We're going to start in a second. Start the webinar here. Thanks for coming, everyone. Who's all glad to get together in person? It's been 18 months for us. This is loud. Okay. You want to turn this down maybe just a hair? There we go. Better. This will be our third investor conference. We did our first in 2016. We were here three years ago, 2018, and we probably would've been here last year, but obviously we had issues. We're glad to be back. I think you're going to hopefully like the product today. We spent months working on this. A little bit about our company is that we definitely punch higher than our weight class for our size, but we're complicated. We have a lot of stuff, a lot of moving parts, and forever we're trying to demystify the complexity of Bio-Techne, all the different things we have. Today's goal is to really do just that, to give you a good view of our vision for the next five years, but help you really understand all the components bottom up the way you like to work, and how it all should add up to what we think will be the future for us. Of course, we have our usual disclaimer here. Get online and see the reconciliations and all the usual stuff. It's all there. Here will be the agenda today. We're starting right on time, and we hope to be finished around 12:30 P.M. We'll need to be because we have a car for the airport soon after that. If we're done early, we'll take Q&A longer. The plan will be we'll all present. I have myself, our two presidents who run the businesses, and Jim will do the follow-up and financials and the main event, the forecasting and visioning and stuff. Then they'll come up, and we'll sit and we'll do Q&A from up here, okay? You all know me, Chuck Kummeth. I'm at eight and a half years here in the role. Here's my team. On the top row, you see the Section 16s, and they're all presenting today except for Brenda. Brenda is in the room, so if you need legal help, she's back there. In the middle, you have more of our staff people. Kevin's in the room as well. Never go too far without him. We have a lot of IT in our company, and Kevin's good to have around, but he's also our data specialist, information specialist, and marketing specialist. I think Struan Robertson was here last time, our head of HR. He's not here today. Bob was running ProteinSimple and ran the division analytics instruments for a while. He left for a little while, took a sabbatical. He's come back, and he's now heading up corporate to corp dev. We have added a VP of quality and regulatory to our staff, reporting directly to me to be compliant. Down below, you have the division VPs and regional VPs. Matt McManus will be new, coming from Asuragen. We'll talk more about that later with a new diagnostics division plan. Steve Carlson is also new, taking over Analytical Solutions. Just a point I'd like to make. Most of my team have been with me the whole way, seven or eight years just about. We've not lost any executives in eight years I've been here. We've never used a recruiter for anyone on this page. We've got pretty good networking and pretty good story out there, and we seem to be a company that people want to join. We think we're creating a great culture, and we'll talk about that, too. All of us are from larger companies. I worked 25 years at 3M. I spent four years at Thermo, where I met Jim. Jim's been with me 12 years as my wingman, and we're amazingly compliant together. I'm not sure why, but we always have been. Everybody is from HP or Agilent or larger multinationals. We kind of get it. Most of our business leaders, like Dave, ran a billion-dollar+ division at Thermo Fisher Scientific as well. We understand how to drive large business processes. To that point, we're running a multinational model here. It's a subsidiary model. It's real simple. It's divide and grow. I like the model. It's always worked for me. It made 3M great, at least in the old days. It's very simple. The divisions own the P&Ls globally. They determine strategy globally. They handle the CapEx and the headcount decisions. The regions and divisions themselves, they run their P&Ls. Regions especially are executing the plan, executing the strategy, executing. You want to have that local governance because you don't want teams in China taking direction from Minneapolis. Right? You want to have it as local and close as you can. It's a matrix. We have a combination of formal P&Ls and informal P&Ls, and they can all work together. Everybody's paid off of growth and EBIT, so it all works pretty well. The two regional leaders that you saw on the previous page are both from 3M, one running APAC and one running Europe, so they understand this model extremely well. It's worked for us. It continues to work. We're at two segments, five divisions, and I expect when we get done in five years with the rest of this division, it'll be probably twice that, and hopefully eight to 10 divisions, and the model will still work very well. Here's the new segment and division structure. It's the same as the old. We've renamed a couple divisions. We've made one change. We've combined Exosome with Asuragen to make a more comprehensive diagnostics division. Proteomics Research Reagents is the same division. It's really proteins and antibodies primarily and our core reagents. We're really focusing on where the world's caught up in proteomics these days. It's more definitive of what we're doing, so we renamed it that way. Analytical Tools, the same way. Along with Analytical Tools, just like the division before, it's not only the instruments, but also our assay businesses. Including ELISA and Luminex and everything we do assay. The assays are very closely tied to these instruments, as you know, and so they still work well together. The Diagnostic Reagents, the oldest business in the company. This is still where we have our controls and calibrators, but we also sell an awful lot of OEM antibodies, and probably a lot of you had tests in the last six months to a year, and you probably are getting tests made with antibodies that came from us. A lot of OEM antibodies. Molecular products is the new division, and it's a combination of Exosome Diagnostics and Asuragen. The leadership of Asuragen has really taken over being the leadership overall. Matt McManus is, many of you probably know Matt. Matt's a pretty well-known name in our industry, well-versed in the science, domain knowledge, and an excellent leader, a fantastic person. He's from the Boston area, so it kind of works with Waltham and everything else, as well as Austin. Our ACD platform, which we had called Genomics division before, we're renaming this spatial biology, which really more defines what we're doing. This is the morphology-friendly technology for single-cell analysis, and we'll go get into that more under Kim's presentation. I should also mention, you see the brands down below. We may be talking about our segments. We have to. The divisions not so much, but the brands and the product lines we do. Pretty much following what other companies do at our size or larger, right? Our four key strategies haven't changed. Geographic expansion. We're still focused on China, and India we'll get back one of these days as well. Europe is still growing for us. We're growing everywhere. We definitely have more growth outside the U.S. than we do inside the U.S., expansion is still an important strategy for us. We are a products company. We have a lot of products, as you know, and innovation is key. We measure a lot of innovation. We measure our first-year product sales. We measure how many antibodies, how many proteins we're launching. We really get into the details on just what we're doing and why. We'll talk about prioritization later, how we prioritize all this stuff, because there's many workflows in our company, and we still launch over 1,200 new reagent-based products a year. It's a lot to keep track of. A lot of companies call M&A a tactic, not a strategy. I think in our case, it's still a strategy. We are still doing both on M&A. We probably aren't doing M&A for scale and fit or taking out cost reduction. We're not a company about saving nickels. We're a company about growth, and we'd rather grow quicker than worry about saving. We have a lot of sites, but that's because we've done acquisitions. We have a lot of talented people who want to be where they're at, and that makes it all work. More to come. We'll talk more about the end. The numbers you'll hear later on from Jim exclude all M&A. M&A is on top. Lastly, you can't grow like we've grown. I'm going to show you charts, and you can look ahead as well. You'll see we've more or less tripled or more so in headcount in the last seven, eight years. You can't grow like we have and not have issues on change management and working on culture. Eight years ago, nobody ever heard of us. Five years ago, maybe a little bit. Three years ago, a little more. Bio-Techne is really mentioned in the same kind of train of thought, frame of mind, or whatever with the Agilent and the PerkinElmer and companies of that size and even larger. We're there. We've got to really focus on what that means, what our culture for our future is. It's important because we want to keep generating demand for talent and the desire to be part of our team. As we all know, attrition right now is very high for everybody, right? There's a lot of mobility right now. If you're not focused on your culture and your talent, your retention, you're going to have an issue. We have grown from seven to 35 sites, mostly through M&A, and they range really from small to larger. We still have the biggest group in Minneapolis, roughly 800 employees, but now we have over 500 in California, and we have around 250 or so in the Boston area. We are spreading our wings, so to speak. We're spread out pretty well in Europe. We've set up subsidiaries in all the major countries now in Europe and distribution around that. We cover Africa, South America, Australia through distributors. They're not on the map here through partnerships or distribution. A lot of sites for our size company, and yet we still somehow manage to find a way to do 40% odd margins. Moving on to core product innovation. We've used versions of this chart for a long time. I still like it because it talks about what we're doing today and what we're going to do tomorrow. We have the core of the company, the history, the legacy of the company with our antibodies, our proteins, our assays, our controls, calibrators, small molecule, and they really fuel the basis of synergies to all these different legs in the stool. Whether it's spatial biology, whether it's liquid biology, and then looking for synergies with exosomes, whether it's in instrumentation, primarily antibodies, and Dave will talk about all the different applied markets that use antibodies and work with instruments and processes like Simple Western and such. Of course, the big thing for our future, probably the biggest opportunity we have looking at our future is cell culture and gene therapy. Of course, this is a lot about antibodies and other content as well. Here's some examples of synergy. Mainly mapping proteins and antibodies to the different instruments we have or the different types of tests or assays we have, whether it be spatial profiling, whatever. We have found a lot of synergy. We have synergy certainly in channel. We have synergy certainly in the science, but we also have synergies in the product system as well. Everyone has a business process. We're not the Danaher business process, and we're not really Six Sigma fanatics or PPI like we learned at Thermo, which is really a version of Six Sigma. We do have a set of rhythms that we run our company by that I think are very interesting and work very well, and we're a little bit unique, and I'll get into how we're unique. Most companies have really two primary rhythms for how they work. There'll be a strategic planning cycle and an operating plan cycle. You figure out what you're going to do, then you figure out how you're going to do it and give everybody their targets. We have a little more than that at Bio-Techne. We set our direction with strategic planning like most companies do. Then we spend some time collecting data and having every team come up with different ideas about what we're working on, and what we should be working on, and what we might should be working on, what we maybe should be killing. We collect that data, and we work into a prioritization process for about two or three months. We actually prioritize, we rank, rack, and stack every workflow in the company. This last year was about 400. We ended up going forward about 300. That means 100 we didn't do. One reason we have really great results and we have really great growth is because we don't waste time on things that are losers. We don't have pet projects. We don't have hidden stuff going on. We don't have politics of one president trying to beat up another one for his project or her project. Everybody works together on this process, we decide together what we're going to do and what we're not going to do. Then it's a five-year outlook. If you do a good job of that five-year outlook, year 1 of the outlook is darn near your AOP for next year. It's very close. Our actual annual operating plan process is actually quite short and quite painless as compared to working in other companies that we've all been in. It begins as an enterprise-level process and then gets divisional, and it turns back to enterprise. You've got to rack and stack in each business first, and then we rank everything across the company so that we know that what's best for the company overall is what wins. Okay? On the bottom row, it just talks about the decision conference, and that really is, you could game this, right? We have a consultant that we've worked with for years. It's a process that I helped develop back in 3M, 15 years ago, actually. You want to make sure there's a team. Most of you know Frank Mortari, he's on that team. We make sure every business unit is working the same way. I'll get into more of that, how you reduce the gaming aspect of prioritization. Here's what it is primarily. Every project has really two axes. There's a cost side and there's a benefit side. Most companies prioritize based off just looking at benefits. How much can it grow? How much can it make? What's the revenue? Without really understanding the true significance of the cost or the duration, the time of that cost, or the risk analysis, risk profile of the program in general. We have a filter on the right that creates a composite benefit algorithm. Yes, there's revenue and there's EBIT involved in it, but there's also strategic significance. There's some soft metrics as well, that which we assign numbers to, and everything's ranked. Along the bottom axis are the true costs of this program. Every project ends up being like a triangle, and you can already see what's the best kind of triangle, the one with the steep slope. The more benefits, the better, on as little a cost as possible. We want nice, tall, short, little triangles. On the right, you see is the stacking of all those triangles, and they're just ranked by their slope. The highest slopes are here, the lowest slopes are here. If you see a space, that means this program here, that's the triangle, that's a big program because it's got a long cost. Right? Here's the trap. Most companies stick with their big programs because they're big and they're political, they're significant, but they might have a terrible slope and they shouldn't be kept going. This is a way to kind of cut through all that. It also is a way to provide a common language for all your businesses and people to work together to understand what we're going to do and what we're not going to do. What happens is, you never end up with following that line perfectly. This is an algorithm. This is where you'll end up. The divisions picked here, we ended up finally here. If this is your cost, think of this as your budget, and this is your revenue, your value at the end. Essentially, if you ended up here versus here, you have this much less value. On the same budget, if you can get to here, virtually, you can see you create more value. You're picking higher value projects, and you've got risk all melded in here already. You're picking the best portfolio, and you actually know where your resources run out. You know where your line is, so you're not overdoing, you're not overburdening your people. You have a list of stuff to do next. When you actually finish something, you know what's next. That's always a problem, right? What do you do? We do this every year, and it's worked really great for us. All right, so now moving from there, operational back to more marketing. Probably one of the number one questions we've been receiving in the last year or so now almost is that, why are we doing so well compared to our peers? Everyone's drawing off of this tide, this rising tide of COVID, and certainly in life sciences, healthcare, and if you're in PCR, it's been a bonanza, right. We've been doing very well. Some of it's serendipity. We've been working on our marketing and our digital platforms for three, four years now, and we just so happen to be launching all those in the past year, and they've really been giving back and delivering for us. The one web focus for us has really worked well. With all these acquisitions, they also came with a lot of our websites. A year or two ago, if you want to order 10 things from us across three, four divisions, you had to get on six, seven websites to do it. It's a real pain. Now we can actually order. Customers have a much better experience. The digital solution, SEO, it's really hard to be in the antibody business with 400,000 plus SKUs and not have a good search engine. Researchers always start with search. They're always going off citations. They're always starting where science left off. They don't want to recreate the wheel, they want to pick up where things have been. Use search. You want to be in those citations, and you want to be discoverable. We do that, and we buy a lot of AdWords. We do a lot of Google type stuff. We pay Google a lot. To be in that top search, be in that top three. The payback has been staggering. We have a data analytics lab now. We have actually a PhD in data helping drive and create our algorithms. We generate all the right customer experiences that you'd want, you'd expect. The references happen for the customer now as well. We also know exactly what we're getting for our investment. When the teams came to Jim and I about a year ago saying, "We're actually getting $30 for every dollar invested off of our web," and we said, "Wow, okay. Spend more and come back to us later." They came back and said, "We're still getting 15." Spend more. Until we see an asymptote, let's keep spending. We're still at $5-$6 of payback, and we've more than quadrupled our spend and our SEO experience. It's paying. This is one reason we're growing faster than our competition. This is the primary reason we're out, we're taking share in antibodies. We're doing fantastic antibodies, and this is why. The marketing strength. Marketing, in general, we use Agile. We're focused on cross-selling. Partivation allows us to work more together anyway. There are just a lot of, not only dialogue, but materials, and you have to be digital in those materials as well. We focus really hard on making crisp, good materials for marketing, for our customers. As you all know, R&D Systems go way back. We are known for what? Posters. The best posters ever, right? It's important that we stay with that we keep our brand alive, and the researchers understand that we're still out there for them. We give them a little extra. Marketing's one area we do that. Just a little bit on the web. We have an awesome website now. It's over 10 million+ annual views run rate a year. We're doing double-digit traffic growth every quarter. It's all about a better customer experience. It's all about allowing an ease of ordering because we are becoming larger, and if you're buying reagents or instruments, you're also looking for assays, and it's just very important to get all that stuff in one place. If you're looking by application, you want to have references of all the stuff you might need per an application. We can do that now. We couldn't two years ago. We just couldn't do it. This is just a slide to show all the different attributes that go into the data analytics team to provide that better customer experience. It's hard to create metaphors to show you just how important this is and how hard it is and how good we're doing this right now with our teams. The data that speaks for itself, the delivery speaks for itself. It's all about delivering the right message at the right time to the right person. We all get flooded with stuff online, and we really focus on not doing that. We focus on getting our research customers what they're looking for and a pleasant surprise with the information they're looking for. M&A, we've had a pretty good track record. We took more or less a year off in 2020. COVID was kind of hard on us. We've been very busy, and we actually did play in the Aldevron game and a few others recently. We're also very diligent in how we do the process. We still are following a protocol, a process of we're looking for a 10% or better ROI seen fivee years. I don't think I've seen a large deal go like that for a while. We're probably more and more still focused on private deals like we've done. The best things we've done have been the private deals of the past, like ACD, like ProteinSimple, and there's still a lot out there. Our pipeline is still 100 deep, and we've got a great debt position. Our cash has never been better. When Jim Hippel gets up and talks about our future, our vision, there's no M&A in the numbers, look at it on top. We've done a fair amount of M&A. It's helped us reach our goals. We were here in 2016 telling you how we would get to $1 billion and near 40% op margins, and we're there. The prioritization, when it's finalized, we show the board every January. We showed the board last January the outcome and what the prediction was five years ago. As of last year, we were within 1% top line and bottom line from our prediction five years ago. The process does work. We feel better about our next five-year projections for you, our goals, our vision, than we did five years ago. We think the credibility is more there now. The strength is there. We've got a better team. We've got more cash. We've got a better brand. We've got a better website. We're ready to go after it. Speaking of TAM, when I joined, it was really just an antibody assay protein business. It just wasn't a very big pond. It wasn't growing, as all of you remember. NIH funding wasn't very good back then either. Now look at today. We've really focused on entering markets that are still growing quite significantly. We have a $14 billion-$20 billion TAM at this point in these seven major areas, right? If you look at these analytically, we're still in very early innings in share in every one of them. This is why we can continue to grow and grow at the high rates that we are. Some are pretty exciting. I think all of you would agree, if you want to be in this industry, if you don't have a play in spatial biology, you're probably missing the boat, right? We're doing, I think, all the right things. Lastly, culture. Employees, 800, 2013, 2,700. We'll be back here in five years, and I'm sure it'll be somewhere around 5,000. You can see the breakdown. Pretty big gain in China, pretty big gain in Europe as well. Hopefully, probably in five years, we'll have something significant to talk about India, I would expect as well. Our culture is really, we came up with this system, I guess, years ago, EPIC, and it really just simple. We like to keep it simple. Employees like simple. We measure everybody qualitatively every year on how they are for empowerment, passion, innovation, and collaboration. Empowerment, we want to develop people, we want to give people what they need and then get out of their way. There's nothing worse than micromanaging. We don't rehearse a lot of presentations. We don't redo things. We try to be innovative and let people be inspired and get on it. Again, we have prioritization done. We set the goals ahead of ourselves. We know what they're doing, and we let them run with it. Usually, we're pleasantly surprised. Passion. I've been in a lot of industries, and let me just tell you, being in the life sciences is a little more passionate than being in abrasives at 3M. Okay? We tend to attract people that have that little extra about wanting to help people. I think passion comes with the territory. Innovation, it's hard to be a successful company if you don't have some way to innovate. I've been in companies that were on top and then not on top. We've all been around businesses. We've all seen failures. How many remember BlackBerry? There's all kinds of stories out there, right? You've got to really keep innovation in the forefront of your employees' minds, and then really help them understand that innovation's everything. It isn't a process that you can schedule. It's about creating an environment where that happens, because it may happen in the least expected time or place. You just want people to be happy and engaged and passionate, if they have the tools and they like what they're doing, they're going to innovate. Collaboration is how you get more than the next person. How do you compete? If you can collaborate and get leverage, you can create things that nobody else has. We focus on that as well. A lot of focus this year on social everything. As you'd expect, we have done our first CSR as well. A little bit on social stats. We are actually a pretty unique company. We're over 50% female. We're over 52% scientists are. We're a pretty heavy percentage of PhDs. I think it's somewhere around 10% or so. 30% of the workforce are non-white. About 25% are Chinese. We have almost a quarter of our employee count in Minneapolis are Chinese, and many have been here for 20, 30 years. I tell you, what that means is that to get out of China 30 years ago on a student visa, you had to be off-the-charts smart. Not like today, it's much easier to get around, but back then, very difficult. A lot of them like Minnesota and stayed. We have very good attrition with our scientists in Minneapolis. We bit hard and early with COVID. We were looking at a horrible quarter that first quarter when COVID came out, and we didn't know what was going to happen, like many of us. We sold some stock in ChemoCentryx to build up a little cash war chest. Then we told the employees that we were not going to do furloughs and not do any layoffs no matter what happened, that they could be safe. We figured this as a one-year problem at the time. We all did. We know how hard it was to attract talent and build a team. We thought, let's not start over in a year. Right? Let's just suck it up and take care of everybody, let everybody focus, and maybe we'll outperform our competitors by a little bit, at least by them being happier and feeling safe. Worked pretty well. We had a pretty good year last year, and we extend our bonus plan to all salaried employees in the company at this point. We do other things, too. We're helping local schools. We're a big partner with the Science Museum of Minnesota, which is one of the biggest and best in the country. We try to listen to our employees, what they want to get involved in, and a little bit different than some companies. We did do our first CSR, as I mentioned. We are ISO 14001 certified in a couple of our major sites. We're going to keep working on everything. We understand our energy and water management pretty well and waste. The next thing is gas emissions. I don't think we're going to be a big emitter anywhere. We'll follow all the protocols and try to be better than average in terms of acknowledgement and knowing the data. Governance. We used to get dinged pretty hard by ISS for our board. There was a lot of longevity. We had a lot of famous old scientists on our board, and they've kind of come off for age. In the last four years, we've actually replaced half of our independent directors, and we have two women. Two of them are newer and women. One was replaced woman, and one is also racially diverse. We have still a mix of businesspeople and science-related people. Our heaviest hitter now is probably Rupert Vessey, who is head of R&D for BMS. He was the Celgene guy, and he got promoted in the acquisition. He's so good. He's been fabulous, by the way. Onward. This is probably the chart I just should've started with and had one slide and asked if there were any questions. Clearly, it's a pretty good slide. You're going to see it again later, a versions of it with Jim. I do want to point out that we were on track for 11% before COVID hit. We only had one quarter to go, right? We're fiscal, and we missed miserably even that one quarter. You can imagine how bad that Q4 was to get to end up at only 4%. At least we had growth. Most companies didn't have any growth their first COVID year. We're looking at strong comps, but we've got a strong future. We ended the whole year at 22.5%, and you're going to hear later how we're going to keep all this going. Maybe not at 22.5%, but a darn fine number of growth. It's been year by year, little by little, but we've been incrementally improving, and I see no reason why this is going to stop. We're going to keep innovating. We're going to keep moving into more and more lucrative areas, and it's going to more than pay the bills, and we feel better about a 40% op margin future than we did five years ago, to be honest, with strong growth. That'll be a little unique in our industry, especially once we become more than a billion-dollar company, which is this year. In summary for me, we're well-positioned and growing in under-penetrated markets. We don't think we need more. These are plenty of ponds, and they're plenty big enough, and they're growing well. Culture and processes focused on driving growth synergies and maximizing our profitability. We're definitely poised to benefit from, we think, a favorable macro environment. NIH October isn't even here yet, we're all expecting 20% or better. I think it's going to happen. Laying the groundwork for a very sustainable future, we're focused on that. We do have eight different ERG groups, and we're allowing that innovation to all occur in the company. We have a great M&A track record. I would say not all 16 since 2014 are winners, but I would say 12 are, and three or four are absolute fantastic. We'll cover all of them. We're definitely benefiting from COVID-19 tailwinds. We're not a COVID company. We're not in the PCR bubble. We had 3% tailwinds for, I think, three quarters in a row, and I think we see that going forward. We're about COVID research, and it's not going away. If anything, it's going to incrementally improve, and we're not giving up on serology yet either. Dave will talk about that. cell and gene therapy, we're going to talk a lot about that today. It is a virtual phenomenon coming, and I think we are even better prepared and positioned than I thought we would be. I just don't see anyone chasing us at the level we're at with our workflow. I think we have an amazing workflow put together, and we're getting a lot of traction. I think it's going to be just amazing to watch. If nobody follows us, if nobody tries to really get in on what we're doing, and if we get a major share of this going out 3, 4, 5 years, it's going to be way larger than the numbers you're going to see later. Some of this data you're going to see is just astounding. Lastly, we had a record year. We're trying to take a little time to celebrate our employees as well. We do feel that there's a reason. It's because we're a diversified portfolio and we're not a standalone unicorn. We're a whole stable of unicorns with platforms in this company, and they're all growing, and they'd be many, many multi-billion dollar entities on their own if we did spin things out. With that, I will pass off to Dave. Thanks, Chuck. I'm Dave Eansor, President of Protein Sciences segment. I've been here for most of the run Chuck talked about, going on eight years now. It's hard to believe, really, that it's been that long. I was reflecting back on Investor Day 2016 and looking through some of my slides. They were pretty simplistic. It's a more complicated business today, a lot bigger. There was lots of questions back then about how are you going to grow the antibody business and the protein business and the assay business, and how are you going to get out of the blocks with instruments? I got to tell you, I couldn't be more proud of my team and the execution that we've had over the last several years. I think more importantly, I've never been more bullish on our future. As Chuck said, I think we're really poised for even greater success going forward. This is what the business is all about. It's reagents and analytical solutions. It's currently, or last year, a little over $700 million, an $8 billion-$11 billion addressable market. To be successful in these businesses, there's no magic bullets. You have to do 100 different things right, and there's not always intellectual property to protect you. You've got to really execute if you're going to grow disproportionally. Breaking the business into three chunks, if you look at our reagents, we think the addressable market for that is close to $3 billion. It's growing mid-single digits, depending on whose statistics you look at. We think our share is around 10%, a little greater in certain product areas like proteins and a little less in the more fractionated product lines like antibodies. Our growth rate is anywhere from 50%-100% better than the market in the last few years. Swinging over to the right on the analytical tools, which would be a combination of our instrumentation platforms as well as our assays, our plate-based assays, we think that's about a $3 billion market, potentially growing mid-single digit with the instruments growing probably north of 20% and with high single digits for the traditional plate-based assays. Kind of a weighted average growth rate of about 15%. We still think we have a lot of runway in this space with 10% or less market share in those end applications. Cell and gene therapy in the middle is really not so much a product-based business, but it gets products from both the protein analytics and the reagent side that are typically made GMP or used in a regulated way to produce these cell and gene therapies. We think the addressable market there is at least $3 billion, growing 20%. Our growth obviously is higher than that because it's pretty nascent for us, and we have minimal market share there. We think that this market's on the cusp of exploding, really. As Chuck reflected, we're pretty much under-penetrated in the Protein Sciences Segment in high growth markets and with a lot of potential. Starting with proteins, why are they important? Obviously, DNA is important because it provides instructions for the cell. RNA translates those instructions into what proteins need to be made, but it's really the proteins that do the work. I think the world's really waking up to that now, that proteins do everything. They form structures, they perform all the functions, they do all the regulation. Proteins are absolutely critical, which is why we're in a pretty good spot. Our proteins are used in cell therapy applications, which I'll talk about later. They're used in cell growth and differentiation in research. They're used as antigens for antibody production, and that's an important part of what we do. They're used in diagnostics, in the controls and calibrators business. They're used in specialty media formulations for different cell types. They are also used as biomarkers that people are studying to understand disease, and many other applications. We're known for the highest purity, highest, most bioactive proteins on the market, and the best lot-to-lot consistency, and those things are not trivial. When we say bioactivity, I'll refer to bioassays. This is something that we do that's pretty unique. We develop bioassays in-house that help to indicate how effective our proteins are at performing the functions they're supposed to perform. We also use those same bioassays to look at lot-to-lot consistency. In that regard, we're quite unique in why we're so valued by pharma and CROs in particular. We have the largest range of proteins by far, both RUO and GMP, and most publications out there. The best bioassays, as I mentioned, and the best reproducibility lot-to-lot. We test every lot against back lots to confirm the performance of our antibodies. During COVID, we quickly pivoted and started to develop a number of proteins. We have proteins to every variant out there, and there are over 30. We also made proteins that represent the receptors that the COVID can bind with, and we sell a lot of those reagents into the marketplace, and this is where a lot of the tailwinds are coming from that Chuck mentioned. We do custom protein development. This is not a big business for us, but when pharmaceutical companies have special challenges, we're the ones they come to do custom protein development. We also can tag our proteins and put them on plates so that people can run experiments to show interactions with the proteins in plate-based assays. We have proteins for regenerative medicine products, which are critically important, immune checkpoint proteins, and as Chuck mentioned, we sell all of these proteins with our antibodies on a world-class website with excellent search engine optimization capabilities. Antibodies, I don't think since COVID, anybody doesn't know what an antibody is now. This is not much I probably have to explain, but they're specialized proteins with specific reactivity. They're a byproduct of your immune system. They essentially mark foreign substances for destruction. They're very relevant in the cancer treatment process. Essentially what CAR T-cells are the business end of the antibody interacting with a cancer cell to mark it for destruction. They can be engineered these days, this is not your grandmother's antibody business. It's a much more sophisticated business. A lot of antibodies, as you know, have been developed as therapeutics, and the sequences of our antibodies are starting to appear in those therapeutics because of all the years we've been developing antibodies. There is a number of applications for antibodies. Western blot in our own Simple Western technology is a key one. immunohistochemistry, flow cytometry, cytochemistry. There is a whole host of immunoassay platforms, so the Luminex, ELISA, and Simple Plex assays and a number of other competitor assays. Anything that requires antibody pairs, we are the clear leader in antibody pairs which are required. You need to probe a protein with two antibodies in a sandwich assay, and that is something that is a very key specialty for us. We do blocking and neutralization assays. We make arrays. We have a very large collection of antibodies in our Minneapolis site. In terms of applications, the big ones that are growing the most currently are the immuno-oncology space, the neuroscience space, and the cell and gene therapy space. We have antibodies for all different applications here and assay types, and we're feeling very bullish about the potential for the libraries of antibodies we have. That library has grown to over 400,000. It's not just the antibodies that we offer on our website or in our catalog. We have what we call sister clones, large libraries of antibodies to the same target, so that we can screen these antibodies for the best ones for different applications. Those methods that we're using these days, which I can't really talk about because it's proprietary, but we are much more sophisticated. We're looking at the kinetics and the binding capabilities, the off and on rates for these antibodies and how they work together in pairs. These are critically important details that determine the best antibodies for different application types and for different targets. We also license our antibodies to both the RUO market, to the diagnostic market, and then we license our sequences selectively to therapeutic producers that end up using those sequences in some therapeutics. We get a nice stream of revenues and royalties from those relationships. Those agreements last many years. Small molecules, we don't talk about a lot. It's a nice niche business for us. It's a highly profitable business for us, and we have a strong reputation for quality small molecules. We're known for our presence in cancer research, in epigenetics. Our small molecules are also used in stem cells, and I'll talk about, a little bit, their use in the regenerative medicine space in cell therapy. We're also very strong in neurodegeneration. This is a new and emerging area of research and also for therapeutics. It's called targeted protein degradation. In this platform, it leverages the ubiquitination pathway to get rid of proteins that are either excessively expressed or proteins that are defective in some way. There's a whole new therapeutic class coming out of this, and we are the leader in producing tools that leverage this pathway. We're the tool of choice now for a lot of the pharma companies that are doing research in this area. Going forward, look for this to be a new therapeutic class that we expect to grow quite a bit over the next several years. I'll point out also that our Simple Western instrument is the tool of choice for verification that these methods are actually working to remove the proteins of interest uniquely. There's a nice synergy in our business there as well. On the analytical solution side, this, again, is a combination of our instrumentation and our legacy kit-based or plate-based assays. We have three main platforms here. The Western blotting platform, the biologics platform, which is capillary electrophoresis and imaging for biologics, and then our Simple Plex and immunoassay platform. The immunoassays are our ELISA kits and DuoSet, which is kind of a poor man's ELISA kit, where we actually test the market and get out new biomarker tests. We have the broadest library there. The Luminex platform, which has been around for quite a while, which is a multiplex platform. Our Simple Plex platform, which is the automated ELISA that we got through the acquisition of CyVek. Many of these instruments, of course, have a long string of consumable revenues that come along with them. As time goes on, as you might expect in a typical instrument model, a razor blade model, the more instruments we place, obviously the more consumables that we sell. As we look at this space, we like to think about where our instruments are and our assays are in terms of stage of development. There are obviously different stages of maturity. On the far right there, you see that our DuoSet and Quantikine kits have probably been around the longest. They're still growing quite nicely because we are the market leader, and we've got a very broad selection there. Luminex has been around for a long time, and there are a number of large players in the Luminex space. It's in the late majority. Again, we provide not only our own assays, but we provide most of the content for that entire market. Our Maurice instrument platform, our capillary electrophoresis instrument is in the early to late majority, but we keep building applications for this box, and it's becoming much more versatile over time. Simple Western, we think has just recently kind of crossed the chasm, and I'll explain to you why that is. We still have a lot of runway with this platform, and it's been a tremendous grower for us, both from a box placement perspective as well as a consumables perspective. We think Ella, our automated immunoassay platform, is just now crossing that chasm as well. We've got a proven track record of bringing instruments and consumables through this process. Beginning with Simple Western, it's got a lot of advantages to traditional Western blot that we've talked about, but more specifically, time to result, the ability to quantitate your Western blot experiment, that the amount of throughput and the amount of flexibility you get from the platform is unmatched. You can do up to 96 samples per run. Reproducibility is way better than anything manual Western blot, and we're improving on that all the time. The other key advantage is you need very low sample volume to do your experiment. One thing that gives us an indication that it is really crossing the chasm is that last quarter, we sold almost 90% of the boxes that we placed without any demo. We're getting a lot of sales into repeat customers who were trying out Simple Western and now are adopting it as a standard platform and really doing their own education within their companies of other parts of the companies that are still doing Western blot the old way. We have now two platforms for Simple Western. You may have recalled we used to have Wes, so we're discontinuing Wes, and now we have two models, Abby and Jess. Abby is designed for the academic market. It does complete automation of the Western blot workflow. It has reduced sample costs, higher plexing as well. More recently, we launched what we call RePlex, which allows customers to reuse certain elements of the consumables to essentially strip and reprobe, and therefore get more out of their consumables, and that's important for the academic market, especially. Very fast time to results, we've greatly improved our data analysis software and protein quantitation capabilities. Jess is the higher end of our Simple Western line, the big difference here, it's got everything that Abby does, but it has high sensitivity fluorescence as well. The second half of this year, we will be launching an improved version of our fluorescence, which we expect to be well-received by the market. It's a bit higher capital cost, but again, it gives you that ability to multiplex, and we think this is going to be a big hit with pharmaceutical companies in particular. Our biologics platform is mainly our Maurice platform, although we do have a MFI instrument as well. Our current market for our biologics is imaged capillary isoelectric focusing. That's where the majority of our revenues come from. There's also, though, high resolution of our charged protein isoforms. We also do size-based separation with this instrument. It's automated, it's fast, it's convenient. It's got versatility of uses, and it's also, more recently, in the last couple of years, we've spent a fair amount of time and energy to get it software compatible with the Empower platform. The Waters Empower platform is widely used in the industry. We made our instrument compatible with it. It's particularly important where customers use the instrument for QC purposes, and so in a validated environment. They really require this, and it's not only secured our position there, it's opened the door to a lot more sales because of that regulatory compliance. Going forward, we've got big plans for this platform to continue to grow. We've got fast SDS cartridges that will be coming out, which will far exceed the performance of our competitors. We also think we can further penetrate the ion exchange market. We plan to do pre-fractionation of samples in front of the MS or mass spec. This should be very attractive for that market. We also plan to do liquid chromatography expansion through charge-based fractionation projects that we have in the pipeline. The other thing that we're doing here is really big focus, actually, with all of our instrument platforms, on application expansion. I said you have to do 100 things right, and this is one of them. You've got to be able to publish and show that your instrument works well for applications that are growing and popular, and tell people step by step how to do it. One such application area is in empty versus full capsid analysis, and also capsid stability, which are really important for AAV in cell and gene therapy. That's an area where we're leading right now and is resulting in a lot of instrument placements. A very versatile, high-resolution protein characterization tool that we continue to expect growth out of going forward. Our Simple Plex platform, we've talked about quite a bit. It's an automated ELISA. It's quickly become a favorite tool for immune monitoring and biomarker research. We think it's crossing the chasm largely because we've been expanding the library. We can do that because we make antibody pairs, and we have an assay development team that's second to none. We are expanding the plex, so we can now do up to 32 samples by eight biomarkers in a single assay. We're also expanding application areas here. Cell and gene therapy is a big area of growth for our Simple Plex platform. It's used in development and process monitoring and also in QC at a number of cell therapy companies. Then we're investing heavily in getting diagnostic status for this instrument. Stay tuned there. It's going to take us a bit of time, but we're getting ISO 13485 status for our facilities, and we're also expanding our facilities in Wallingford, Connecticut, and we'll be 5X the capacity to make cartridges there. We're also improving the quality of this platform on a continuous basis. Ultra-precise instrument, very easy to use. Put your sample in, put in your cartridge, push a button. It's every bit as sensitive of anything out there, including Quanterix. It's cost-effective and, over time, we're expanding the plex of it. We have really high hopes for this platform as well. As you've seen from our results in the past several quarters, all three of our instrument platforms are growing really nicely and reaching that critical mass of adoption and tipping point, I guess, if you would call it. As I mentioned, wherever we place these instruments, they are driving considerable consumable growth. We expect over time that consumable revenue will continue to grow far in excess of the instrument platform placement, just because they're getting used more. Just a couple words on our conventional immunoassay platforms. They may not be as sexy or as exciting, but they are really nice-sized markets and still growing nicely. R&D Systems brand is the premium immunoassay brand in the market. It's the trusted ELISA platform for pharma, also for CROs. We are the clear leader here. We have the largest library, the most publications, the highest quality assays, and we're also a leading provider of Luminex assays. Our specialty here is we can do custom Luminex assay development. As I mentioned, we also provide a vast majority of the content for the entire Luminex market in terms of antibody pairs and protein standards that are used to make these assays, no matter who makes them. This is a very large and profitable conventional immunoassay segment, I would say, growing nicely for us and above the market. We are still taking share in all of these platforms. That's kind of the traditional business as I talked about back in 2016 and 2018 and how it's evolved. As I mentioned, it's a lot more complex. There's a lot more moving parts, but there's also a lot more opportunity. I'll move on now to cell and gene therapy, because a lot of those tools that I just talked about are used in this space. It used to be talked about Emily Whitehead, and that was the poster child, literally, for success of cell and gene therapy. I'm happy to say that there are many success stories now beyond that. Really, I know myself and a lot of people that work in our business, when they talk about this with family and friends, what they talk about is us being an innovator and enabling these cell and gene therapies and actually saving lives. This is why we get up in the morning, is really why this is so important. There are really three main areas, the way we look at the market anyway, of cell and gene therapy. There's the traditional stem cell-based therapies, so induced pluripotent stem cells and hematopoietic stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells. There's a lot of therapies that are coming in that space where essentially you're trying to grow up stem cells in large numbers and then convert them into another type of tissue and then transplant that into the body, or you're doing it with a blood-based therapy. These are pluripotent. They require a lot of growth factors, which we provide, GMP, and some small molecules. A really important area for us and an area that we go to market direct with. The next area for us that's really important and emerging is the gene-modified cell therapy. This is where CAR T-cells would be, or natural killer cell therapies, where there's a genetic modification done to typically a T-cell or NK cell, and that cell is used to then go fight a cancer in your body. We go to market there through ScaleReady, which I'm going to talk about, which is a joint venture we formed, and that got some delays with COVID, but finally got off the ground in earnest in January. The gene therapy space, where historically we haven't played a lot in, but as I'll talk about, we are playing in now, particularly with our instrumentation, but also with our non-viral gene editing platform, which we think is going to have a place in this market going forward. First, a little bit about the market, and there's a lot of information on this slide, but just to highlight a few things. We think that the market for cell and gene therapy is somewhere between $4 billion and $5 billion. It's grown about 25% CAGR since 2015, and it's expected to grow at an even higher rate for the next five years. Depending who you talk to, estimates, almost everybody thinks that by 2030 this will be north of a $30 billion market. There are currently 1,358 active cell therapy trials going on. Right now, CAR T trials represent almost half of those trials, so it's a really important part of the early market. As I'll talk about, I think a sleeper in here could be the NK, natural killer cell market, which many cell therapy companies are adopting programs around NK cells as well. We think that this is certainly a market to go after, and it's really about getting shots on goal. Right now, the market's pretty nascent. Most of the players are in early innings, it's about trying to play Moneyball and figure out which customers have the best chance of succeeding and why, based on their workflow, the indications they're going after, the competitive environment they're going after. We kind of have our own proprietary algorithm, if you will, about how we look at this market and who we think are going to be the best partners for us going forward. Also included in there is what types of products that they potentially could buy from us. When I think about ScaleReady, and again, this is in this center gene-modified cell therapy space, which is a good chunk of the market today. The reason we partnered with these two companies in particular is because they are key elements of the workflow, and they work together very closely with the reagents that we have to offer. The idea here is to offer an end-to-end solution, and the most important word and why we called the joint venture ScaleReady is that we wanted to make something that was scalable and worked together seamlessly. The partnership is between Fresenius Kabi, who has an instrument called the Lovo, and they have a new generation instrument that'll be coming out as well soon, specifically for immune cell therapy. That instrument does key steps of cell separation at the beginning, so separates out the white blood cells, and then cell washing at the end before the cells are frozen to go back into the patient. On the far right is Wilson Wolf. We partnered with them because we believe that they have the best cell culture approach, best cell culture vessel. It's very simple, and it's IP-protected gas-permeable membrane on the bottom of the cell culture vessel that lets the cells breathe, optimize media volumes, and is, we think, the absolute best way to grow cells for especially autologous cell therapy. Our offering is really in four key areas. We offer GMP proteins, which is kind of the lead horse and where we've got most of our volume so far. Through the acquisition of Quad, we've got access to a non-bead-based cell separation and activation reagents. We are actively working with Fresenius to perfect a cell separation approach there that will allow us to, in combination with their instruments, separate out T-cells specifically with no risk of contamination of beads. We have specialty medias that we're developing for regenerative medicine space, but also for T-cells and NK cells, and I'll talk more about NK in 1 minute. We have non-viral gene editing tools through the acquisition of a small company called B-MoGen that spun out of University of Minnesota. The combination here is sold through a joint venture commercial team, which is a collection of technical sales experts and field application specialists that know these workflows inside and out. They study the workflows so that they know the workflow as well or better than the customers that are conducting them. We have a, we call it challenger sales model, where we get the customer engaged in discussions on where the weakness is in their process and why they should be looking at our workflow for scalability and reproducibility. For illustrative purposes, I wanted to show you some of the potential for our ScaleReady. This is the world according to Wells Fargo. It's a bullseye chart that they published. They study this space a fair bit. I don't know the exact algorithm for why they include companies on this, because it certainly isn't the entire universe. It maybe is about a fifth. A lot of these companies are public, and I'm sure it has to do with investment opportunities that they are presenting to their clients. Most of them are public, as I said, but some are private. I don't want to give the impression that this is the entire market. As you look at this diagram, just to interpret it a little bit, around the outside are the different kind of approaches to cell therapy that are used. Autologous and allogeneic CAR T therapies are on the top left, and that probably expands from about 7 o'clock to 1 o'clock there. By far, as I pointed out in the previous data, about 50% of the market is in the CAR T space. There's fewer players, but a lot of other different approaches to cell therapy around the outside. As you move towards the center of the bullseye chart, you move towards BLA. The companies on the outside of the chart are preclinical, and then they move to phase I, II, and III, and then to BLA submission and approval. What we've started to do is to analyze this to see where are we from a ScaleReady touch point perspective with these companies. It turns out that 84% of the allogeneic CAR T. By the way, autologous, for those of you that don't know, autologous means the cells go from you back into you. Right? Allogeneic, think of it as more like off the shelf, so a donor cell that is scaled up for cell therapy and then can be one to many. When we looked at the allogeneic and autologous CAR T, we had 84% and 72% of the customers on this chart, respectively. I can't tell you which ones because of confidentiality, but in the drug program perspective, we had 76% of the allogeneic and 48% of the autologous. We looked at other areas of the chart. We had 60% of the TCR and 48% of those programs. We had 90% of these four categories here combined. I had to combine them because actually we had 100% of some of them. On the NK front, where we see a tremendous amount of growth coming more recently, we were positioned in about 56% of those customers. The key takeaway here is that our ScaleReady shots on goal approach, our challenger sales approach, is working, and we're getting seeded into a number of these accounts with either one, two, or all three of the product lines that I mentioned earlier. Overall participation in this chart is about 48% of the companies in the bullseye, 68% of those in phase I and II, and then 48% of the ones on here that are preclinical. Overall, for the entire market, and our database indicates that there is at least 1,800 in our sales force database, we have 668 customers that are customers of ScaleReady for one product line or another. 510 of those are in preclinical or research phase. It just tells you how nascent this market is. 150 of them are in the early innings, phase I and II. Only 6 are in phase III, and two of our customers are BLA or commercial. A lot of potential here for this market and something we are extremely excited about. Any given cell therapy customer, depending on the number of reagents that we provide them, if they can make it to market, and again, depending on the indication, and so it varies widely, it could be $10 million-$20 million per customer. It is that kind of potential. It also doesn't happen just on its own. In addition to offering these products, we also have to offer a ton of data. Behind the scenes, we have a lot of scientists working all the time to generate data that shows how our products work together seamlessly. Not only our own reagents, but the bioreactor and the instrumentation from our partners. We are continually generating that data in-house and publishing, but we're also doing it with our customers because people believe their peers. Obviously, I don't think they have any kind of agenda. That approach is working quite well, but we're in the early innings of that as well. There's just a ton of data customers want to see before they will adopt or change a process. The cell and gene therapy market requires this, and it's going to be an expectation going forward. Not many companies can provide this combination, let alone the data of them all working together. Cell and gene therapy also requires GMP facilities. We've talked quite a bit about our GMP protein facility that we opened up, grand opening in the late fall of last year, 61,000 sq ft. We believe it's the highest capacity, highest quality. You'd be blown away if you walk through it. It's really state-of-the-art, differentiated from any of the competitors in many respects, and it's intended for clinical use of our products. Capacity up to about $200 million of revenue, depending on the mix and the pricing involved and the kind of proteins we sell. We think we can go well beyond that. We left space in the facility to expand to produce our various medias for cell and gene therapy, as well as certain GMP antibodies that are used with our Cloudz and in other elements of the workflow, like in QC. We're quite excited about this, and we're currently producing salable product in this facility as of this fall. A little bit about the NK market. It's a natural killer cell market. As I mentioned, we feel like this is a sleeper, potentially. This gives the potential for off-the-shelf cell therapy because these NK cells don't present the graft versus host disease risk. They are very effective at killing cancers. We have a very nice offering in this space, our TcBuster technology can be used for non-viral gene editing of NK cells. Our media, we have a great media for growing NK cells. Of course, our GMP cytokines and small molecules can be used here as well. Then one thing that we're quite excited about is our Cloudz technology. We're developing this application right now, one of the downfalls of natural killer cells historically has been that you had to use a cancer feeder layer to grow the cells. Of course, nobody wants to use a therapy that involves the use of cancer cells themselves. We've figured out a way now to create Cloudz that can reproduce that feeder layer effect, essentially messaging and nutrients that go to the NK cells that allow them to propagate and work very effectively, as effective as the ones that were cultured with these, what they call K562 cancer feeder lines. This is something we're quite excited about. Stay tuned. This is something in the next couple of years that could start to really materialize. A little bit about our small molecule business. Again, we don't talk a lot about this, but our Bristol manufacturing facility is ISO 9001. We have a whole separate section of the facility now that makes ancillary material and GMP-grade small molecules. This is a niche. Nobody else that we know of makes small molecules for use mainly in regenerative medicine. iPSC cell workflow, anybody that needs like ROCK inhibitor, for example, which is used to freeze these cells. It's a very important material for that workflow, and we make the only GMP version of that in this facility. We make a bunch of other small molecules that are used in the stem cell for reprogramming, differentiation, expansion, and self-renewal. This is another area that we're excited about, and we intend to expand that facility to accommodate a specialized GMP space in the next year. Finally, I'll talk about our genome engineering services. Again, we got this through the acquisition of B-MoGen which was a spin-out of the University of Minnesota. We have our three areas here that we do gene editing services in. One is our proprietary TcBuster technology which is a next-generation non-viral gene delivery system. It allows the transfer of a gene of interest into any cell type. We also do GMP manufacturing to do proof of principle for a pre-clinical and up to phase I in a small facility that we built that's just around the corner from our Minnesota site. We also offer cell and genome engineering services using CRISPR technology, but also some of our own proprietary gene editing technology. A little bit about TcBuster. It's called a transposon-based plasmid. There's also a transposon mRNA. The benefit of this is it has a higher cargo capacity, so it's not going to be for everybody. Where AAVs can break down is they can only carry so much cargo into the cell. The longer that mRNA sequence, the more important it is for you to look at non-viral approaches, and this is exactly what we offer. It also gives a lot more targeted insertion. You get much fewer random expression events. There's obviously no virus handling required here. Important for the customer these days, it's a short lead time. You try to get an AAV from one of these suppliers, it can take six months to a year or more. It's a lower cost per patient, 50% or so lower cost per patient to use this versus a virus technology. We think this is going to carve out its place and we've got a lot of companies interested in this, proof of principles going on. What we need is the first IND, we're hopeful that that could happen in the next 12 months. The last thing I'll talk about is our instrument platform. People think about cell and gene therapy and the benefits of Bio-Techne, you think about our reagents, actually, we're getting a big lift in our instrument business from cell and gene therapy as well. Our Jess is used in new target discovery. Our Simple Plex instrument is used in viral titer measurement. We have a number of customers doing in-process testing with Simple Western and Jess as well. We're doing vector characterization. This is a really important application area I talked about for our Maurice and our Jess instrument. We had a number of customers, and one of the reasons we had such a lift in our Simple Plex sales during COVID is we had a number of researchers doing cytokine storm studies using our Simple Plex instrument. We can look at purity with our MFI instrument, but also Simple Plex and Jess, and then we can do Simple Plex cell activation and monitoring as well. Used around the entire workflow. As I said, we're getting a big lift from this every quarter, selling more instruments into the cell and gene therapy space, and probably in the gene therapy space with the empty versus full capsid application. That's been one of the biggest growers for us. In closing, as I said at the top, we're better positioned, I think, than ever. We're doing some really important things here, where we're not only enabling the discovery of these biomarkers that are the root cause of disease, but now with the advent of our cell and gene therapy business, we are actually moving closer to the patient and actually getting closer to playing a big role in saving lives. As the song goes, our future's so bright we got to wear shades. I think we're really excited about it. I think it's break time now. Is everybody ready to get back at it? All right. We'll get Kim up here now and move into the next segment. Thank you. Thank you, Chuck, for the opportunity to present again. It's my second time. Glad we're having an investor call this time, or investor meeting, because we made a lot of progress. A lot of things changed in my segment. My name is Kim Kelderman. I manage the Diagnostics and Genomics Segment. My presentation today is going to be a short overview of the segment, followed by mini deep dives in every product line. Then eventually, I'll put all the pieces together and explain to you why I am so excited about this segment. Go to the first overview. As you can see, we have four product divisions in this segment. Last year, they did together a $228 million in revenue. The products currently on market are addressing an overall market of $6 billion-$9 billion. This market grows pretty rapidly, so mid-double digits. The first product group is the spatial biology, and you may well know the ACD product brand, with products that can interrogate DNA, RNA, as well as proteins. The real power of this technology is that it maintains the spatial context, so you can exactly see what is going on, where in your tissue sample. The next division over is the liquid biopsy division. In there, we have the engine of exosomes. I will explain to you later why we believe that exosomes are the best way to do liquid biopsy. Third product group, newest to the family, is an acquisition closed earlier this year in April of Asuragen. Asuragen has a nice collection of molecular products. Molecular products to do genetic screening, oncology, and they also have a portfolio of molecular controls, which is very interesting. I'll get back to that later. The fourth and last division here in my segment are the diagnostic reagents. Diagnostic reagents have, for example, bulk antibodies, calibrators, and controls. Very exciting, newer in this division is the capability of delivering assays. We design assays for customers. Good. We then go into the first division, product division, it's the Spatial Biology Division. As you might know, this space is growing quite rapidly. There are all kinds of market numbers over the place, very different in size, but one thing they all have the same, which is that they're all indicating a huge growth for this market. This market is literally exploding. I'll give you some indications here. You can see in this bar diagram that overall spend in life sciences is a little north of $100 billion. Life sciences tool of that part is $30 billion. If you think about the spend in tissue specific diagnostics, you're talking about $20 billion or so. If you then think about where this spatial context is really making sense and adds value, that's $4 billion-$5 billion of addressable market for us. That's the research part only. If you think about the diagnostics part, which we have been entering just as well, that's another $4 billion-$5 billion. The diagnostics parts we address with our HPV as well as COVID-19 probes that are FDA approved. We're inching to that space rapidly and I'll talk to you later about the portfolio in there. The next slide is why this space is booming. I'll explain to you how it is so interesting. First off, it is a very complex area. Tissue profiling is just very difficult. There are many different tissue cell types, and even within the same cell types, there are still cells that are doing different things from each other. They're obviously organized in a 3D way, so it is very complex spatially. However, our ACD products have the capability of finding any genetic target that you're looking for and shine it up brightly. That way you can see actually what gene is where. That way you can study what's going on in and around the cells, and you can clearly understand what the disease pathology is. In the three pictures on the top right, you can see again that there's all kinds of different cell types, different vascularization, and then the four bubbles represent all the different types of probes we sell. We have over 47,000 probes that you can order through the Internet. We also do custom probes. Very happy turnaround. We can get you any probe that you're really looking for. When you run our assay, the final outcome is basically a spatial map, very much a picture as if you use a telescope Hubble, right? You look into space, you get exactly what you're looking for, basically because you know what is where, and you can identify a lot more information that way. That is exactly why this space is growing, because there's a lot more information than just yes/no, is there a gene, right? I'll explain how our technology is able to do that. The lower left, you basically see at the bottom there. You see that little line which is the green and blue? That's a target. Imagine you're looking for a specific gene, right? The blue part would be your target sequence. That's the one you're looking for. We design the probes. Those are those little Zs you see in the bottom. Those Zs, we actually develop in pairs. The first Z has the exact fitting sequence as the target you're looking for. Just like a Lego block, that thing clicks in place, but only if it's this fitting sequence, right? The second Z next to it in a slightly different color, does the exact same thing. The sequence next to it needs to be very specific, and that Z also needs to click in like a Lego block. Only if there are two Zs next to each other, there will be an L-shaped tree that we build on top of it. It is very specific because that is just the 2 Zs have to be there. Both of them have to be there, otherwise nothing happens. Right? Once that L-shaped tree is there, our chemistry puts branches on it and then puts a whole bunch of bright dots on it, bright lights. Basically like a Christmas tree. The target is much longer, so you can build a whole bunch of those trees next to each other, and basically you build a forest of Christmas trees. That shines so bright that if you put that on a microscope, you can see that dot with the naked eye. That is very powerful. Obviously, we took a lot of time to try, and not try. We patented all around it, so it's very well protected. We did that because, again, this is the only chemistry that can detect a single molecule in or around a single cell for any target, DNA, RNA, or proteins. One, two, four markers, up to 48, you can interrogate any length of target in any tissue. That means two things. It could be any species, like mouse or human, but it also means any tissue preparation, like FFPE or fresh frozen tissue. You can do any of that. There are different Christmas light types, chromogenic and fluorescent detection. Most important, as you can see in the bottom, it does all this while preserving the spatial context. What happens, but also where. Very exciting. I'm going to show you right now which targets we can interrogate. During last year, we have enabled this technology for DNA because that's where it all starts, like David mentioned. RNA was always our stronghold. Think about microRNA, which is a really booming space over the last couple of years. It's a much shorter target. We had to adjust our chemistry to also shine brightly even though the target is shorter. You can't build as big as a forest. Therefore, we had to make the chemistry with more branches, longer branches, so we can put more Christmas lights in and still get the same bright signal. Right? Eventually, this year, we moved this technology to also work on protein. Now, what research area are we playing in order of importance? Very much the same like Dave presented earlier. We really play in immuno-oncology, neurosciences, cell and gene therapy, and QC, as well as in cell and gene therapy, the workflow. In oncology, and not a surprise, over the last 18 months, we also see a lot of activity in the viral research. How do we know this? Our publications. We are really proud of the trend in our publications. We have third parties, independent publications, in reputable magazines, and of course, we follow those. We've passed 4,600 publications in the last year, and that for us is yet another indication. Of course, the revenue is growing really, really fast, but this is yet another indication for us that this technology is getting global adoption very rapidly in all these research areas. Very encouraging. Many people ask, "When do you use this technology? Where do you play?" Well, let me talk you through the diagnostic assay, the evolution of a diagnostic assay. There's the discovery phase, where researchers are really trying to cast their net really wide because they don't know what they're looking for. They would like to interrogate 10,000 or 100,000 targets and figure out which one is part of the disease pathway that they're investigating. For that, you would need high, high plexing. The spatial context is not so important, the specificity is not so important, you need lots of data. You don't know your target, right? That is not where we play. Customers use our products there, and we are fine with it, our real strong suit is the next phase, translational research. That's where you know somewhat what you're looking for. You have one or five targets, maybe 20, that you would really like to precisely interrogate. For that, you need mid to low plex, you need multi-omic detection, you need some automation. Now you can really precisely study what's going on, high specificity, but also with the spatial context. That's exactly what this technology can do better than any other technology. Now, on the back end side, you see that eventually this then becomes a clinical diagnostic assay where you run an IVD assay. That's actually when you really know what target you look for. It has to be repeatable, it has to be precise. The spatial context is really favorable. That's where we can play just as well. That would be the other $3 billion-$5 billion market that I just mentioned. This is our strong play on the right-hand side. On the left-hand side is more the discovery where companies like 10x are playing, just for the context of where do we play specifically. If we know that we play there, we know that we can be really, really good there because we occupy that space really well. On this graph, you see on the vertical axis the amount of data that comes out of your experiment. On the horizontal axis, you can see all the different targets and/or different samples that we now can cover. Look at the bottom left. We were always really good in RNA. That was our stronghold. I just mentioned that we adjusted the chemistry to also be able to interrogate smaller targets with a smaller forest, still lots of lights. We made it into DNA, proteins. We'd also realized that people want to do more than one, two, or four experiments at the same time, so we put the plexing part in there, all the way up to 48 plexing. Of course, the more complex the workflow, the more automation we'd really want. We have many relationships with box companies, two very long relationships that are very healthy with Leica and Ventana. Now we're bumping in the frontier today, meaning what we're going to work on is to enhance the informatic tools for customers to better process the information that we're getting out, because that's more and more these days, right? We would also like optimize workflows for our customers, right? Some people run ISH and IHC, separate workflows. We are focusing on trying to make it easier and being able to run those things in parallel and create co-detection. That's our future. We have a fantastic coverage of this space, as you now can see, a strong history, and we have a great future ahead with this business unit. I jump to the next one, liquid biopsy, exosome-based. In there, we have the prostate cancer test, kidney rejection test, and companion diagnostics. The first thing people always ask is, "Look, why are you so enthusiastic about liquid biopsy?" That's because the exosomes that we look at are a lot better modality than most of the other modalities in liquid biopsy. Think about it. You usually interrogate either circulating tumor cells, cell-free DNA, or you utilize exosomes. We know that, specifically in cancer, early detection is really, really important. In the early stages of a disease, the exosomes are available abundantly. There's plenty of them. For the others, that's not really the case. You want to detect early, and then you also want to be able to reduce the background noise, and that you do by selecting and fishing out the right exosomes. Exosomes have the same fingerprint on the outside, same markers as the originating cell. We have technologies to fish them out, and there, we'll be able to select the information and reduce the background, which is, of course, not always easy with the other modalities, specifically cfDNA. The question could be, well, is the information any good in an exosome? The answer is yes. Exosomes are actually designed to bring information from one cell to the other. They're like satellites. They shoot out the cell. They have all the information in there, DNA, RNA, and proteins, eventually are designed to protect this information until they reach the other cell. Therefore, we know that the information in there is really well protected and is of high quality. That's very unique, and that's why we're so excited about the exosome business. The typical workflow based on exosomes, as you see on the left-hand side there, living cells actively shed exosomes. You see those little purple bubbles. If you zoom into those, you see them intracellular floating around. They carry the entire genomic information, and they have the biomarkers outside, like the hosting cell. They float around basically in any bodily fluid, so urine, blood, as well as saliva. Many of those bodily fluids are much easier to obtain than blood. For us, that's a real game change. We sell the kits that help you isolate the exosomes you're specifically looking for. Once you have those, you can interrogate those using NGS machines or qPCR machines. With that, really understand cellular processes, but also disease pathways. It's a very, very enabling technology for research. If you look at the product that we currently have on market and the product that we're developing, as you all might know, we have the prostate cancer test on market. We also used to call it EPI. We launched this year a EPI version, which is kitted, the EPI CE, and it's specifically for Europe because Europe has more a decentralized model and does not have the CLIA option. We designed that product specifically for Europe, addressing the European market. Very exciting in our pipeline is the ExoTRU Kidney Transplant Rejection Test. I'll double click on that one next slide, I will skip over this one. In the pipeline, we have lots of very exciting projects. Johan Skog, the leader for R&D and the innovation center in the Exosome Diagnostics business, is sitting here in the audience. We are proud to have him because there is amazing work being done, specifically around the early detection of cancer based upon exosomes. In addition, the team is working on a second generation of prostate cancer tests, this is a rule-in test rather than a rule-out test, which will broaden and enlarge our markets vastly. The R&D team is in parallel working on many very exciting CDx projects. CDx, a companion diagnostics project. Basically, we design a diagnostic for a pharma company so that the right patient gets the right drug. Very exciting pipeline. Of course, a double click on this kidney transplant rejection test. A couple of facts. First off, 22,000 patients get a new kidney every year in the U.S. alone. There are over 200,000 people living with a new kidney. That indicates to you how scarce kidneys are and how important they are. However, 40% of the patients that have a new kidney show signs of rejection in the very first year. That means there's a lot of opportunity to be able to detect that early, the rejection. Once you know that there is rejection, how to dose which medication to make sure that you have optimized the chances for the kidney to stay with the patient. Exosomes are ideal for this. You see that little pink kidney there and the blowout to the left. Not only are there exosomes coming out of the kidney cell, tubular cells. Exosomes are coming out of the immune system, the T-cell that is possibly attacking this kidney. Now we have exosomes coming from both these parts with all the information about activity, the happiness of the kidney cells, as well as the status of the T-cells. These exosomes inevitably end up in your urine, and we all know that a urine sample is relatively easy to obtain. In fact, we have a kit that we can send to your house, and you can take your sample from your house and send it back to us. If you look at the workflow in the monitor, we take that kidney sample, we take those specific exosomes out, we run it on qPCR, and then we send the result to the physician, which can make then the right decisions on what to do with this patient. Very non-invasive compared to a tissue biopsy of a new kidney. We have a publication that came out, we're really proud of, and if you look at the performance of the test, it's off the charts. There is the sensitivity, specificity, and the predictive values are very, very good. We are working hard on this test. I can't wait to give you more information, sooner rather than later on the progress that we're making with this test, and we're very excited about it, not only from an economical point of view, but also from a human quality of life point of view. We jump into the third newest to the family division, which is our Asuragen division. I already mentioned the different product groups. In total, those products on market address about a $1 billion market. 14 products in that portfolio, of which two are IVD approved in a fast-growing market, somewhere mid double digits. What is the offering that we have in our Asuragen? It's basically proprietary kits. Easy-to-use kits that have everything in there that you need to run the chemistry. This chemistry is really, really good at reading through hard-to-read sequences. Where other technologies stumble, that's the focus of our kits in general. In addition, on the right bottom side, you can download for free software for interpretation. In the top right is the automation. Automation we partner for, so we are automation non-specific. We pick the best box for our test, meaning we look at install base, we look at what technology works best for us, and we're looking at price performance, and then usually have a partnership with the box owners so that we eventually can provide a complete solution to our customers with all these three ingredients in there. Of course, we have patented this technology well and are enjoying all these products currently on market. Genetic screening is basically to get a risk assessment of inherited diseases. We can address inherited diseases like Fragile X, spinal muscular atrophy, cystic fibrosis, Lou Gehrig's disease, Huntington's disease, amongst others. In the middle, you see our oncology products, which address the leukemia, solid tumors, and non-small cell lung cancers. On the right-hand side, very interestingly, we have a group of molecular controls. I'll get back to that, because that fits really nicely with the diagnostic reagents division. Those molecular controls are mainly around infectious diseases, have played a real important role over the last 18 months. As you can see, the top two are all related to SARS-CoV-2. If we look at our portfolio in the product pipeline, there are a couple aspects. The third one is a hard-to-do carrier screening panel. Currently, the high-complexity lab runs around eight different workflows for these specific diseases. We are creating a panel so that a high-complexity laboratory can run that in one workflow, one NGS workflow. There's obviously a huge efficiency by having that panel run one time. The second product further out in the pipeline is the expanded carrier screening panel, and that has a different dimension. The carrier screening panel is basically to cover all the genes, all the diseases that organizations like ACOG would give you guidance for. We want to cover all of them. More importantly is that we make this test so easy to run so that it's not a specialty lab that can only run it. You can decentralize it. Any molecular lab can then run these hard-to-do tests, which is a real market enabler for us. Last but not least, we know that we have amazing stuff in the pipeline at Exosome Dx, and this unit has the capability to productize, to make kits, but also get the regulatory and the clinical stuff in shape. Therewith get global IVD products ready for global distribution. A very exciting funnel on that part too. The diagnostic reagents. First off, we're really proud that we are serving and working with most all the large IVD companies, IVD providers in the world. You see some of their logos on the left. We have long-standing relationships, a real strong channel, and that you do not do overnight. That takes decades, and we're really proud of that part. The market, I show you the macro there. On the left-hand side is $1 billion of addressable market. The first column you see, I cut it up in sample types. Basically, we play in any of those sample types, blood and urine, and others. The real strategic focus there is market share. That's market share as such, but also share of wallet of our strategic partners. The second cut you can see is divvied up in different types of testing. If I may want to focus you on the fourth from the top, which is the molecular diagnostics. Up until half a year ago, we had no offering there whatsoever for our partners. Now with that product group that we've acquired through Asuragen, we now have an offering there, and we are really excited to be able to work with our partners to further utilize those products and build them into their assay. On the right-hand side of that middle thick black bar, you can see the assays and reagent market. This is another $1 billion market. Three years ago, I told you that that was an adjacent space and that we were going to try to enter that. We've done so really successfully. It's unbelievable. It's actually a real reinvigorating part of this business. The nicest thing about it's not very complex in how we did it. I'll walk you through. First off, we have those relationships with those large IVD companies, right? We have, for a long time, made standards and controls, high-quality standards and controls, for these IVD companies. To do so, you really need to understand the assay that they're running. Very often, our teams would find points of improvement to get the assay more stable or to get the statistics on the assay, the performance of the assay up. We would tell them how we would do it, and therewith, the customer would have a better assay, and we would have standards and controls. However, very often those customers are now going like, "Well, since you know this so well, wouldn't you be able to design our assays?" Of course, was the answer yes. I didn't want to become a design house. Just design an assay and hand it over is not our model. However, now we're designing those assays, and we put in, of course, our standards and controls. We pull in antibodies from Dave's business, and we put all kinds of reagents from across the organization to those assays. We hand over the design to this partner, and once they start running it, we have a beautiful pull-through of all our components that we sell. This has been really a nice aspect of this business, and it's made it a lot less lumpy. It's also enabled us to have eight consecutive quarters of growth in spite of the pandemic. During the pandemic, some of the routine testing was down by 20%, but we kept it in the black, and it's really nice, highly likely because some of the pull-through, some of the components we have been able to sell because of our relationships. Now, we're coming to the segment again. As you might have noticed, I talk a lot about the Exosome DX, liquid biopsy, and the molecular products and how they're actually joined by the hip. This week, we've made the decision to combine those two businesses. It's a really interesting move, and I think very promising move, and I'll show you why. You see this middle block here? Let's focus on the middle first. That's the molecular diagnostics division, a new division that McManus will manage. In that, we have the Exosome Center of Excellence, managed by Johan, where all the innovation and the exosome-driven innovation will happen. That team can then select if their assay and their product is going into a companion diagnostics business unit, meaning building a diagnostics for the pharma companies, or whether we put that in a CLIA lab like we did with the prostate cancer test. Your exosome-based innovation goes into the CLIA lab, and you can serve the U.S. market that way. If you want to make a molecular product out of it, fully kit it with the approvals, you can hand it over through your CLIA lab into the molecular products division, and there it will serve global IVD market. It's very exciting. We do have two CLIA labs in that business, one in Waltham and one in Austin. We have, and will continue to build out, a specific CDx channel as well as a channel for laboratories around the world. That's a new channel for Bio-Techne, so we're really excited that we now have a Dx channel into laboratories. Part of that came with Asuragen. The US channel was already very much built out. There were good starts of the European channel. With Bio-Techne, we are fully utilizing and building out further this channel into Europe. If we quickly step back to the spatial biology, that is pretty much the same. It has these ACD powerful spatial products in it. It has a services department in that, where we can do professional services for pharma as well as for academics. They send their tissue samples in, and we send the reports and charge for it and get them to fall in love with our technology. They have exclusive access to a pharma as well as to a research channel, academic channel globally. If you jump to the right, that's the diagnostic reagent. We know this one so well because it's the longest with us. It's the backbone. They have internal supply to my other division. They also pull through from all of Bio-Techne into those OEM channels, into the IVD companies around the world. I will give you three lenses why this is an excellent idea. First lens is basically the stepping stones from a component supplier to a molecular diagnostic kit supplier. We have been really, really good at supplying components for decades, right? We sell these to customers, and customers make something out of it, subassembly or a product, and we've been really good in partnering that way. However, over the last five to six years, Chuck has guided us to capture more value out of the markets, as you can see on the little diagram on the right-hand side. We started putting subassemblies together. We created products for the OEM channels, and we actually started selling results and use our own products with the lab developed test set up, like we have with the prostate cancer test. Over the last two, three years, we've been kicking around during our strategic session, how do we participate selectively in the molecular diagnostics field? I say selectively, because you don't want to barge in there and boil the ocean because you'll end up unconscious, if you look at your bottom line. We do want to go in there selectively and then play wherever we feel that we have a competitive advantage in technology or where we have a better channel where we can win. That is our vision. Now with the Asuragen addition, we can certainly play in there. We do have now these products on market and these capabilities to get the products there. Very exciting. The second lens is really around the companion diagnostics. On top, you see the drug development life cycle. Early on, the pharma company doesn't exactly know what it's looking for. It needs to go find out which markers are really doing what. The exosome-based technology has been extremely useful there. We have great relationships with these pharma companies, many projects going on. Once they like a certain target, you might want to do your pre-clinicals, your early testing. Yes, we have the CLIA lab in Waltham and could help them support that. From there was nowhere to go, though. We would lose our customer. You see that bottom line, the bottom row really showing you that if you go into clinical 1 and 2 and phase III, we now have multi CLIA labs and we have the capability to develop a product, get the regulatory approvals, utilize our global channels to distribute this product globally. We can really stay the whole journey with this pharma customer and cover all their needs during this CDx approach. The last lens I'm going to talk to you about is more people related, the patient journey. Genetic testing, the assessment of risk of inherited diseases. You typically do pre-pregnancy or during pregnancy. That is a market segment that we've never been able to play in, right? We didn't even have a channel in there. With the Asuragen acquisition, we now play in that market. Once you're in the world and you're a kid or an adult, you go to your annual checkups, their routine testing happens. We participate there with the diagnostic reagents through these IVD partners. We like that position because the physician market is really distributed, right? There's many touch points. We like that these IVD companies sell their routine testing, and we participate through making their assays and selling components to them and their standards and controls, et cetera. Once you get an abnormal result, usually your doctor will send you to a specialist, and the specialist will further investigate what's going on. To take a tissue sample, for example, now there we play with our ACD products, spatial biology. They could do some more oncology testing. We have the oncology test. For example, the kidney prostate cancer test. We got the kidney test coming on. Specialists will also do the oncology testing that Asuragen brings along. Also there, you need standards and controls, and you need other reagents, so we play there squarely. The last vertical is the patient monitoring, and that's really very much the same as the previous column. It's all about, is the medication working? Eventually, hopefully, is the patient healthy again? There, they do very similar testing, and we also fill that space really nicely with our three divisions. Now, if you think about it, we cover the patient journey. The previous slide I showed you, we covered a whole journey for drug development. Then the slide before that, I showed you that we're now on all the stages, on the stepping stones from component supplier to being a full DX supplier of kitted products. That is exactly why I'm so super excited about this segment going forward. Thank you very much. Jim. Wow, a lot of energy there. It'd be hard for me to match that. Hopefully, both Kim and Dave was able to demystify our business somewhat for you today. They always do for me every time I hear them talk. It's fantastic. Needless to say, I know you'll understand what I have to talk about today, it's numbers. Let's first start with where we're at and how we finished fiscal year 2021 with what our business mix looks like today. From a segment perspective, we're still very much a proteomics-focused company with 3/4 of our revenue coming from the Protein Sciences segment and roughly 1/4 of our revenue coming from Diagnostics and Genomics. When you look at our product profiles, we still are very much a consumables-driven business, with over 80% of our products considered consumables, and nearly another 10% comes from other recurring streams such as services and royalties. All combined, we're about 90% of a recurring, everyday run rate type business. Roughly 10% of our business comes from instruments, but I'd argue more importantly, roughly 10% of our combined non-recurring revenue is driven directly from those instruments. When we look at our geographies, we're over 50% in the U.S., in Americas. Roughly a quarter of our revenue is in Europe, and the remaining roughly 20% comes from Asia, with more than half of that coming from China. If you saw this chart eight years ago, Asia, China would be barely slivers on this chart. Finally, from an end market perspective, we still are today primarily a research use only market, where our customers in that market are roughly 2/3 biopharma and roughly 1/3 academic. The distributor pie you see there roughly matches our business in Asia, which tends to go through third parties in terms of transactions. In the OEM, you see at 18%, the majority of that is coming from the diagnostics reagents business that you just heard Kim talk about, where we sell to practically every IVD instrument maker in the world. There are also some unique antibodies and proteins that we make specifically for other companies that resell under their brand, and we consider that OEM. I thought, given that this is the anniversary of our very first Investor Day five years ago, it would be interesting to go back and look to see exactly how have we performed compared to our aspirations at that point in time. Starting with revenue, back in fiscal year 2016, we were just under a $0.5 billion of revenue, which was a significant step up from where we were just a few years before, roughly over $300 million of revenue. As you recall, much of that revenue increase and that 17% CAGR came from the acquisitions that we did early on to create the new transformation of our company in terms of breadth and market penetration. Between fiscal year 2016 and fiscal year 2021, that CAGR was 13%. A big difference between that CAGR in the last five years versus the CAGR in the first three years is that most of that growth, or at least more than half of that growth, came from organic revenue growth as opposed to acquisition-based revenue. I think the chart on the right shows that quite clearly, where five years ago, we were sitting at fiscal year 2016, where we had just grown 6%, which had gradually increased. You saw the chart from Chuck from basically flat when we first started our transformation in fiscal year 2013, even though the overall revenue CAGR was higher at 17%. Looking forward to fiscal year 2021, on an adjusted basis, we finished around 13% organic growth, and it's increased almost every year between those two periods with fiscal year 2020 being the one exception. Both from a total revenue perspective dollar-wise and from a percentage perspective otherwise, we are ahead of where we were aspiring to be five years ago. It's also true on the adjusted operating income line, where five years ago, at just under $200 million, the step up in income wasn't quite as significant as it was for revenue because, again, much of that revenue was through acquisitions and much of our acquisitions are early-stage companies that are barely breaking even at the time. We told you five years ago that we saw the promise in these acquisitions with their strong IP, their strong gross margins, and their huge growth prospects and ability to scale that they could very quickly expand their margins and grow income very quickly. You can see over the last five years, that has happened. In fact, it's grown about the same pace as revenue. Only reason why it's not faster is because we have done other acquisitions in the meantime in terms of faster than revenue. Adjusted EPS, of course, has pretty much tracked the adjusted operating income line. Again, on both counts, we've beaten our aspirations from five years ago. Actually, in fiscal year 2021, had we not had the Exosome acquisition in the last five years, that income number would actually be quite a bit higher than our aspiration at the time, because as you know, Exosome was a pre-revenue company. All right. What about deploying capital? We've deployed about $2.4 billion of capital over the last eight years. Our market cap, I think we've maximized some shareholder value there. Our market cap has increased by about $18 billion over that same time period. We've been very diligent and very disciplined in how we have deployed that capital, largely through M&A, and I think in a very balanced fashion in terms of strengthening our core businesses, entering into new expanded product portfolios that leverage our core businesses, and then expanding into adjacent and very large markets such as spatial genomics, clinical diagnostics, and now cell and gene therapy. We've returned roughly $0.5 billion of revenue back to our shareholders by maintaining our dividend, as well as being opportunistic about buying shares back. In this case, about $110 million over the past five years. Ironically, our internal investment in terms of capital is lowest from an internal perspective, only about less than 10% in CapEx. That's not because we don't care about investing organically in the business. I think it's more a reflection of the low capital intensity our business model has. It doesn't take a whole lot of capital to make a whole lot of money in our business. We have invested $200 million to support our growth, largely in facilities and equipment. Of course, the most noble one is the largest investment we've made, which is our GMP factory, which is going to support a lot of growth in the future. Let's dive a little deeper by segment. I thought it'd be interesting to look at how much of our revenue and operating income over the last five-year or the last eight years, actually, since the transformation began, has come from our acquisitions in the year we acquired them versus what had done through organic execution. You can see in the Protein Sciences segment, over the last eight years, the organic execution of revenue growth has nearly tripled what we actually acquired over that same time period in the first year. In adjusted operating income, practically all of the additional income has come from organic execution. As we mentioned earlier, most of our acquisitions are essentially break even, some even lose money at the time we buy them. From there, we grow them organically, both from the top and the bottom line. I think ProteinSimple is one of the best examples of this, where when we initially bought them, now I guess it's been seven years ago, they were a $50 million business, barely breaking even, and they've now crossed over 30% operating margin contribution line and still expanding. Moving on to Diagnostics and Genomics, the profile here looks a little bit different. First of all, the starting point was much lower, very small base because eight years ago, it was really just the hematology control of the legacy hematology controls business that made up this part of the business. There were some acquisitions done early on to bolster that business and give it more scale. That's where Bionostics and Cliniqa came on. It was really the only acquisitions where we materially bought revenue in year 1. The organic piece has been smaller, but that's largely because much of that organic growth is coming from our new growth platforms such as ACD and Exosome, which have been done more recently in the last eight years, as opposed to early on in the past eight years. Going forward, we expect that green bar of organic to be driven by those two businesses, and will look much more like the Protein Sciences for the next five years. Adjusted operating income, again, almost all and then some of the increased operating income has been organic because collectively our acquisitions actually were losing money, and that's largely because of Exosome being pre-revenue. I think it's important to note, not only have we bought quality assets, but we've executed on realizing the full potential of those quality assets as well. Another way to look at the history of how acquisitions have impacted our top and bottom line is to look at from a relative perspective on operating margin and ROIC. I just point out the big ones, the big acquisitions here that have occurred in the last five years, because we've been very transparent about talking about when we buy a larger acquisition. Because of the nature of those acquisitions in their early days, they are going to be dilutive to our margins initially. Because of the potential we see in scaling those businesses and their high gross margins and unique technologies, we have a sea of potential for them to scale their margins very quickly. When we do a bunch of acquisitions back to back, it's harder for you to see externally. You can see the trend here from 2016 and 2019 was that way, where we initially bought ACD and we had a step down in margin and a step down in ROIC. After that annualized, it started to flatten out and even started to rebound. We purchased Exosome, had another step down in margin, another step down in ROIC. After that started to annualize, just as it was starting to annualize, margin was starting to flatten out, ROIC was starting to go up, and then COVID hit. That was just the trough for everything, right? In the last year and a half, we really haven't done any acquisitions, and we've come out stronger out of COVID than we even entered it. As we had predicted, the margin has escalated and the ROIC has escalated quite dramatically as a result. I also will point out a surge in acquisition, which we just did in Q4. For those who listened to me carefully in the last call, I've messaged that we expect a step down in margin again this year because of that new acquisition. Again, the margin profile of that business long-term is very strong. All right, that's the history lesson. What's in it for the future? Five years ago, we were standing up here telling you that we can nearly double the business in five years, and that was our target to do so. We had a decent level of confidence in that because of the stable of unicorns we had at the time and our confidence in our teams to execute on those unicorns. We stand here now in front of you today with yet another new five-year target, not a forecast, but it's a target. It's a target we have a high level of confidence in achieving, which is to more than double our revenue yet again in five more years to something north of $2 billion. Three main reasons why I think it gives us confidence is that, first of all, the overall market conditions of life science research in a post-COVID world, I think we all would agree are more favorable now to our space than they were five years ago. We're in a healthier market overall for life science tools. Our stable of unicorns are nearly double now what they were five years ago, now with cell and gene therapy, and exosome is part of that stable. Then, of course, our prioritization process that Chuck talked us through in the beginning of our presentations today. That prioritization was the key process that enabled us to see the path to make the most out of both our core and our acquisitions combined together. It's the same tools we use today. It's the same tools we've used in prior businesses to turn around companies and turn around businesses. It's really the output of that process that ultimately gives us the confidence that this can be achievable. Specifically, how do we get there? I've put it into five big buckets here of growth, with the key product categories down at the bottom, and then the various top products themselves or product lines that make up those product categories and the brand that represents those particular products. Starting with what we call our core. You hear us reference our core all the time. What do we mean by core? I think it's been explained, but I'll repeat it. It's our proteins, our RUO proteins, our antibodies, our ELISA kits, small molecules, and our legacy diagnostic controls. We have an expectation that business should be able to maintain at least a 7% CAGR going forward. Now, pieces of that we think will be higher, probably the protein and the antibody. Some pieces of it might be slightly lower, maybe diagnostic controls, for example. All in, we see it as being a 7% CAGR, and still the biggest piece of our business. Within the instruments, which is the next column over, our instruments, called out specifically under the ProteinSimple brand. Of course, this is led by our horses, Simple Western, Biologics, and Simple Plex. We believe we can get a 17% CAGR over the next five years, which is in the ballpark of where we've been the last four or five years. As Dave explained, some of those product lines have crossed the chasm, some are about to cross the chasm. We don't see any reason why we can't continue that momentum for the next five years with so much more market to go after. It's now a much bigger business than it was five years ago, so the actual dollar contribution will be considerably larger to our base. Of course, you just heard Kim talk about the ACD business, RNAscope, DNAscope, all the different scopes that come out of that. Spatial biology is hot, and it's a big market, and it's going to stay that way, we think, for years and years to come. With all the opportunity that you just heard Kim talk about there's no reason why we should not expect and hold ourselves accountable to a mid-20% type growth level for this piece of the business for the next five years, at least. If we were to stop there, rough math would suggest that we should be able to hold at least the organic growth that we experienced, the adjusted organic growth we experienced in this past year, if not slightly higher, just because these are bigger businesses now. What will accelerate our growth rate, we believe from here, are two new exciting spaces that are still right today, nascent and small. You've heard nascent used a couple of times, but have just huge opportunities, and we're very well-positioned, as you heard today, in. That's in the liquid biopsy space around the exosome portfolio, as well as, of course, the cell and gene therapy, that this particular chart highlights really just the reagent side of things. As you heard Dave talk about, it also is going to be a driver of continued growth in our instrument platform as well. Those two horses or unicorns, small today, therefore they're going to have the highest growth rates in terms of the potential in the future, and they'll be also very large contributors from a dollar perspective, given the opportunity set that's out there. I think the chart also signifies when we can expect that to happen. Those two bars of the chart are further to the right because it will probably take a little longer for those to materialize, as Dave explained with his bullseye charts, in terms of where our customers are in the life cycle of bringing those to market today versus where they will be in three to five years from now. With doubling our revenue, as we've historically shown, we take a lot of pride not only in our growth, but also in our ability to produce profitable growth, and that will continue. Also a strong cash conversion of that growth and of that income. Our cash flow historically has always mirrored very closely to our net income, and we manage that very tightly and expect to going forward. With that kind of increase in our revenue base, we absolutely should expect to double our free cash flow, which would be well more than enough to very quickly pay down what debt we have today. More importantly, over the next five years, cumulatively, those cash flows, combined with an ending leverage point of, say, three and a half leverage, which would be considered something we'd be willing to do and pretty risk-free given our business model, would give us well over $4 billion cumulatively of potential dry powder for more acquisitions and finding more of those unicorns to put in our stable. Yeah, it's been quiet the last year and a half, and yes, it's an expensive environment right now to be doing M&A in. We're patient, we're diligent, and we're very active. Our reagents and our products touch almost every new technology that's out there, and that's what's so exciting about our space is that there's always a new unicorn out there. We'll be ready to pounce on it when it arises to keep this virtuos circle going for what we hope to be decades. In end, we were well-positioned five years ago, and that was the story we told you then in terms of getting to a double-digit organic growth. We think we're even better positioned today to produce even higher organic growth. I forgot to mention on that last slide. With cell and gene therapy and exosomes really lighten up in the back half of this timeframe, we think we'll be ending fiscal year 2026 with organic growth in the high teens. It'll be a bit of a J curve in terms of organic growth, which we show here is 16.5% CAGR. We're not necessarily expecting 16.5% in a straight line. You will start out in the 13, 14 range and progress to the high teens, is how we think this will play out. Of course, as I mentioned before, with our legacy of investing smartly in the right projects with the right ROICs, we will see our adjusted operating income increase by as much, if not more. Absolutely getting to that 40% margin level. How much above 40%? Probably the question you're asking. I'm not going to give it to you. I think as time goes on and we get above that 40%, there's a lot of things internally we could potentially do from an internal investment to accelerate that growth rate even further, that don't hit CapEx, but hit OpEx, right? Still maintaining a firm hand on our margin. If you ask, "Well, then why don't you do that now?" It's because the opportunities haven't fully vetted themselves as of yet. If we hit that 40% when we think those opportunities do, it'll be a great time to pull that trigger. Again, not foreshadowing, if those things don't happen, we'll be well north of 40% operating margin, no question. Of course, talked about the great cash flow conversion we have and the powder that will give us to continually update and add to our stable of unicorns. I hope you heard today we have fantastic leadership, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. It's really the leadership and the people and our scientists out in the field that really make this all happen, and I think we have some of the best in the world. We have some unique internal processes that we don't give all this nice lingo to try to jazz it up. It's really straightforward, but it works. How boring is a process called prioritization, right? I mean, that's a pretty boring name, but it works. Of course, at our core of our company, has been and always will be science. We have some of the best scientists and science-thinking people in the space that I've ever been associated with. With that combination, I think we're going to do very well and achieve our targets. That's all I have. With that, I think we're going to do some Q&A. Yeah, I'd further point out that that $2 billion is without any M&A, right? To Jim's point that we're likely going to do something in the next five years, and let's say we're at two and a half billion from M&A, we probably won't be at 40%, maybe it's 37%-38%, but we'll be trading off accelerated growth with minor movements in the dilutive nature of op margin. I think you'd take that trade-off. It's worked pretty well so far. I want to get our presenters up here so we're not turning around and looking goofy and get them on the spot here to answer better than I can a lot of things. Dave, you want to say something? Yeah. Hi, everybody. My name's David Clair. I lead investor relations here at Bio-Techne. Raise your hand if you have a question, pass the mic around. Thanks, Dave. First of all, to Chuck and the team it's great to see you in person. Thanks for organizing this. This is great, and investors as well. First of all, Bio-Techne is really central to the protein world. That's pretty clear. What I would love to understand, given your current position, you laid out a number of growth drivers and areas where protein, you're in antibodies and other areas where you're continuing to grow. When you look at from your vantage point today, given your depth in proteins and the emerging world of proteomics, the second generation of proteomics that we're going into, what are some areas where you think, in terms of technology and capabilities, where potential additions can happen and potentially where you can extend these unicorn-type acquisitions or both on M&As and areas. There's the high-plex proteomics, there's the mass spec side of things. There is the extended antibodies and microarray side of things. Maybe just talk to us about that. What are some opportunities do you see there? I'll kick it off and move to Dave in a second. During our strategic planning five, six years ago, we had this discussion about is proteomics going to be enough? Back then, NGS was all the rage, and should we be getting in more into that? Should we be looking that direction? We came to the conclusion that no, proteomics is probably where we're best suited, and there's a long way to go yet. Now here we are, we thought that proteomics would come back on strong and hard, and it really is. I see much more innovation now around proteomics than I do anywhere else, as you just mentioned. Dave might want to comment on some of the things on the drawing board and where we're going in directions and things he's seeing. Yeah. I mean, we're seeing some changes in the approach to think molecule connection and reflect. We'll get there with some of our own technologies that we already have. We're also looking both organically and through acquisition at potential candidates to participate more in that space. I can't talk specifically about the targets, but obviously there's a big push out there to use different technologies, all of those as an example, to measure proteins at a single molecule level and to do high-plex. There's some obvious companies out there like Olink, but there's also a lot of other companies that are emerging. That's an area we're curious about and looking at with great interest. I will tell you, though, that we have first-hand experience, not only with our own business, but seeing a lot of others try to bring these products to market. It takes a hell of a lot longer than they think, it's a lot harder than they think to supplant these existing technologies. We're looking at that with cautious optimism, but we're still banking on the horses we've got. The good thing about having all this content that we have, both the antibodies and the protein standards, is that everybody has to come to us. We get a look under the hood at almost everything that's coming along very early in the game. We've mentioned in past discussions that we do have internal programs in plasmids and mRNA. Any of you might want to mention, that it's a big area that we actually have some confidence in. We tried to get into that space with the big move, the big acquisition, and it didn't pan out. We got outbid. I think we have a more realistic view of the potential size of that market and also how long it's going to take to develop. We are pursuing an organic approach there, and I think that'll pay some fruits. It'll take a few years. I think the AAV is one area that we can participate in for sure. I think we can also participate in a pretty strong way in the mRNA front because of our protein expertise and our ability to produce critical enzymes that are required for that technology to work effectively and to be able to get around the intellectual property barriers that exist there. Okay. Super helpful. This one is for Jim, and just getting used to the in-person environment. When you saw that, we'd be looking. In terms of the op margins, I know you're not going to give us a higher number, but maybe just help us understand what are the things that you're watching on the downside to reach that 40% op margin. What are the set of things that where you see there could be potential risk just beyond COVID, just beyond sort of what's happening in the market, anything else that we need to be cognizant of in order to reach that 40%? I'll be honest with you, I don't see a lot of risk to that because at the end of the day, the biggest risk would be we don't grow. If we don't grow, then it'd obviously be tougher to expand margins. As long as we grow, and I think we have excellent plans to grow the business. It's such an awesome gross margin business that the margin scales very nicely with growth almost in all of our platforms. I can't really even think of a scenario where it would go backwards other than additional M&A, which will likely happen. That's another reason to not flaunt a 40%+ number out there, because just as there were acquisitions in the last five years, which has made getting back to 40% that much challenging and more challenging in that timeframe, that same thing's going to happen in the next five years, right? That's really the only factor I see that could derail margin, in my opinion. That and for some reason, if something drastically reduced our growth, but there'd be bigger problems than that if that happens in terms of margin percentage. That's super helpful. The last one from my end. Just in terms of Exosome Diagnostics and the overall Diagnostics franchise, Jim, when we think about diagnostics, we think about trials and sometimes practice-changing trials and larger trials that need to be built up in order to get those products to a more mature level, get them recognized in the market. When you think about that, the investment there, how are you thinking about it in terms of, is that something that your partners are going to do? Is that something that you're going to be taking on in order to deliver that type of a CAGR? Broadly thinking, the message that I was hearing is it fair to say that you are becoming sort of, in a simplistic way, if I could, an intel inside to a number of these assays to characterize that? Yeah, Puneet, thanks for the question. You're right. Your assessment is right on. We are obviously having this innovation center, with the exosomes. From there, you can, without too high of a cost, get into the CLIA environment. Without doing these huge trials. We believe that the moment you have more data there and more confidence, you can always make the decision, do I partner up and/or do I go it alone, right? There needs to be a real good reason to go it alone because some of those clinicals are obviously very expensive. Not that we couldn't afford them, but we would certainly want to be careful with such expenses. On top of that, usually there are backend expenses in setting up another channel or other relationships. It is an equation that we continue to look at, and we will always be smart about, do we partner or do we go it alone? We're currently going through these equations with the ExoDx tests just as well, and I think we've got a real nice, clean path forward, which is indeed using the strength and the investment levels from the different models, and we pick the best one. Your second part of the question was are we more an intel inside? I would say, yes, we're more in the forefront and have these molecular products that we can globally distribute. Yes, we are in more assays that we design ourselves into in our own portfolio, but also in the IVD partners portfolio. You can see it's more than just standards and controls. We are now pushing in more of the reagents, more of the antibodies, more of the picks and shovels and the components that Bio-Techne always has been so good at. Thanks for the question. I think it's good to point out too that there has been a growing theme in our company of going beyond just a catalog order kind of business. The big biopharm is coming to us more often. We've announced quite a few license deals in the last few years. We talked about it yesterday at the conference for those of you online, but I asked the question, how many are we at right now? What does it add up with the royalty structure if these things pay off here with our antibodies that we've been licensing? It's between $1,500 million a year annually. Nothing's baked in. These are three, five, 10 years out, but we're going on nearly a dozen deals licensed right now. We're doing more all the time. They're coming to us. We have, as Dave said, a very healthy, growing, somewhat throttled custom design business because we don't really want to be in that, but it's a big enabler for a lot of everything else we're doing, and it creates more credibility, and it creates more pull-through. When we do something really hard for a big biopharma customer, they're really grateful, and they realize how good we are, and they come back, and they pull through a lot more product. They buy more of our regular stuff. It's a growing trend with us as well that we have more and more content. It used to be just the Luminex side of things a few years ago. Now it's going everywhere. All right. Great. This is Catherine Schulte with Baird. Thanks for putting on the day. I guess first for the 7% guide for core products, I think that product group has grown a little faster than that over the last couple of years, even if you lump diagnostic controls in there. Just given that momentum and expected increases in NIH funding, I guess, is there potential upside to that 7% number? Yes. I got to give us a little bit of breathing room, Catherine. Yeah. I think that's the right answer, that this is a model of the $2 billion. Where are you going to hedge a little bit? We've been doing much better than that. As you can see, there are plenty of upside in the model of two. That's why we feel more confident about the $2 billion now than we did the $1 billion 5 years ago. This is 1 area exactly right. Now to say that we're going to be for sure seven or higher in the controls may be a reach. We keep telling you we're close every year. We do keep missing it. The pipeline is getting better. It really is this time. We're still probably a year away from having more of the calm, the Sysmex of the world really coming back online strong with us. If that happens, we're going to be pretty far north of that seven. The other thing I'd point out is, five years is a long time, and five years ago, we had that same category of products in the 3%-5% range. Yeah. We have considerably moved it up in regards to the expectations going forward versus five years ago. Your point's well taken, and we certainly hope there's upside. All right, great. Maybe for the new GMP protein facility, what do you view as your differentiation versus other competitors in that space, and any update in terms of filling that capacity so far, and what stages of development are the customers in that you've signed so far or are talking to? I can't name names, obviously, but we've signed on a number of a handful of long-term agreements simply because there aren't that many customers yet at a stage where they're ready to sign up for a long term. We tend to structure those deals more on a percentage of purchases basis than absolute numbers. I tried to mention that, and I can't share the details of this either, but we have a little bit of a Moneyball type of formulation of who we think the best partners are going to be based on how much they'll buy from us if they're successful, whether their process, we think, is going to make it through the clinic, who they're competing against, what's the indication. There's a lot of factors that go into that. As I said, I think any one customer could be $10 million+ annually if they make it to market. It's been a shots on goal approach. Currently, we're only consuming about half the capacity, though it's a lot less than we have in our existing facility. We're quickly consuming all of that. We'll soon be moving to the new facility, but I have to tell you that it's not trivial for a customer to switch over, and it's been more difficult during COVID because they have to come, they have to inspect us. Then we didn't just move the products over made as they were. We took the opportunity to do a lot to make a number of changes that improve the yield, improve the reproducibility of the products, and make them more cost-effective and higher quality. We need our customers to go through that process as well to qualify against our previously produced lots in our existing facility. It's a pretty involved process, but we're very confident. We started out with the things that are going to be used in the T-cell workflow because that's, as you saw, the biggest. That's our IL-2, our IL-7, our IL-15. We started out with those. We scaled them up, made them better quality, better reproducibility. Now we're going to start, we think the end of this calendar year, be able to start to get those customers actually in the facility to do those inspections to qualify the lots against the ones we previously sold them. We made saleable product already in the last couple of months that has a long shelf life. We're starting to counter the depreciation, if you will, that we're getting from that building already. It's just going to take off from here. It's going to depend on how fast these customers move through the clinic and how willing they are to make the switch over. We're trying to encourage those ones that we think are going to be the biggest users to go first. A little on that switchover, I think you saw the funnel. You saw what could be coming. Could be a tidal wave. Three, four years from now, there could be dozens trying to come online. Their biggest fear, and they all have the same charts, they're worried about will there be enough reagents to go around? Right. I think us getting a shot, really everybody getting a shot to at least be a backup and be tried out is going to be very high, I think. Given our brand, and we're the world leader in proteins for research, we just think it's ours to lose. We should be able to attract and really obtain an awful lot of equalization, equalized business in the throwing out the other guys who really aren't known for proteins. They're in it because they had to be in it. Yeah. To answer your question about differentiation, it doesn't sound robust, but it is. This reproducibility batch to batch is key, and then just absolute capacity. Customers want to buy product that is either from the same batch that they bought last time or that can be demonstrated to perform almost exactly the same as that previous batch, and that's what we're great at, and that's what they love. Building's a deal closer, I promise you. Yeah. Come on by and see us. Yeah. All right, great. Last one from me, either for Chuck or Dave. There's been a lot more talk recently about drug pricing reform. Yes. How do you view the potential for drug pricing reform to become a reality, and how that might impact trends in the industry? Well, I think we're further down the food chain, obviously. If drug pricing materially affects the pipeline and R&D investments that biopharma can do, it's going to affect purchasing from us and everybody else. We wouldn't be a phase I effect, but we certainly would be involved. It would affect everything. That's my take. Dave? Again, that's where I think the Moneyball approach comes in because I think the ones that make the most sense, that have the highest potential will go forward. I think they'll just be more discriminating about their pipelines. I think we need to be the ones that are in those pipelines of products that have the highest potential. In terms of core products, remember, we're primarily a picks and shovels supplier. We supply to everybody doing everything. As they narrow their field of research because they have to, then we would probably take a hit too at some level. I think it'd be much later. It wouldn't happen right away, and we might be able to mitigate it being given we'd had some time. At some point, I think there's going to be a consolidation in this cell and gene therapy space. Right that's going to be pretty significant as well. There won't be 1,300- There won't be. There won't be 1,800 companies very soon. Yeah. The cream's going to rise to the top. Yeah. Jacob Johnson from Stephens. Maybe one for you, Dave, just on the cell and gene therapy topic. I really appreciate the charts and all the data on the ScaleReady relationships, maybe just one point of clarification. Those are ScaleReady relationships, not necessarily customers that you're selling to. Is that correct? That's right. ScaleReady has, at that point in time. Yeah A few weeks ago, 668 customers. That doesn't mean they're all buying Bio-Techne products or Wilson Wolf. They're buying one or more. Some are buying one of them once. Some are buying two of us. Some are buying three. Our goal from the very beginning has been to get the workflow so seamless and show data that the products work together, and that's what we're working towards. Every time the ScaleReady team gets on the phone with a customer, they talk about our entire offering, and they've already mapped out whether it's relevant to that customer and where and why. That's a key element of what we've wanted out of this. Certainly speaks to the breadth of relationships there. Maybe just a follow-up on that quickly. Can you talk about the sales effort for cell and gene therapy? I don't think it's solely this ScaleReady relationship, though that obviously helps. No. It's kind of complicated, but in the regenerative medicine space, the key offering there is proteins and media. To a certain extent, a little bit of TcBuster, depending on whether they're gene edited. We go to market with our own direct sales force there of Bio-Techne. In the immune modified therapies like the T-cell therapy and NK and a few others, think about it, is anywhere where somebody needs to use a G-Rex and a Lovo in the workflow with our reagents, that's where we try to really leverage. We're educating that team also on the utility of our instruments. They may not sell them directly, but they mention them, and then they send leads to our direct sales force. On the instrument side, we have a direct sales team that's schooled in the cell therapy workflows, and we of course send leads across the business all the time, and they know what customers to go into. We have this comprehensive cell and gene therapy marketing group that is looking at the field holistically and then trying to generate leads, and then we send those leads out to the specialty sales teams that go into those businesses. Finally, on the research use only side, that's where our traditional reagent sales companies are. They're selling to the people that are preclinical or in the early RUO stages. We're selling them everything, and then we know when they're ready to move into the clinic or into a more serious stage of development, and then we hand that off to one of those other teams. There's about four different approaches that we go to market, depending on what stage the customers are at and what type of specific cell therapy workflow that they're pursuing. Speaking of positive things that happened as a surprise in the last couple of quarters was just the amount of assessments and specification for Ella in cell and gene therapy. We're actually in the millions of dollars of revenue. It was quite a surprise. It's moving quickly. This is potentially quite a sleeper as a platform. Chuck, one for you. Jim's got a picture of a pile of cash when you're talking about allocations. On M&A, and maybe also talking about your prioritization triangle. Yeah. When we think about M&A, should we think about strategic growth as being the most important kind of determinant of how you look at deals? In the filter? Yeah. In the filter, I think we still rank revenue growth as the highest lever. Then there's a component of profitability, and then we do a soft component. We give a score of one to five on strategic significance, so we understand that's a strategy, and that's probably third. There's five, six, seven things in the filter, and every year we test that filter for a see if we still like it. We every year kind of come back to it. We still like revenue growth. We've had a lot of discussion today about 40% being wonderful or not, op margins. When I look around our industry, revenue growth is still king. I will trade off a couple points of margin for accelerated growth. If we could become a perennial 30% grower and be at 32%, I'd take it all day long, just to be honest. Finding those deals, as Jim was pointing to, it's been really difficult, and we only are going to be able to dilute so far. We'll just be patient. Seven, eight years ago, our growth strategy was 2/3 M&A and 1/3 organic, just didn't have that much to work with. Today it's totally flip-flopped. We can be pickier now. Of course, we were flat back then, and now we're not. Everything we look at is dilutive pretty much. We have to be more careful, but it doesn't mean we're not going to do it. We have to do it. We're not very big. We're on a path to get well beyond $2 billion. We're not done at two either. We're never going to get there in five, 10 years with the many billions of dollars of revenue into at least the Agilent size we want to be at without doing more M&A. We'll do that. We all have M&A backgrounds. We're actually pretty good at it, so it'd be boring not to try. I have a question from Dan Arias from Stifel, who couldn't be here. Clearly, COVID drove a significant step-up in the instrument placement rate for Simple Plex, which drove really robust revenue growth for the Simple Plex business. How do you expect post-COVID placements to track, and can you talk about expectations for system utilization from a relative standpoint, mid-COVID versus post-COVID? Can you give us a feel for per-box pull-through expectations? What's on the horizon for assay development that can keep the growth going? Classic Dan, seven questions in one. Do you want to take it? Yeah. Clearly, during COVID, we had a lot of interest in Ella because it's a phenomenal tool for measuring cytokine storm and individual markers that were indicative of COVID immune response. Some of that is non-repeat, so we'll see a bit of a drag from that for probably a quarter or two, because the amount of instruments we placed and the amount of cartridges we sold with those specific indications was pretty immense, and drove a decent amount of the tailwind that we mentioned. However, we've placed a lot of these instruments into these institutions and in these labs that they're now getting very used to, and spoiled, frankly, by the convenience, ease of use, and reproducibility, sensitivity, you name it, of the instrument. They're developing more and more applications that they want to use the instrument for. We fully expect after a quarter or two of COVID hangover that we're going to regain quite a bit of activity. We've also got a lot more larger accounts that are adopting the Ella platform, and expanding the number of machines they're buying. That's a great trend that we're seeing, and driving quite a bit of cartridge sale growth. I don't think we've shared the pull-through on cartridges. We've shared theoretical, and it's well over half. It's a closed system, so it's well over half. Yeah. It theoretically should be a 75% kind of revenue based off consumables margin. Yeah, eventually. We're not quite there yet. Yeah. Partly, though, because we've been throttled and we need a new factory because we've been doing everything we can to make enough, but. Yeah. We ran out of capacity at one point. Could not service. We had extended lead times. We're back to a point where we're back to our normal lead times, which is good, but we expanded capacity, brought on an additional shift, and scaled our instrument production. Now, as Chuck said, we're building a new facility, and in the next year, that'll come up, and that'll have the potential for like 500% capacity gains. Even though we're crossing the chasm with that, we still have largely 20 large main customers, it is still a bit lumpy. They're doing their clinicals, their projects, they buy a boatload of cartridges, they go away for two, three months, there's nothing. It kind of ebbs and flows. We've had three solid, strong quarters. It was really flat four quarters ago. It's going to bounce around a little bit, you got to be a little bit careful if we move from an 80% quarter to a 20%, because it could pop back to 100% the next, it's going to be lumpy for a couple of years. The last thing on Simple Plex I'd mention is why I call it a sleeper is everything we're talking about here really is about biomarker research. What's going to be coming soon is going to be being used in basically QC-ing and in cell and gene therapy, and it's already selling pretty fast. Tomorrow's business around that is going to be patient monitoring, which is why we're taken through 510(k) here, and we have a partner in China. That I can't even tell you how big it might get. We know it's an excellent patient monitoring system for a cytokine storm as one avenue, and we're not sure we're done yet even thinking about all the other ways we can use this thing. We do know that Quanterix is a bit nervous. Just one more from online. This one's from Alex Nowak at Craig-Hallum. Can the company expand on its sales strategy around ExoTRU Kidney? Has the company decided on a sales channel, either direct or partner, and has any decision been made to help leverage the MolDX coverage policies on transplant? Yeah, thank you for the question. The answer is no, we have not decided yet. We're very close. Again, the strategies have been laid out for multiple options. We're ready, and we have a plan to roll it out ourselves. If we find the good construct with the right partner, we are open to have a good deal with a good partnership. That's why I mentioned earlier in my presentation that I'm looking forward to sooner rather than later announce which way we're going. For now, I cannot disclose that yet. I'd just add, it wouldn't be as difficult to build out that channel as it has been for prostate, because obviously there's a concentration of transplant centers. We're not afraid of that at all. The other part about changing venue, we have the option because we have a surgeon now, so we have a site for a different venue. Not sure it's any better than NGS, but we do have options if we need to. I would just also add that NGS is much better to work with around this indication than they have been prostate. They just see it as a much bigger issue, much more painful issue, much more important area to address. They've seen our data as well, and they like it. Hey, guys. Daniel Masek. I'm for Dan Arias at Stifel. Thanks for having us. Good to see everybody. Catherine mentioned one of the revenue buckets that potentially had some room for upside was the diagnostics controls and the core business. I was wondering, another area that I look at that I think is the ProteinSimple business within that, Dan asked about Simple Plex, I wanted to ask about Simple Western. 90% of the customers you said don't need a demo. I was just wondering if you could kind of unpack this a little bit. Is this mostly current users expanding their fleet, or is it because the technology is becoming more broadly understood and expanding to new customers? If you could just elaborate on that a little. Thanks. Yeah, I think it's a bit of both, really. We're seeing a significant uplift in pharma and biopharma buying more instruments. If they had one or two at a site, expanding to six or talking to another part of their company in another part of the world even, internally promoting the fact that how much simpler, easier, reproducible the Simple Western workflow is, then those other entities are buying and adopting. The other thing is there's just so many more publications out there now that you don't necessarily have to prove it. Thirdly, I would say, we say no demos. We have virtual tools now that we developed during COVID that can almost replicate if a customer desires a demo online. We don't have to physically go there with an instrument and actually show them in person. Used to be one in the trunk of every rep, but yeah. Okay, thanks. One more from me. Just wanted to ask about being able to hire. I know you mentioned that that was potentially a key driver of growth and maybe a hurdle as well. I was just wondering what kind of trends you're seeing, how hiring is going compared to your expectations, maybe what are your expectations for going forward to this year? We've just gone through analysis because the data was kind of shocking how high our attrition was. Believe it or not, we're better than most of our peers by a couple of points anyway. It's a pretty big deal, especially with younger than three-year company veterans. They're moving around a lot. They did after the financial crisis, too, but I guess it's somewhat expected, but it's really, really prevalent right now. Our industry's booming. There's a lot of opportunities, so people are taking opportunities. You have to be on your game in terms of selling the whole package of your company to your employees, not just their comp. It's about culture. It's about everything. We have a few things helping us out. If you want to be in microbiology in Minnesota, there's only so many places you're going to work. Certainly the East and West Coast are very challenging. Our West Coast is where we have all our instrumentation, of course, we're looking for software engineers, we're right down the road from Google and everybody else, it's not easy, right? We have to be constantly working our message and improving ourselves as a company you want to be part of. It's challenging. It's not throttling our business. It's helping our margins a little bit yet because we're still a little bit behind, we're better now than we were six months ago. We have three full-time recruiters. We've added one. We may go to a 4th. A good recruiter should be able to bring in 75 to 100 people a year, as we're told, we've got some good ones. They're doing it. We need about 300 net new people this year, and that'll be doable as long as we don't lose 250 along the ride. It's challenging, but you won't hear a different answer from any CEO in our space probably. Right now, it's very challenging. I think we're not maybe the best, but we're sort of way far off the bottom of the pile here. I would just add that we're planning on having to pay more in certain areas of the country. Yeah for certain positions, and we've built that into our pricing expectations going forward because we know that we're going to have to cover that. We're okay in management. I think, one, we share the equity far deeper than most companies in our space, and we've extended our bonus to every professional in the company. Only labor is left out right now. We're even evaluating whether we go all the way through labor as well. Not many companies can do that and have the margins we do still. That's also very positive overall, but certainly, we're pretty safe in management. Hi, guys. This is Lizzie Speyer from Citi. I'm here for Patrick Donnelly. Thanks for taking my question. I guess first on the M&A side, you guys talked about the focus is on revenue. Just on the size, if you look at Aldevron, it was a $10 billion acquisition, and then BioLegend went for $5 billion. I guess, can you talk a little bit more about the size that you're thinking of? Yeah. Any size works for me. We came in second on Aldevron, so just so you know. We were using stock, obviously, along with $2 billion in cash, and it is such a great fit that we really thought and EQT thought, and I know EQT because I worked for them in Germany for a while, and they know us, they know our stock, and we were the only company they were going to allow in the process to use stock because they, quite frankly, figured the minute we announced, it'd probably go up $150 a share. We're not afraid of size. We know what the result would be. We don't have to sell our execution abilities. You guys never have questions on execution for us because our results kind of show for themselves. We know what we're doing in terms of running a company and integrating other businesses, and we're not afraid. It's more about strategic fit and at the right price. Preferably, we like private. $5 billion deals don't go private. They're always going to be in a process. We're always hunting in this $200 million-$500 million range, which can go private. If we can get it done before it goes to a public process, we'd love to do that. If we can't, we'll get in the game, and we played at BioLegend, too. We're not really a flow provider, and the synergies weren't as strong to go that high. I can certainly understand PerkinElmer's wanting to go adjacent and take a shot here, but it looks like their price tag shows me they believe the entire management forecast. We usually take the numbers down a bit as we model. We're not afraid of size. It's more about the fit and the price. Return. Return, yeah. Timeliness for that return. Yeah. We still are stuck in a "We want 10% in five years of ROIC," I don't think we've seen a deal that's been public here for a while. I understand the cost of money's pretty low, and everyone's WACC definition is pretty low right now, but I have a hard time doing a deal at 6% when our cost of capital is about six. Our own internal ROIC is in the teens. Yeah. Right. Exactly. I guess one more. You talked a little bit about Simple Plex and Simple Western. How much runway do you think is left in terms of these instrument placements and what's the eventual penetration rate you think you can get to? I think you said you're already at 2,500 placements, but the market opportunity is large. Yeah. Can you just talk a little bit more about that? Thank you. There's actually 1 very nice metric that we can use because this ProteinSimple is the old imager provider, and we still sell imagers. There's roughly 20,000+ imagers in the field right now. We have all the call points to talk to. We do feel we're between 10% and 15% penetrated because you get an imager built in. One of our strategies has been to upsell people who need a new imager just to go with the Simple Western automation. You get your imager built in. It's in the range, right? You also can look at the value of all the consumables for doing westerns by hand, and it's $1 billion-$1.2 billion out there. When you map out the sizable enough labs that could use automation versus continue doing two a week by hand, you get to roughly $500 million-$600 million or so in that range. We've got a long way to go. We've had a couple of quarters at 50% that are COVID related, this is a 20% grower for years yet, we think. We've been asked this for the last three years, we've been remaining over 20%, I think we're just hitting a good tailwind now with it, as a matter of fact. Anything you want to add, Dave? Yeah, just one other thing. A lot of the acceptance and adoption of the platform is driven by the availability of Simple Western qualified antibody content. We've got a big push on now. We're more agnostic about who supplies the antibodies simply because it's a little bit of the tail wagging the dog if you don't. There's way more revenue to be had from placing instruments and selling Simple Western consumables than there is from antibody purchases from us. Although we have more than 2,000 qualified antibodies for the Simple Western platform, we are broadly expanding that through third-party suppliers to make it so it has much higher utility to the market overall. Yes. A question that when I think about your bullseye slide, it brings an interesting thought about how artificial intelligence, which seems to be showing up everywhere and helping speed up the process of drug design. Do you think that artificial intelligence and its influence in this space will change your business in a positive way, in a neutral way, or a negative way? How do you think of that? Well, one way that we are working this is we have a much bigger understanding. I guess it's a more scientific approach that's more domain specific to what an Amazon would do. Customers that buy this also need that. We're in the process, and we can analyze workflows and understand almost instantly from where a customer's searching, what they're doing. Then once we know that, we see the ability to generate algorithms to predict the requirements that they'll have for other reagents, et cetera, and even instruments. Then we can effectively market to those companies in a much more targeted way. It's the early days of this, but I think that's where the industry's going to go from an artificial intelligence perspective there. I'm thinking more about its ability to speed up the drug development process itself by eliminating a bunch of combinations that have a lower chance of success. That's where I thought you were heading. Yeah. Okay. I want to call an audible. We actually have our digital officer in the room here, Kevin. We have a data team that actually, we have projects specifically on that, doing screening. We actually took a shot at some things that we've got patents on and tested how useful they would be or potential as a therapeutic, because we got matches that are completely specific, which means they could be a drug. Without animal models, it becomes difficult. I think there's more of that happening than you realize. That gave us the beginning to actually use more of this internally as this science and this management of data we have lots of, to further our own direction for our own R&D and what we're looking at, and Kevin drives all that. We own in marketing as well. If he wants to make a comment. Hey, you covered it pretty well, Chuck. I think it's fantastic that we have a data science team that has experience actually in our business and are also data scientists. When I think of that team and the experience they have with the science itself, and then looking at data, it not only does the things that Dave talked about, right? Our ability to look at the pathways and understand what researchers are doing pretty quickly and benefit us on a website perspective, but it also helps us understand where the industry is going and making sure that we're ready for things like you're talking about, which is acceleration of the market. Not just in the cell and gene therapy space, there are other spaces that we're looking at as well. I think a lot of the antibody engineering that's going on now is going to be a big boom to the biologics industry, because I think it's almost gotten to the point where they can look at the structure of a target and design an antibody, and you don't have to do a lot of trial and error. It would be designing an antibody that fits very nicely. We had a speaker come in and talk to us about COVID and the spike protein structure, and he knew every aspect structurally of that and where the most likely mutations were going to come from, which ones would be the most dangerous, and then therefore, what antibodies would be optimal to design to counter that effect. In the past, that would've been just a big polyclonal search through the clones, go through two years of research just to get to a point where you had something to go in the clinic. I think now there's going to be a day come very soon where you're just going to engineer antibodies theoretically like they did with the 777 plane and never fly it. It'll go almost right to the clinic. Great question. Anyone? Hi, this is Richard Ryskalczyk with Sandhill Investment Management. It was just a higher level M&A question. We've been investors for a handful of years now. We've seen as this business has gone from no organic growth to now you're talking about this high teens organic. Just the way I see the whole story developing is you've got these great tailwinds behind the overall industry. You guys are positioned well. You've got the margins, you've got the balance sheet, and you guys have just done a phenomenal job at finding these smaller M&A targets that are doing quite well as a whole. I guess just in general, what's your secret sauce or how do you do it to uncover these opportunities and you made the comment that everybody has to come to you and you see everything going on. maybe that's really the answer to that, but just would love to hear a high level thought. That's some of it for sure. One is we're pretty well networked. We're from the industry. We're also members at ELDA. Two of our targets we've founded ELDA. ELDA's an industry consortium. There's roughly 100 members there. As you come out of stealth mode in life sciences, you usually join ELDA. You've got to use a lot of weapons to get access. We also get a lot of calls. We also get a lot of help from a lot of bankers and investors who come by and tell us what they've heard or what they've seen and something we should look at or call. It's almost a group effort. What we're really good at, though, is making relationships and providing value up front in some form of partnership and getting a good look under the hood, then maybe make a determination or a way to help them understand that we'd be a good marriage. Right? It took us 18 months with Yuling Luo's company at ACD. It wasn't for sale. It took me getting to the board of ACD and convincing them how good the relationship would be if we had them together, and the board deciding, "This does make more sense than an IPO. Let's do it." ProteinSimple was off a banker relationship, a really good one, and basically got a call and said, "S1's out. You should read it. There's a three-week window if you want to scoop this. You know it really well. You almost bought it before. You don't have to do a lot of due diligence. They're going to IPO, we think maybe under the money, if you want to take a look. We knew what we wanted about that business. Within two weeks, we had a deal. The only other thing I'd say is there's no recipe book for M&A, right? Every deal is different. Every time you use 1 approach, you never get to use it again anyway. You've just got to stay nimble and stay engaged and have a great team and then keep reading, keep searching, keep listening. Thanks. Gary Wu from DFD. Just want to get your thoughts on your exposure to reimbursed markets as you get into these clinical tests. Are you pretty agnostic as long as the business opportunity is good, or would you like to keep a limit on how much your exposure is to a reimbursed market? I'll let Dave go. The higher-level question would be how much do we like diagnostics, I guess. We're going to be in diagnostics because it can scale, and there's a lot of leverage and a lot of synergies with our content, which you've talked about, and you all get that. We are going to be picky, so we want to stick to the diagnostics that can make money, oncology, neuroscience, the areas of cell and gene therapy that Dave's talked about. How much more deep we go, I think depends on what it is. Exosome is a platform, not a single product, and we've got one out the door. We're close on the second, and Johan's in the back here, the father of the platform. We've got another half a dozen or so to go, right, Johan? That's why we want to look at partners, too, because we can't do them all singly by ourselves. One reason we bought Asuragen too, was to get that team that were regulatory experts and good at kitting and good experience in governance of diagnostics. We just don't have enough. Yeah, I can add to that, Chuck. No, Kim, go ahead, Kim. You're right. Gary, thanks for the question. Reimbursement is super important, right? There are several aspects. Early on in the development cycle, we do already know if we have to go establish that or whether we can piggyback on an existing reimbursement code, right? It is already a factor in the innovation center that Johan runs. The MAC question earlier, we have the Waltham lab of NGS. We also have the Austin lab, which is Novitas, right? We can also pick out there which one is most favorable for our designs of the exosomes. The nice things with two labs is that we also have some redundancy in case there's a force majeure. It gives us some multi-center capabilities to validate each other. Those are aspects that we really like. Most other kitted products that we design and sell, especially the Asuragen portfolio, we sell to the laboratories, right? We sell to labs, and they obtain the samples, and they have to deal with the reimbursement and to make money off of it. Of course, it influences what our ASP is going to be, but we don't have to deal for all these products or market with that same reimbursement question. We have maybe time for just one more. We've got a flight to catch. Puneet, did you want to get one more in? Just one on M&A. This is a question that comes to me quite a bit from investors broadly. Maybe touched on it briefly. This is more of a funnel and an ambition question on M&A. Ambition is clear from the comments you made about Aldevron. The real question is, at this point, the market and the market participants and your peer group companies are a lot more knowledgeable about the proteins and proteomics and genomics and the opportunity to sell in gene therapy and biologics overall. Obviously, the market appears to be a lot more competitive for these acquisitions. What's changing in your process in which when you talked about 100 or so targets in your funnel, and Jim showed this nice funnel slide a few years ago to now, what do you have to change sort of going forward? Obviously, ProteinSimple was very successful, but it was back then in 2014. Seven years later, how are you changing the process? Anything you can provide there that gives us better visibility into the funnel? I can say that one thing we're changing, you probably have to go earlier. We're looking at partnerships where we maybe take an equity stake first and try to not fully commit, but take a shot. There's a couple of those on deck we're looking at. We've done one recently in China to that extent as well. That's probably one change, because I agree with you, I think the days of finding a sweetheart call come in and scoop a deal are probably gone, at a nice healthy size anyway. I think the processes are going to continue. They're just going to be expensive, and maybe we have to lower our sights, but if we can, like Jim said, we can figure out a way to get the return, we'd probably still do it. We have to have synergies and more sales synergies to create more return off what we buy if we're going to pay more, right? Hmm? I really don't have anything else to add to that except, patience and time as well, right? We heard some noise over the past five, six years around how many acquisitions we were doing a year and a buying spree, et cetera, and we're trying to reassure everyone that we are being very diligent about it and being fiscally responsible on our return expectations and so forth. I'm not going to change that just because we're in a hot market right now. I think with time, everything's cyclical, we all know that, and the key is to always be active and out there and knowing and ready to strike. When the time comes, opportunistic-wise, whatever that reason may be, we can strike. I've given plenty of therapy to an abundance of business leaders who've lost their deal or came in second, whatever, and are heartbroken or had too much invested in, spent months, and I usually end up with the same thing every time. "Don't worry, there'll always be another deal." You've got to move on. I'll just remind you from a comment I made earlier, too, it's another reason for not getting too ahead of our skis on the operating margin targets and commitments because we've got an amazing internal engine right now as well. There's some ideas that are coming up through the prioritization process in the future that would cost more money to do than we've historically spent on our OPEX, but they're not fully vetted yet. Hopefully, by the time they're vetted, we'll be in a position where we are north of 40% and can be able to make those internal investments while still maintaining that high margin. Yeah, do the ROIC calculation on the GMP factory. $50 million spent, $200 million in revenue in five years, that's probably 70%-80%+ growth margin. It's much higher than 10%, I promise you. Yeah. We have plenty of investment in every one of our instrument platforms. The consumables was running out of capacity, so on every front, we're expanding factories. That even includes our ELISA kits, that they're also outgrowing their capacity as well as our Luminex platform, which are kind of the older things in the portfolio. Even those things needed some capacity expansion. As Chuck said, it's a great ROIC. There's nothing better than those organic investments. We've got to go, I think. Well, thank you everybody. I'm extremely pleased you all showed up in person. That's great. For the 25 of you that are here, there was actually 90 some online. It's been a really big success for us, and we really appreciate your interest in our company. Thank you.