think, is a key investment choice you have to make, as opposed to there was always a small molecule or is always an antibody. We as a team are really gonna focus around in that commercial setting, in that patient segment, for the severity of that disease, for the target we're going after, what is the modality that's gonna get the best commercial uptake? I think, you know, an example of that is Gyroscope, where there's lots of people looking at dry AMD, and I think they're looking at wet AMD and saying wet AMD was treated by a once a month intravitreal injection without realizing that dry AMD is actually asymptomatic in its early course, and there is no incentive for a patient to turn up at clinic once a month when it's asymptomatic. You need something where you can say to a patient, "I'm gonna do it once and once only." That's why we felt gene therapy was the killer insight there to unlock that. We remain very enthusiastic about that program because of that. I think, you know, it's not always gonna be gene therapy, it's gonna be a number of different things. You've gotta make that judgment and you've gotta be making it right at the start. On the Anaveon question, you know, we're not overly concerned about the bilirubin and the liver enzymes. These are, you know, end-stage patients. They've seen a lot of chemotherapy. The dose-limiting tox is we're not gonna be dose limited by liver. You know, we're seeing other things there, which is gonna get us to the dose. I think we're okay there on that patient set. You mentioned the dose response. I see the same thing. You know, on the data as presented, it looks like there is a dose response. That, of course, would be hugely encouraging if that's true. You know, it's just still a relatively small patient set, you know. It was 20-30 patients. A big chunk of the patients saw very low doses as we're in the early phases of the dose escalation, so we have to be somewhat cautious. You know, I think it's not unreasonable to believe that we're seeing a dose-response, and it's not unreasonable to believe that the responder we showed you today, you know, that might be drug-mediated, in which case that's very encouraging. As you know, in small-scale oncology studies, one patient is an anecdote. Hi there. I'm Paul Cuddon from Numis. I've got two questions. Firstly, on the pipeline of new company kind of formation, creation, ideas that you're talking through, perhaps if you could elaborate on where you're seeing those opportunities kinda geographically, whether you're seeing more international opportunities now given your success that you've had worldwide. Secondly, and perhaps it's related actually, the smarter approach to kind of managing the portfolio to maintain your kind of cash runway, but support more companies that are each gonna have kind of their own kind of financing needs in the future. How can you help your companies be smarter? Chris, you take the first, and perhaps, Rolf, could you take the second? Very good. Yeah, new opportunities. Clearly, you know, lots from where we traditionally get them. You know, the U.K. remains at the forefront, and the U.K. remains undercapitalized relative to the opportunity. What you need to do to unlock that opportunity is to bring the commercial vision. That's the bread and butter, that's the Kesmalea, and we'll announce some others, hopefully over the next few quarters, that absolutely underpin that part of the model. You know, our reputation has grown, and therefore we do see more international opportunities. Anaveon's out of Switzerland, and there's another one Martin's on the board of in the Netherlands. We have a couple of U.S. opportunities. What those opportunities have in common is they're areas where we believe we have differential insight relative to the market. We will reach further, but as you go further, I think you need an even greater reason to think it's special, and we do think about those four. Remember the company-building thing is a very hands-on, relationship-driven, lots of meetings, and it can take up to a year from your first meetings when you actually do it. That's much more easily done, where it's getting on a train to Cambridge to have a coffee with a KOL or walking across the street to UCL, than it is getting on a flight to somewhere in Europe. Not doable. It's just an extra drag on the operating model, and why point yourself at it when there's so much good stuff here? Hi, Paul. Yeah, I think in terms of supporting the portfolio companies, I think, you know, that happens in a number of different ways. I mean, the first and obvious one is capital. You know, I think the model and certainly when, you know, I joined Syncona and looked at Syncona, I think there is a differentiated model here in how we look at capital. I think the ability to attract people in, give them the certainty around the funding and also the longevity of that funding is really important. You know, as we've touched on the strategy, the ability for us to work with those founders, maintaining control over a longer period, I think both benefits the company and then ultimately also benefits, you know, our shareholders. We retain a higher proportion. I think it's more than that. You know, we've talked about the close relationship. Martin and Chris in particular, and the broader team have done this for over 10 years. We've got a lot of experience of how to found these companies and, you know, we know what some of the potholes in the road on that journey are going to be. I think that close relationship of the investment team and now as we're talking about bringing in an advisory capability, so regulatory experience, commercial experience, and with the launch teams around finance just to make the job easier. All of those component parts all go to help, you know, one, you know, overcome problems, but also drive the speed of execution and the ability to get to market quickly. I think it's a combination of all of those. Thanks. Hi, good morning. I'm Miles Dixon from Peel Hunt. Can you hear me okay? I can now, yeah. A couple of related questions if I could. Firstly, on moving from 1-2 to 2-3 a year, how much of that really is a function of historically you haven't had those functions available to you, or is it exclusively about capital deployment? How can we think about capital deployment moving forward, especially given that you haven't moved the guidance window for GBP 150-GBP 250 today with this new strategy? Look, I think we've learned a lot about building companies. It's incredibly labor intensive and it takes a lot of time. I think the purpose, much of the change that we're proposing today is around institutionalizing that capability so that we get faster and better at it. I think particularly, yeah, the launch capability and also the advisory function allow institutionalization of capability, which will be enabling to let us hit the sort of 3 companies per year target. That's how those 2 pieces fit together. Rolf, do you wanna talk about guidance? Yeah, I mean, we've given you quite a broad range on guidance, and I think as I alluded to in my comments, that, you know, getting the exact timing of these things is always challenging. Also I think it reflects the sort of the breadth of opportunities. If you think about the business model, when we have the early startups, that's a relatively well-defined, you know, capital within a certain range. As the portfolio matures, you're gonna have a range of capital needs, and part of our job is to manage that. With any given period, you will have a range of capital depending on where the evolution of the portfolio is. You know, when we've looked at the strategy in trying to grow the business, you know, as you would imagine, we've done quite a lot of scenario and planning and modeling around that. When we looked at it, we felt that that sort of range was sufficient to accommodate that level of growth. You know, some years it might be a little bit lower, some years it might be a little bit higher. On an averaging out basis, that felt about the right sort of range for us to manage that portfolio growth. Great. I don't know, Bill. Is there any questions? Very good. Thank you very much for coming, everybody. Appreciate it. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to come on to the team, and we're always keen to talk to you. Thanks for coming.