Well, while we're waiting a minute or two, I'll just kind of start babbling a little bit. This is our fourth, at least my fourth, investor conference. In fact, it'd be our fourth, 'cause we didn't do anything 10 years ago externally, earnings calls, anything. So, they've all been fun, and they've all grown every time we've done it, and we always are pretty transparent, and we're known for that. We try to be authentic. We're more or less a Midwestern culture still, and we try to live by those values. You guys have all given us credit for that. So today we're gonna talk about, you know, a lot of stuff. It is definitely a death march slide deck. Sorry about that, but there's a lot in it. But it'll be a good reference, if nothing else. We are gonna give our usual update on the five years, but we're gonna actually talk about looking out ten years even, so. Some of the new markets we're going into are... They're gonna be massive markets, but they take time to develop. Things like liquid biopsy and cell and gene therapy, and we wanna give you a good sense for, you know, even though we've been laying track for five, six years, that, you know, what's the next five to ten years look like? 'Cause we're very committed, and we are gonna definitely win big in it, so. So what do you think? Can we start? Look at the boss back there. All right, let's go. All right, first and foremost, safe harbor, of course, and I won't spend much time on this. You guys all know to get online and do the reconciliations. We'll be talking about forward comments, et cetera. Here's the agenda today. It's a long morning, but we'll try and keep it as fun as we can. And you definitely know who I am. The presenters today, starting with me for 42 more minutes, and then we'll go move to the presidents. We have, we have Will, and we have Kim, and Jim. We'll put Jim at the end because that's where all the numbers are. Oh, I'm on the wrong slide. Okay, I see. It goes this way. Never mind. We don't want you leaving early, so we put the numbers at the end, so. This is my eleventh year. I'm sure we'll get to talking about succession. It's been out there a while, and we've got news on that. The three internal candidates are all pictured on the slide there. I'll be presenting today. Feel free to take them for any test drive you want, question-wise. So I'm in my 11th year. Jim's in his 10th year, but Jim's been with me, like, 14 years. And yes, we all did time at Thermo Fisher, so like, like many in this industry. Mark's been a good mentor, and Mark, you know, helped me set up our first banking 10 years ago, all kinds of stuff. And, you know, it's been good. And we still tap him regularly for talent, which is also good. Our newest guy here is Will, just under 2 years. Also Thermo, but also Quanterix. Also from Minnesota, but a lot of domain knowledge in the biology space. They'll talk a little more themselves later. Our company and our products have been hovering between $12 billion-$14 billion for the last year at least. We are still largely a consumables-based company, which means we're pretty profitable, and we focus on that. You'll hear a lot about that today. We are still roughly 10% instruments, and about another 10% of that 81 is consumables that make the instruments work. It's really 20 when you think about businesses around instruments and, of course, the other stuff. Now, when you break it down to what platforms, we're not a one-trick pony company. We've got a lot of platforms, and it's a portfolio-based company, and we did that by design. We'll talk a lot about it, but, you know, these are the, these are the products. The proteins, antibodies, the assays, and the diagnostics on the bottom there, you know, that's kind of the core of the company, the, the history of the company. We're 47 years old now. We were 37 years old when I joined, and those were the four platforms then. But we've gone into new things and adjacencies that make sense. We have a mission, and we want to focus on improving the quality of life by catalyzing advances in science and medicine. And we are all about the science. We'll talk about employee base later, but about 12% of this company are actually PhDs, which is a pretty big number if you think about it. Where it all began, when I joined 10 years ago, 10 and a half, it was largely just a reagents-based company, with a little over $300 million, contracting. Wildly profitable, but, you know, there weren't many investments made. We probably made more changes my first year than the next five, the next nine altogether. But, I mean, a few fun facts: back then, there weren't any computers. In 2013, I bought the company's very first laptop. This is one example. There were five people in IT. There were 12 people in Finance. There were two people in HR. We today have 200 people in digital with IT. We have 150 in Finance. We have QC back then, probably a dozen people. We were always known for quality, and we did, definitely did test and a lot of quality back then. We're much more sophisticated now. But now we're, you know, we've got QA, QC, and a lot of regulatory for our diagnostics. Our organization is now 250 people in quality and regulatory. And you'll, you'll see a picture of Qi later. She reports directly to me. Needs to be independent to work, and, it's done well. So 10 years later, we have all that and more, but we've also moved into different acquisitions we'll talk about, but different platforms. But they're all platforms that have synergies back to the content, and that's very, very key. The science, the juice is all about the content, so... Another reason we had to make big changes 10 years ago, we just want to sell antibodies and proteins for a living. It's—they're not very big ponds. They're, you know, very small market growth back then. Not a lot of funding back then, and, I mean, roughly $3 billion. We had about a $2 billion market cap. We were public. Probably the best thing about us back then was our stock symbol. Still a good one. And then today, it's, of course, much, much bigger, roughly $27 billion. You'll see all the, the same categories, but new ones, right? Cell culture, gene therapy, tissue pathology, liquid biopsy. We've gone much broader in proteomic research in general, with our, our instruments are already proteome-based machines, so. And drilling down further, you know, those, those 7 categories really turn into 5 markets, and the core being the top one, now roughly $6 billion. But you'll see the bottom ones, proteomic instruments, 3, spatial, 5, liquid biopsy, you know, 9 and big and growing, and gene, cell and gene therapy, 4 and growing fast. On the right, you see the growth rates. On the far right, you see our share position. So we've got a lot of runway left to go on these markets, even the core. Lots of diversity, lots of different innovation today. You know, we'll talk about the golden age of proteomics, but, you know, it's been good to us as well, all the way, all the way to the core of the company. And the results are pretty hard to dismiss. So we've had about a 14% CAGR for 10-year, a 10-year number on the revenue line. Very, very solid operating income. We always made a lot of money, but we did, we did, like, miss the nineties and Deming and a lot of approaches. So we're using SPC now. We're using different things to actually create more EBITDA. So even though we've invested more, so we have all these new people in these staff positions to make a real company a real company, we haven't lost our ability to focus on the bottom line, and we've created a lot of, you know, a lot of value. We used to test every product we made every month, whether it was sold or not. Some were being tested after 10 years and never sold a single vial, as an example. So we, you know, decided, well, maybe it's we should use statistical process thinking and or maybe test when we get an order. And so there's been a lot of things like that over the years, and a lot of cash to go with it, and we've used that cash. We'll talk about acquisitions, but that's been a very key component of our growth as well, is the M&A side. We're gonna talk today a lot, even though we've got competitors online, and we're very transparent. We're gonna talk about the magic and the secret sauce that makes our company work. And it's worked well for 10 years, and it's gonna keep working well for another 10 or 20, I think. We follow... We're all big company people, multinational backgrounds. This is my sixth business in my career. I've over a $1 billion P&L, and the guys are about the same. So we're used to this, and we follow a subsidiary model approach. So I want to be able to divide and grow. We're gonna talk about our segments and our divisions later, but each business unit, you know, has a division structure and a regional structure. And essentially, the divisions have a global P&L responsibility, and they're responsible for the strategy, for the headcount, the capital, and decisions like that. And then we work together with our regions and our channels to execute those plans. They also have their own pro forma P&L. So Europe will have a pro forma P&L, but it's... You need to think of Europe or APAC, you know, as a smaller pie of a company that report into biz by biz to the divisions as well. And then we share, of course, resources and the staff functions across. HR, finance report directly up, no matter where they are in the global, in the world. Very common model. If you have an MBA or took organizational design, you'll know that they all work. It's always about the people. You have to design organizations around the people you have, and you have to look for people to fit in the model that you're running. And we've done a good job with that. We'll talk later, but we've all been around pretty well in this industry, and networks are very good, and we know how to attract people. And the more success we've had as a company, we've attracted even better people. I, for one, in my level here as a CEO, for my direct reports, 10 years, I've never used search once, never used a recruiter. So it's all been through network or through, you know, finding the right people. They generally come to us. Here is the magic that makes our process work. And we call it the Bio-Techne technical business process, but you know, every company has to have at least two rhythms a year. You'd always have your strategic planning process, and you'll have your budgeting process coming off of that. At least that. You have to do that. We have another one in the middle, so we spend a lot of time prioritizing. After we've set our directions of strategic needs and such, we actually zero base every value stream we have in the company every year. We break the company down every year. We're always trying to actually stop stupid stuff early and cheap and focus as much of our resources on new products, new directions, new investments for growth every year. If you don't do that, all you have to work with every year is just the money that comes out of your growth. After you pay merit raises and everything else, there's not much left to work with. This is a trap that a lot of companies fall into. They don't, they don't make the tough decisions to stop doing things they shouldn't be doing. Sometimes a big project should be killed just because it's a bad project. Just because it's big, doesn't mean it's good. There are always pet projects. There's always things. Doing this process last year, we broke it down. The company has 400 work streams. That means every fraction of every Tom, Sally, and Harry that are in the company, no matter what they're doing, there's a core, but there, there's R&D, there's every function realized. And then we break it down, and we prioritize, and we come out the other end. And when that's done, we do a five-year look ahead with that. Year zero essentially is the year you're in, so you know you've done it right when it matches your P&L currently. You know you've found all your resources. That means year one, looking one year ahead, should be pretty close. Guess what? The budgeting plan becomes pretty easy then, because you've decided most of the hard work. I'm gonna talk about that, and here's how we do it. I've talked about this in the past, but this is the juice that makes our company work. Every work stream we have, we break down into a triangle. There's a cost on the X-axis, and on the right side is the Y-axis is the benefits list. You see the filter. So we evaluate everything we do by these benefits versus the cost. On the right, you see this curve. Those are all the 400 projects, value streams in the company, and they're all little triangles. All you're doing is stacking slopes. The higher the slope, the better the project, because you've got better benefits versus smaller cost. It's not perfect. It's an 80/20 rule, but it does a few things for you. It gets everybody talking. It's a bottoms-up process, so we don't hand down targets and try to beat people up, saying, "They've got to hit these numbers." They roll bottom up to us in telling us what they can do, and then where the resources run out, we all decide together. The divisions all do this individually first, and everything's prioritized within the division, and then we use software, and we actually run the whole company against each other. And so think of it as towers of prioritized projects, and then they run out of room at some point, resourcing. We always wanna have more to do, you know, than we are currently doing. We have ideas. There's things we wanna change, too. That's the way we run the process. But everybody knows what's going on, so, you know, if Will loses some projects to Kim, he'll know why. And we can sit in as a management team and go, "Well, that project's out now. You know, does it need to remain out, or should we bring it back in? Well, we got to bring it back in, because if we don't do that project, the three you have in will never happen." That kind of stuff occurs. Well, then we bring it in, but then something else has to come out. So we actually know exactly where our resources are, so we're never over-constraining people. This is key to innovation. If you wanna have a bunch of people that won't innovate, give them more work to do than they can do. If you're... Don't have free time, if you don't have the ability to actually sit back and think once in a while, and you're always under the gun, you're not gonna be very creative or innovative. So it's important. It's also a common language. Everybody talks. Everybody works it up together. Guess what? We have very little politics in this company. There's, there's not a lot of dog-eat-dog or competition, division, division. People know why they lost versus somewhere else. They know it's for the best of the company. And, you know, and it's, it's a process where the truth will set you free. If you want your project in, tell the truth. If you're too risk-averse and you don't put the numbers down, you won't get the money. If you're too courageous and too bold and over-promising, you're gonna get the money, and you better deliver. So you're measured on it. So, we have a corp dev team that works across the whole company, making sure we're all doing this in parallel for speed's sake, but also there's no gaming, right? So it's all done kind of in the right kind of context. This has worked for us. It's worked so well. You won't see many companies have a slide like this. This is not a year-on-year comparison. This is a year-on-year comparison, five years ahead. This is when we got done with the plan, and looking at that plan, what we predicted to be five years from now, now looking back, how did we do? How did we predict five years away? And that's here you see on the, the prediction versus how the results were. We're within 5%, more or less, every year for the last five years. Now that we have 10 years together, we can go back and start measuring to see how we did. I think this is pretty phenomenal data because it, it's important to know this. So we're doing this now. We're telling you about the next five years. In 10 years, I'm telling you that we're gonna be co- we're gonna be close to what we're telling you, because we've got history to prove it. Now, a little bit on the company. We, we are broken down by two segments, and we have five divisions. So in the Protein Sciences segment, which is about three-fourths of the company, really, we have our research reagents, and then we have our analytical instruments. Okay, and the brands are across the bottom. You know, the antibodies and proteins on the reagents side mainly, but on the analytical tools, we have really our assays, our immunoassay, kind of, proteomic-based analysis tools are all there, and they all work together. On the right side, we have the diagnostic reagents, another core of the company. But we've got... You know, we've gone into liquid biopsy, and we've gone into carrier screening, so we have a diagnostics division. Then we have spatial biology, you know, with the ACD acquisition and now Lunaphore. We'll talk more about that later. So we have a lot of new things. Another way to look at it, and internally we kind of call this the legs in our stool. We have our core products, and we like to think of our company this way because we wanna always be leveraging our reagents into the new things we're getting into. We didn't just buy instrumentation for Western blotting because we wanted to be in Western blotting. You know, it's because Western blotting depends on antibodies, and we're a world leader in antibodies, so we wanted to know if there's gonna be a directional move that, you know, that way, we wanted to be part of it. So that's the same thing for spatial biology, cell culture, gene therapy, liquid biopsy, as well as proteomic analytics. These are all big spaces. We talked about that earlier, but they're all growing well. We have a low share of physicians. We have innovation, IP, we'll talk about, but we also have synergies back to the core. We have 6,000 proteins in our catalog. We have, you know, 40,000 antibodies that we make in our catalog, another 500,000 that we source. We have over 20,000 assays. We are the inventor of the ELISA kit, you know, 40 years ago. We have a brand-new platform that's now ISO 13485 improved for microfluidic immunoassays with our Ella platform to really take ELISAs to the next level. And you'll hear more about that later from Will. So now, are we done? Not done yet. Another 10 years to think about. I used to talk 10 years ago that, and I have a lot of M&A experience, so we talked about our growth would be largely 75% M&A based and 25% in our, you know, organic, internal. And some of you remember those days. Now it's kind of reversed. We're still gonna be big in M&A. It's important to us, but we've got a lot of horses in the stable here that we can ride right now, so that are growing, and we're gonna drive all these. Cell and gene therapy is gonna be a massive market. We've been laying track for five years. We're gonna be a big winner. We were the company that was able to land Wilson Wolf. Everyone tried. We did it. Proteomics. Our instruments are productivity tools. They're not overly expensive, but they create immense, tremendous value, and they have lots of flexibility. We're gonna talk today about the extensions and applications these instruments can do. Liquid Biopsy, and no one's gonna tell you it's not gonna be a major winner long term. You know, eventually, when some of these companies crack solid tumors, it's gonna be even bigger. But, you know, we think we have the best platform out there, better than circulating DNA, cell-free DNA. We have, you know, we've got exosomes, and we have 250 patents protecting it. And then spatial biology, we're really in two camps. We're in the, we're in the discovery camp, but we're also in the analysis camp. And, you know, single cell something is on everyone's minds, and we're, we're very big in single cell analysis, and now we can automate that whole process, too, with our Lunaphore acquisition, another asset everybody has been trying to get. So our strategies overall, you could probably look at 90% of everybody's strategic plan, they'll have these categories probably. It's more what's, what's, what's in them that makes sense. We are definitely gonna drive innovation. We talked about how just a little while ago with our prioritization process, but we have to be a product company and an innovation company first and foremost. We're not done expanding. We've got $100 million of business in China. It's 10% of the company, was 3% when I joined. It's definitely in a low right now. We'll talk about that. But, you know, it's gonna, it's coming back, and it will come back strong, I think. And we're just not that big yet, so we'll be one of the first to come out, I think, of everybody. M&A is still a strategy for us. We make a lot of cash. We're gonna put it to work. I don't think we'll be doing four or five a year, but I think you can still count on a couple a year for us for a long time. We're not known for doing big deals. We're not known for going after public processes too well, but we do... We have become more or less a benevolent kind of inquirer, and if, and this is a climate where their funding is tighter, IPOs are nonexistent, and it's a target-rich environment, so expect more M&A. We have focused a lot on the customer the last few years. We talked about that in the past, that to win in antibodies, you've gotta, you've gotta have a great search engine capability. We're gonna talk about that and our investments there. They're big investments, and we're, and we're still doing them. You cannot do this without a team, so we have a new head of HR who came from Apple. We are focused a lot on culture. We always have been. We're focused on talent. We're gonna talk about EPIC in a second, but you know, we've done a really good job, I think, of finding people that think alike, that want to be part of this mission together. So we are products based. You know, we lead with quality. Our new systems brand, as you know, is a gold standard brand. We don't have to worry about that, so it's about building on top of that. So we do invest roughly 8%-10% back into our business. It varies between reagents and instruments, of course, but that's kind of the number. I'm not gonna go too deep, just to show you before Will gets up, that our instruments are synergistic with our content, and antibodies really go everywhere. It's kind of the thread across the whole company. But we have more than that. You know, we are the world leader in proteins. It's a proteomics world right now, and we're, you know, we're doing well with it. IP-wise, when I joined, we had... Well, first of all, I wanted to understand, how could we be probably 80% market share in proteins, 54% op margins back then, and have no IP? We weren't growing anymore. Even today, we're still very profitable. We've now, we've invested in the business, but we have focused on it. And we had zero patents 10 years ago, not a single patent in this company. Today we're knocking on 1,000, so most through acquisition, but we're actually doing quite a few now internally, organically as well. Not a lot in this presentation, but another process that I've brought in, that I grew up on at 3M, was the tech council concept. So we have all our top technical people who meet every month and really focus on what else could we do together. If we marry platform A to platform B, and we're the only ones in the world that have these platforms, what does that give us for a differentiation for, you know, for a competitive value? And guess what? It creates a lot of new programs to evaluate every year in this prioritization process. So we have lots of innovation now and lots of IP forming. Exosomes are great carriers for a lot of things, including antibodies, so there's lots of stuff we can—we're focused on. So expect more organic growth out of this company. We are global. Everybody, and me included, have done a lot of global work. I lived 3 years in Europe. I did a count recently. I've been to China 75 times in 25 years. We're all the same that way. It's... We're not, we're not US-centric, but we've a long way to go. APAC is just getting there. India, this will be a big year for India, we think. Korea's really coming back on the march. Japan's having a good year, you know, knock on wood. They only have 1 out of 3 good usually, but this is one of them. And Europe, you know, we've got a lot, a lot of synergies left to drive in Europe. We have now four full subsidiaries in Europe, and there's more to do. But, you know, there's plenty of growth there as well. We have 35 sites. You saw that in the first slide. That's a lot for this size company. You know, we could focus on saving nickels and integrating and giving you a KPI scorecard, so we're doing that. I'd much rather focus on growth. A lot of these are due to acquisitions, and if we focused on integration or removing their site, we'd lose the people, the very reason we bought the company in the first place. So we have a lot of small companies that the sites are based on that. We're not overly saturated or full of inventory warehouses or things or distribution centers or things like that, so we're doing fine there, and we have great operations people. But we are very global now, and we're proud of it, and we've got you know sites of excellence all around the world at this point, centers of excellence. We've come a long way headcount-wise in a very short time, really. I mentioned some fun facts before. I'll mention some more, but you know very proud of some of the growth areas we've grown in, very proud of what we've done digitally, very proud of what we've done with the regulatory side. We've come a long way to be a player in diagnostics really in a short time. You guys know there's a lot of bodies in the ditches in diagnostics world. So we plan to win, and we're doing well. We're now roughly about 3,200 employees worldwide, and about 380 or so are PhDs, so very, very science-heavy. M&A will remain strong. We can be choosy. We always have been. And we'll keep... And the growth rates we've talked about and the numbers I'll talk about later really have no M&A in them. But look at this, look at this scorecard. Before you count, there are 22 companies on here, and they've all had a big impact. And I can genuinely say, out of all these 22, there's only two I wouldn't do again, so it's not too bad. They're small ones, and to be fair, we didn't probably do enough due diligence. They weren't material enough, and we - you know, shame on us, but the more important ones have done well. Just to bring an example, you know, we talk about the value creation, but, you know, $3 billion or so of spend, creating $11 billion of market cap. You look at what ProteinSimple did for us, and we bought it back in 2015. It was a $50 million business, not quite profitable. We paid $300 million for it. Today, over $250 million, a 20% grower with 35% op margins. What's that worth on the public IPO market? Billions, for sure. So this, you know, we've got a lot of good assets. We've become pretty well known for finding assets just as they're ready to take off. There's a good reason for that. Most of these companies have come to us early in their cycle because they needed a special juice to make their machine work, their assay work, whatever. Content drives everything, and so we get in very early with a lot of companies out there, and that gives us really an unfair advantage to get after them and buy them more quickly. They get to know us as well. They know that we want to bolt on, not, not integrate. We don't ram a new sign down their headquarters the first day they come on board. We, we more or less actually wait till they ask us, "Where's our sign for Bio-Techne?" So, it's gone well. The last three years, of course, a little softer due to COVID, of course, but doesn't mean we haven't been active, and we're probably right now more active than ever. There's a lot of little companies that need help right now, and we know a lot of them. I think I covered most of this, but, you know, we're looking still life sciences. We're missing a few things I wish we had. I wish we had more in media, as an example, for our cell and gene therapy area. We don't have cryopreservation. There's a few things to tick off. We've talked a lot about needing automation in our spatial business. Now we have it. We work with everybody out there, we know everybody out there, and we pick the best one, and we can tell you exactly why it's the best one, and you might ask Ken later just why that is. We try to get into a first mover, you know, type of situation. I think we're there with, like, Wilson Wolf, a great example. Probably outside Miltenyi's probably the only other de facto standard in cell and gene therapy is the G-Rex bioreactor, 800+ customers. In virtually every clinical going on out there today, it's gonna be a big winner, you know, but we need some time. We are customer-focused. I'm gonna talk about our journey, spending more and more all the time on this journey. You have to have a world-class website. We are now. I bet we spend; we buy probably AdWords over 10,000 a quarter, so it's a $6 million-$8 million spend. Used to be all on the bottom line, but now, you know, we drive our search engines. Personnel-wise, the organization digitally, we're organized, you know, under a digital leader reporting to me, so the IT and the corporate marketing are all together under that umbrella, 'cause it really works together. You want to leverage a lot you can for corporate marketing, trade shows, the website, the branding, et cetera. Product marketing in the divisions, and so they work together at that level. We draw the line there. So because of that, we have an always-on marketing kind of engine going at the corporate level, working with the scientists in the divisions. We try to remove the friction in the business. We, you know, we have a lot of products. Creating an experience for the customer to do one-stop shopping is no small feat in this company. We still don't have that yet, and we're still growing well, so there's more runway. In 2-3 years, we'll have complete one-stop shopping in this company, and it'll create even more growth, guaranteed. Quality, I mentioned, 250 people now in our regulatory QA/QC function, from virtually nothing, you know, 10 years ago. You might think it costs a lot of money, but... and it does, but it also creates a lot of growth. And it's, you know, it's the terms you have to play by if you wanna be in these spaces. If you wanna be in these lucrative, high-growth areas, like, you know, like, like, liquid biopsy diagnostics, you know, LDTs in general, you've got to make these investments. And, you know, data is behind everything we do. You probably haven't gone to any presentation without somebody putting up an AI slide lately, but, you know, we, well, here's our AI slide. We have done a remarkable job. So we, you're a customer, you're on your, you're looking, you know, you kind of know what you want. You're doing research in a certain area. You know there's 500,000 antibodies out there, and you're starting your search before you start buying from 100 different suppliers out there, and you find our website. We actually can, in real time, tailor the screens we give you by where your eyeballs are on the screen. Honest to God. So we do that, and then we can very quickly predict what work you're doing based off what professor's work, whatever, and we start making recommendations in real time while we're on. You might want to be looking at this type of product for these experiments we think you're doing. So we kind of blow people away. They get kind of weirded out even over just seeing how fast we can get on top of what they're doing. And we're getting better and better at this. You know, call it machine learning, call it whatever you want, you know, but it is, it is real-time data analysis that's, that's not just decision tree-based type of software. And we have, you know, dozens of people working on this at this point, and it's become a bigger and bigger portion of our website experience. And it's all about that. It's all about giving that, that, that customer, that scientist, an experience that they're gonna... They're gonna not only purchase many things in one, one, you know, visit, but come back, right? To understand, wow, these guys have a lot of stuff, and they, they get it. They know what I want to work on. They know what, they know what I need to buy, and they have good brands. Everybody knows R&D Systems. So lastly, just getting into some of the culture. We've been using Epic forever, so of course, we measure everybody on how their results are, but we also have soft metrics as well. We try to measure people on their, their Epic values. But before we get to that, you know, we want to talk about... We emphasize this. We're, we're really focused on building the talent pipeline. We have very low attrition from manager up. We're gonna talk about ESG in a minute, but we've got great, uh, diversity in the, in the company. We really fortify belonging. We actually ask everybody, try to get everybody thinking about get a friend at work. Have a friend at work. Have, have a reason to actually want to work at the office and not remote working, for one example. And we're optimizing our systems, you know, we're using all the best software now, and, you know, we're moving to Workday and all these types of things that, that, you know, like everybody else has, and it works great. So, you know, it's empowerment, it's passion, it's innovation, it's collaboration. These are the four leadership attributes that we try to get everybody focused on, and all our leaders score well on these areas. If they don't, they don't really rise, or they don't, you know, they're not really for our company. And we take a pretty hard line on some things. We're definitely a collaboration company. I'm not real big on work from home. We have our policies, and you're allowed to with manager approval, but, very rare instances, you know, where, where it's complete work-from-home type of position. We're... First of all, largely, we're three-fourths lab-based, so the lab people have to be in, and there's an equity issue here. So we try to get everybody, you know, in the office and collaborating, working together. Keep them safe, of course, and, but that's our culture, and it, you know, it's working for us. Here's my team. As of today, there are eight new faces in this team. All but one are due to retirement of the previous individual. So, just to focus on a few. Brenda retired, our GC from the very beginning. She was a remarkable GC for us. Will's new in the last couple of years. You see Chi there in the middle. She has been in the company a long time, always wanting to do the right things for quality and finally got her way, and she has a 250-person organization right now, and I think she could manage a 1,000, to be honest. She's amazing. You see Brenda there? Her old email was Brenda@apple.com, just to show how long she was at Apple. She opened up all the retail globally for Apple. Globally, HR. So I can't go anywhere with her around the world. Walk into Apple, and there are people, like, thinking she's a celebrity. So she used to work for Jobs, and she's got stories, believe me. Gary Latham, you know, he came with Asuragen. We now have a CTO. It's been a while. You know, for me, a CTO is not... We have CSOs in the businesses, but a CTO, it's as much about process and organization skills, being a leader, driving tech council, more than just being the smartest person in the room. This guy's both. This guy is super smart, knows all the background science of all our platforms, literally, and can organize like I've never seen. So he's running tech council beautifully. Really thrilled. The board is really thrilled to have him on the board, and they were pressuring me for years to find a CTO, to be honest, so I'm glad I could check that box. Lynn retired with Asuragen and ran MDD here, but now Bernie is internal. Kenny took over. Fabulous. We just hired Dylan from Thermo. Guess who the antibody guy was at Thermo? It's Dylan. Dylan's on our team now. And then Peter Schuessler on the end is taking over for Gary, who just retired. And he also, Thermo and ran the Mass Spec in Europe for Thermo, among other things. Another strong Ph.D., but very good organization skills. Has lived in the U.K. as well as Germany, and we all know that in our company, our biggest opportunity in Europe is Germany. Germany should be our biggest business, and it's not, so he'll be focused on that. Should be low-hanging fruit, I think. ESG, I... We're on it. Yes, we're doing all the things you have to do for them, you know, emissions and such. We've always been good with social, and we just haven't taken much credit for it, and now you kind of have to in your proxy and, and everything, and so we're, you know, we're, we're bringing all that data forward. But, you know, look at the data. We're 50% female, 35% minority. We're 25% Chinese in our headcount.... as an example. So diversity isn't our issue. We actually have almost 50% of all our management are female, which is a pretty high score. Due to this, we've made all the Forbes lists the last couple of years. So, so we're doing well there, I think. Diverse board as well, led by an independent chair. I'm not chairman, and after 10 years, I'm still not. You know, they are focused on CEO succession, and there's a nom and gov committee, and I get to play a part, but it's not my decision. They've made me clear on that, but it's fine. It's been a good board. They virtually have given me everything I've asked for. We even had, at one point, permission to do three acquisitions at once. So we've built credibility for delivering, and that's gone pretty well. I can't complain. So just the last slide. We remain well-positioned and growing in underpenetrated markets. That's the bottom line. We have a great team, and we're in a lot of big ponds, and we're, you know, got a lot of runway in all of them. We're focused on the culture, and we're focused on being a team, minimizing politics, working together, collaborating, and growing and having fun and making good science and taking care of our stakeholders. We are going to be one of the first to come out of this macro environment. We were one of the first to go into the soup, and we're one of the first to come out. There'll be, I'm sure, questions on China. You know, we see an end, a light at the end of the tunnel in China already, as an example. You know, because reagents kind of lead the way, you know, consumables lead the way anyway. We are not changing our strategy. We're trying to build a, you know, a life sciences and diagnostics portfolio. We're five divisions today. I think in 10 years, we'll be 10 divisions. I think we're gonna talk about it, but we'll be much, much larger. But organized the same way, in a continued divide-and-conquer, you know, subsidiary approach. It works. We have a great team now, and I'm sure it'll just even get better. You know, good results attract great people, and we have. The door continually gets knocked on, so. We're known for integrating well. We're known for making smart moves. We haven't made too many poor decisions on the M&A front, and I think that'll continue as well. We're very rigid with our, you know, our methodology. We don't land a lot of public processes because we don't like doing deals under 10% ROIC in five years. It was just announced that, you know, I think Abcam, Danaher was a 5% model. I can't get you guys excited over a 5% model. It just doesn't work, right? So, and, you know, so our portfolio, because of that, is positioned for high growth, and we're going to spend the rest of the day telling you just about, you know, where that's all gonna come from. And it's very, it's, it's plenty detailed. I'm sure some of these slides, you're looking at, and going, "Oh, my God, I'm gonna need college credit when I leave here." But, you know, try to make it fun. Ask any questions you want. We'll be very transparent. We've got chairs up here for later, and, and I'm hoping that you'll, you'll walk away being excited as we are, okay? With that, I'll hand it over to Will. Good morning. Thank you, Chuck. Yeah, listen, it is such a pleasure to talk to you about the Protein Sciences segment. I've been in role for a couple of years, and, you know, as we talk through the business today, there's literally no place I'd rather be and no other time I'd rather be in this, this role. It's an incredible time. And with that, we'll talk about the golden age of proteomics. So we're gonna start there. We're the world leader in Protein Sciences, period, right? It's a lead that we've got, and we're gonna expand under Chuck's leadership and my leadership going forward. So no other company is better positioned for shared growth kind of during this period. So I'll start the talk today just by talking about a couple of megatrends and big drivers in Protein Sciences. I'll relate that into our strategy, and then we'll talk through kind of the strategy execution piece as we go forward through the day, and then, then we'll conclude there with, with the summary. So first, I want to talk about one big driver, right? So we all know about what's happened in the genomics space over the last 20 years, right? Tremendous amount of discovery within genomics, and that's been applied in many great ways for society. If we think about proteomics, right, we're now in this phase where high-throughput proteomics and discovery is really a reality, and it's accessible, right? So in the past, we've been really limited based on the complexity of proteins, for what you could do and kind of how you could interrogate proteins. Yet, proteins drive everything. They drive every function in your body, right? If you think structurally, functionally, everything. So we know a lot about the blueprints, and we've done a ton of work on that over the last 20 years. We're now moving into the ability to interrogate all the proteins related to the blueprints. So as you kind of travel around, even if you just get online later today, you'll find a lot of genomic cores. They're now multi-omics cores. Sometimes they'll be multi-omics spatial cores, right? So we're deploying proteomics much more broadly. I think the reality is they've got this huge pent-up demand to understand the role of proteins. So how do we play there, right? Chuck mentioned something about content. We've got 40 years of leading content, right, in proteins and antibodies. Our antibodies are leveraged across almost every high-throughput platform that's utilized. So what does that mean for us? We'll talk about it a little bit later. It means when you make a discovery on any platform using our antibodies, and you want to translate that and go into diagnostics, we participate all the way through, right? So we have license and commercial supply approach into that marketplace. So high-throughput proteomics is really changing and is driving, much like high-throughput genomics did over the last 20 years. It's having an incredible impact. The nice thing is about a lot of these systems is they're actually leveraging a massive install base, right? They utilize genomic tools like high-throughput sequencers to count barcodes connected to proteins, right, and to do that detection. So there's a tremendous opportunity for growth in this space.... Next, I want to kind of take us a little bit back in time, right? So we shouldn't lose sight that protein therapeutics have really been around since 1982, and the first protein therapeutic human insulin, recombinant human insulin, was launched. And what we've seen is this steady progression from simple proteins to antibodies, to antibody drug conjugates, right? And so what does that mean? First of all, it's great for us as society. This is very personal. The one on the right saved my niece, right? My niece is now this 24- or 25-year-old kind of kid still. She's got a couple of kids. She was checking out, right? Brentuximab saved her life. So it links into our mission as a company, but it's also incredibly personal. If we think about our role here, right? So we make all the tools that enable biologists and protein therapeutics companies both understand mechanism of action. We work in their development labs and in their quality control, right? So we have a tremendous impact in this space, and it's a space that continues to grow. If we think about the next modality here, we think of cell and gene therapy applications, right? Which are really precision protein therapeutics. We're in the early innings here. There's 13 approved therapeutics that cover 18 different indications, right? We see kind of a modest market of around $4 billion there, but if we relate that to, you know, 20 years ago with biologics, what you see is this tremendous growth, growth potential in this space. We'll talk in more depth and detail about our participation there. So, you know, if you think about the big drivers of overall discovery linking into biologics and protein therapeutics and how that carries through to cell and gene therapy, you know, it's a tremendous time to be the world leader in protein sciences. So then how does that relate back to our strategic pillars? So PSD is Protein Sciences segment. And if we think about those pillars, we start with our core. That's our core content, where we've got this incredibly powerful and strong position. We deploy that in a couple of different ways, broadly across proteomics applications that we can... And we'll talk about our destination of choice for protein sciences in a moment, but we also leverage that into cell and gene therapy and diagnostic applications. When we talk about our instruments portfolio today, we'll talk about about expanding kind of our opportunity or market opportunity through innovating on those platforms. And kind of more importantly, Chuck started the discussion. I'll add to that a little bit later, is the ability to go and look at, you know, 400,000 antibodies or understand kind of proteomics workflows. Nobody is better positioned to engage with our customers and deliver solutions to them, right? So we're working diligently on a best-in-class customer experience, and we'll call the destination of choice. So I'll hit on that, right? So we're going to jump in first then into the segment itself. So the segment has kind of two divisions within it. So we've got proteomic research reagents, and we've got our proteomic analytic solutions. So going back, if you start kind of left to right here, it's all about world-leading, best-in-class content. So we've got the most proteins. We're the market leader in proteins. We get the broadest base of antibodies on the marketplace. We have small molecules that are complementary. You'll see that later when we talk about cell and gene therapy applications. And then as we move into immunoassays, Chuck mentioned we invented the immunoassay. We're the world leader there. We're the most cited portfolio of immunoassays. And in 2015, when we linked up or acquired ProteinSimple, we started deploying our content on systems that we own, right? And so that was a real difference-maker and a catalyzer for us as a whole. So I want to go into, again, well, what makes our content special, right? So, you know, having a large, broad portfolio is kind of one thing, but they're the most. As we characterize them, they're the most bioactive proteins in the marketplace. It's incredibly important because as you're building your antibody portfolio, having the best immunogen to immunize animals and develop world-class antibodies, we're in a great position with both. They're incredibly complementary. Second, confidence, right? Chuck mentioned we've got 250 different folks in quality, quality, and quality assurance and regulatory within the company. We are laying track ahead of all of these kind of regulated applications, right? So think cell and gene therapy, think our customers who want to deploy our content into diagnostic applications. We're building ahead of that, and we're building really strong core capabilities in that regard. And then finally, continued innovation. So you know, Chuck mentioned not a lot of patents when he first started, right, in the proteins and antibodies. There's actually still not, but there's an within antibodies and proteins, there's not a really broad, but there's an incredible knowledge base on how to produce proteins. We have many proteins that none of our competitors can make, for example. One of the questions we get a lot is like: Well, hey, doesn't everybody have access to AI now? Can't they figure this all out? Actually, that's a part of the solution, and it's not the entire solution, right? So we see that as a massive competitive advantage. The fact that we can pair our 40 years of know-how with these advanced tools around AI and synthetic protein development, right? So we're in an incredible position there to continue to to innovate. If I move over, then I'm just going to kind of conclude the content, kind of related to the proteomics content related to the reagent solution side of our business. So, you know, as you'll hear consistently today, right, we're in a really attractive market. We're growing ahead of that market, and we're not, you know, at a point of kind of being having too deep in the penetration. The opportunity is just tremendous there. So our content is deployed across a myriad of applications. We'll talk about some of those today, but if you are doing protein sciences, you're using our content. I'm going to shift over then to our analytical solutions. And so here again, we've got an attractive addressable market. We've been growing ahead of that market, and we've kind of got modest market share and penetration.... And so you see the theme across the bottom, right? So we can characterize proteins, and we deploy content on these systems. But one takeaway here is that we're simplifying and disrupting existing applications. We're not only automating. So if you think about some of these automation platforms, what they might do is they might improve true throughput, but they're not changing the application itself. And so from our perspective, this opens up a tremendous amount of potential for our customer, not just in productivity, but what they can actually do in terms of deploying these technologies. And we'll dive deeper on that now. So, you know, is this working? You know, is our approach having our proteomic analytical systems, is this working? Well, if we look at our adoption across our platforms, it looks like it's working, right? So we've got over 3,500 Simple Western systems, over 3,000 ICE that are used in biologics research and development and quality control, and over 1,000 Simple Plex instruments, right? These are becoming standard tools in any group leveraging protein sciences, right? You cannot visit a protein sciences lab that either doesn't have one of these or doesn't want one of these systems right now. Tremendous upside opportunity. I'm going to start with a little deeper dive into our Simple Western platform, but earlier on, I mentioned expanding market opportunity through innovation. So we'll start here and just give you a brief overview of this technology. But Simple Western is the only automated Western blotting instrument on the market. I'm almost certain that nobody in this room has ever done a Simple Western, but if you have 2 days of your life to kill, you can go to a research lab and spend that time. You don't want to, right? So our process simplifies that into about 4 hours, right? In addition to that, it improves the quantitation and throughput, so the work that you can do. And with quantitation, right, that opens... and precision, that really opens up the application spaces for us. So going to that thought again of expanding our application space, what you see here is that across different applications, so whether we're working with cell and viral lysates, applications where size matters, which are kind of critical in protein degradation type of workloads, gene potency assays. So I'll mention again later, so Simple Western is now used as a quality release assay in an FDA-approved drug that was recently approved for gene therapy. Really, the opportunity with this system, as we continue to perfect it, is really exceptional, and again, it goes back to expanding application space and expanding market share, or expanding market opportunity. Next, we'll move on to biologics. So earlier on, I mentioned protein therapeutics as kind of a general megatrend. So our Maurice instrument is really leveraged broadly for protein identity, charge size, and characterization space. There's really a couple of main applications for it, right? So one is this SDS approach, which is really a purity test, and everything else is related into the cartridge around protein identity and charge. So where this is leveraged is in analytical development and quality control in protein therapeutics applications. So we've got a fantastic footprint there, but when we think about our opportunity to kind of expand, in fiscal year 2023, we did a couple of things. We added a new cartridge in there that allows for fractionation, right? So kind of prior to that being available, the amount of effort and work to fractionate samples and push them into mass spectrometry was really you know, kind of an intense process. So we really simplified that, and we kind of expanded our opportunity by $300 million to get into the ion exchange market itself. Second thing we did was with our CE-SDS cart, we went from about a 30-minute run time to a 5-minute run time. This was really a game changer for people doing any development work in the lab. So imagine a day now where you can run sample after sample in 5 minutes, rather than... I mean, you just, it's incredible from a productivity perspective. Lastly, we enable these systems with both the Empower and Chromeleon kind of tie-ins, right? So you can control the instruments with your existing kind of infrastructure in this biologics workflow. So I'll move on then to NanoCell. So NanoCell was an acquisition we made in fiscal year 2023. So NanoCell kind of follows suit with this whole approach of simplifying existing workflows and disrupting them, right? So with NanoCell, you can kind of be up and running and sorting cells within 5 or 10 minutes. We know that there's a big driver in the single-cell market. We know this can also be deployed in cell and gene therapy applications. So this is a really nice opportunity, and it addresses about a $300 million market opportunity for us. And then I'm gonna finish off with immunoassays and talk about the Ella platform. This has, you know, just incredible potential for us. So our Simple Plex or Ella platform is an automated immunoassay, right? So going back to our leadership in immunoassays, this is now deploying that content in a very rapid and robust test. Incredible precision and sensitivity in the systems. Imagine you're thinking about deploying something you discovered more broadly, whether it's on any high-throughput system, and driving it into a diagnostics application, or you simply want to look at several, you know, a multiplex of genes, you know, consistently throughout a day. Simple Plex is really the ideal platform for that. And what we're seeing is that this is getting adopted in, like, gene potency or assay or, excuse me, cell and gene therapy potency assay applications, for example, and in diagnostics applications, right? So we've also made the investment to take this to ISO 13485, and we've expanded our capacity in Wallingford, Connecticut, where we make these as well. But let's take that just a step further and think about immunoassays as a whole, right? So how does this all kind of land in, we think about the overall drivers in the marketplace. So we've got the most utilized platform in our ELISA kits, our standard ELISAs, with over 1,600 publications, right? We're the market leader in ELISAs. So imagine if you're a customer who's either done discovery or you're working in ELISAs, you have a really easy pathway to get into the Simple Plex platform, where we've got over 250, you know, kind of critical assays on three species. And we cover important applications like neurobiology applications, which are certainly kind of catching fire, right, with all the positive things happening in that marketplace. But we are expanding all of our applications into cell and gene therapy space. We can also deploy our content for higher plex applications on the Luminex platform for things like multi-cancer early detection, right? So what we're finding is that customers are doing discovery work. They may be doing some additional characterization work on mass spec. They might be doing high-throughput discovery. But where it ultimately lands is a high... either a lower plex format, like Simple Plex, and they'll leverage that, or they'll leverage Luminex. So since everybody's selling Luminex assays, as a general statement, leverages our content. We're just a really nice catchment for that, and we've got a great expertise in developing those assays themselves. And I'll relate this back to the big megatrend I hit on kind of earlier, right? So we're incredibly well-positioned. If you think of high-throughput discovery and protein detection, we play at every level. So if you're doing high-throughput applications, you're leveraging our content through licensed commercial supply agreements to drive broad discovery in those multi new multiomics cores. If you're in verification, validation, or doing clinical trials, you can deploy yourself in either the Luminex or the Ella platform again. And then finally, if you want to take this all the way through to diagnostic applications, again, depending on the number of analytes you're looking at, you can do that either in the Luminex platform with our content, and we also sell the Luminex platform or our Ella platform, right? So we're incredibly well-positioned. So we go back to this golden age concept, and we know that it's got these amazing drivers in terms of discovery. Nobody is better positioned because of our history and core content to drive market share and market share growth there. So I'm going to finish the analytics section just by hitting briefly on again, expanding applications. And that sometimes is menu or just the application of space and expanding our market opportunity, in this case, by around $1 billion. Okay, we're going to shift over now into one of the applications. I think a few people are probably interested in what's going on in cell and gene therapy, right? Listening to early comments, just some highlights here. So we're going to finish with two areas. I'm going to hit on cell and gene therapy, and then I'm going to talk about customer experience and our Protein Sciences destination of choice. So when we go to cell and gene therapy, right, we think of curing the incurable, but what really is it, right? There's really three areas, and this is important, I think, for you to know, as analysts and certainly for us running the business is, you know, immune cell therapy. Here, we're manipulating the immune system to clear tumors, right? In regenerative medicine, we're replacing lost or damaged cells, and tissues with stem cells, and then in gene therapy, we're repairing and replacing genes. Okay? And so I'm going to kind of talk through each one of those categories today, and they are really unique, uniquely different. It's, I think, helpful to understand. Before we jump into that, again, I want to just reiterate, you know, the tremendous kind of growth. So, one of the questions we get a lot from analysts is, "Hey, things are slowing down. There's less kind of capital flowing into these applications." And what we're finding is we're still growing. We're uniquely positioned. We actually like the little bit of pressure on the market. It sounds crazy to say that, but what that's doing is it's driving people away from systems that are super expensive and will never scale into our solutions. So anyway, tremendous growth opportunity. We got a couple thousand clinical trials happening globally. The FDA is geared up to approve 20 a year by 2025. You know, I think that's a directional estimate, but the idea is, again, the takeaway is that they're gearing up to support that. So if we think about our opportunity, we think of an addressable market for our products of around $4 billion, growing in the upper teens. Our trailing growth has been around 50%. And again, we're uniquely positioned to participate here. And I want to talk about the investments. We've been laying track, and I've used that term already, but we have been investing ahead of this market in several ways. And I want to start with supporting cell and gene therapy development from from development into the clinic, right? So first of all, we've made tremendous investments in GMP production, so both for proteins and our small molecules, right? We're incredibly well positioned to meet the near-term and long-term needs as that market kind of J-curves up. Secondly, we have GMP small molecules. This is a unique attribute that we've got that other groups don't. So we can now consolidate kind of these critical regulators in our small molecules and deploy them. We have GMP small molecules, and we're expanding our capabilities there. And then finally, on their analytical tools, we've expanded both capacity and our regulatory certifications. So let's start out with a little deeper dive on immune cell therapy. And so, you know, first glance, oh, man, these guys have a lot of products that kind of cover this whole space, right? And we really do. That's great. We can participate in a lot of different ways. I'm going to talk about kind of three ways we're highly differentiated in this space. The first one is an innovative aseptic immune cell culture solution that we'll talk about that leverages our proprietary technologies along with Wilson Wolf. I'll hit on our partnership with ScaleReady, which is our immune cell joint venture, and we'll finish with kind of this unique product we call Tc Buster, which is also kind of a game changer in the space, especially around making the genetic modifications. So starting out, we've got this, really powerful strategic partnership for immune cell therapy with ScaleReady. That partnership includes Wilson Wolf, which we've mentioned a couple of times already, Bio-Techne, and Fresenius Kabi. This enables us to have solutions from kind of vein to vein in this space. They've got an incredible commercial presence. We've got over 800 customers. Wilson Wolf is in almost half of all clinical trials right now for immune cell therapy. It's incredibly powerful. If there is a conference, if there is a KOL, if there's a campfire where people are talking about cell and gene therapy, ScaleReady is there. And I'm literally not kidding, these guys are everywhere. This team is everywhere. So we've got a tremendous coverage model. Let me move over then to the aseptic immune cell therapy manufacturing system, right? Right now, kind of the de facto leader in this space is a company called Miltenyi. You may be familiar with them. They're a privately held company, but they've got a solution on the marketplace that while it works well in many ways, it's not scalable, it's incredibly expensive, and it just limits accessibility to the platform, right? So along with Wilson Wolf, we have developed an aseptic cell manufacturing system with the G-Rex bioreactor in the middle. Imagine this bucket or this G-Rex is where kind of everything happens to grow cells. So there we will push in our GMP cytokines or proteins. We'll leverage our GMP media, so our T-cell media, into that space. As we develop other tools that we can leverage within G-Rex, we'll insert them. But what's critical about this is this takes a very cumbersome workflow, simplifies it, and enables people not necessarily to automate it, but to standardize into a format that's kind of an aseptic system. This is unique, and for us, this is a differentiator kind of going, going forward. I'll close out the immune cell section by talking about TC Buster, right? So, TC Buster is a nonviral transposon system for stable gene transfer, right? So when you're making T cells, T cells or weaponizing them, right, you're, you're inserting some genetic material. Right now, it happens with something called Lentivirus, and if you cover companies that make, make Lentiviruses or characterize them, you're probably really familiar with it. Lentivirus has kind of been this, this standard, right? But Lentivirus has a couple of really significant limitations. One is the cargo size, so what you can insert. Why does that matter? It matters for a couple of different reasons. One, if you read about kind of these CAR T cell therapies, durability of the treatment, right, comes up. So oftentimes, what folks now in the next generation of CAR T therapy are trying to put multiple edits in so they can have a larger CAR that enables that kind of weaponized T cell to work more, more effectively, right? So it's really critical. Lentivirus simply cannot do that. So this is a game changer. It's really the only product broadly available and accessible on the market. So about 7 months ago, we commercialized this to democratize the technology. Prior to that, we were offering it as a service, and it was really limited in terms of how many customers we could reach. So you know, what happened immediately? When I talk about that demand, right, so we've already got greater than 50 customers for this product. We have two already in filed INDs, approved INDs, right? So imagine this is now being broadly deployed. I talked about the general needs, but it's highly differentiated, so it's another opportunity to kind of win customers over, kind of in that space. I'm gonna shift over to regenerative medicine. Remember, early on I mentioned regenerative medicine is really different than immune cell therapy, right? And we say every step of the way, same thing, we have huge coverage, we have huge coverage here, but what really, really matters and a huge differentiator for us is our unique GMP proteins and our GMP small molecules. In this case, you're not only growing T cells, you're growing all sorts of different stem cells, and I wanna just touch base on that then, right? If we think of the different types of cells and the different applications in this space, having an incredibly broad GMP protein portfolio matters. We are the leader in regenerative medicine right now, kind of by far, in terms of providing proteins into the space, and it's both because of our RUO animal-free and our GMP proteins. We have proteins that nobody else can make and nobody else does make in GMP if they, in fact, do have kind of a bioactive protein as an RUO. For us, it's really a huge differentiator. So in addition, in addition to this, we are launching, and we already have iPS iPSC media, that'll be leveraged in this space, and those will also all be under GMP. So if we think of cell therapy, then including immune cell therapy and regenerative medicine, we're not really limited in just the reagents part of this, right? So if we think of cell therapy verification, right, and those tools. So if we think of viral vector QC, you come to ProteinSimple. If you think about release testing, we're the de facto standard for potency assays right now. And then if you wanna have in vivo analytics after you've done treatments or in studies, you can leverage our RNAscope and our spatial portfolio, right? So we have not just highly differentiated components in kind of the reagents aspect, right, and the G-Rex. Think about immune cell therapy. We really have a huge advantage now that we also are playing at the front end in the research side and on the quality control side.... Okay, so we're going to finish up with gene therapy solutions. And so in gene therapy, we're going to focus mostly on our instrument store. We do have other products that kind of fit into that workflow. They're noted here, but if we think of vector production, vector analysis, and in vivo monitoring, we're in a really unique position to support this marketplace. So coming back to the ProteinSimple portfolio, right? So for gene potency, we have kind of the ideal platform in a Simple Western. For vector characterization, you can use either our Maurice platform if you're looking at pure samples, or if you're looking at kind of early in development samples that are kind of come with a more dirty matrix, if you will, you can leverage our Simple Western platform. And then for viral titer, you can use the Simple Plex platform. Again, imagine we've taken workflows and really simplified it. These are just basic tools in the space. Let me hit on that. So this isn't just about product positioning. If we think of gene therapy, there are critical quality attributes that every gene therapy company has to pass around. They include viral titer, viral identity, capsid protein ratios, you know, empty/full ratios, stability, protein expression to, potency expression, and, and purity, right? You can kind of see the check boxes for what we covered. So imagine doing that without an automated, ultra-precise system, right, that brings a ton of productivity in the lab. So we've already seen Simple Western adopted in gene therapy. We are becoming a de facto standard, as I mentioned earlier, in immune cell therapy, with the Simple Plex platform. I think here, we have a huge opportunity in terms of ADC characterization, whether it's something where we've got the assay on Simple Plex, or we can do that on our Simple Western or Maurice platforms. So I'm going to finish off our discussion today, talking about creating a destination of choice. So I started off the conversation saying that there's no better place or no place I'd rather be than at the world leader in protein sciences, right? So if we think about our customers' ability to leverage, leverage our content, know-how, and solutions, we have the intent of becoming their ultimate destination of choice as we kind of bring together our full investment. So what, what does that kind of look like for us, right? So if we think of our best-in-class content, we have incredible choice, we have confidence in the choice, and we're innovating, as I talked, talked about earlier. We are, are expanding kind of our workflow solutions. And then if you think about the experience our customers have in finding those, right, if they happen to be meeting with, with one of our, great salespeople, and it's a specific application, you know, they're grinding right through this, right? If you think much more broadly about the, about the work that people are doing in protein sciences, their ability to kind of find research by our products is really critical. So when we think of protein sciences and we think of this destination of choice concept, we are well on our journey there, and we're getting close. So I think if I look back at our presentation a couple of years ago and our other investor presentations, we talked about the incredible investments that we've been making behind the scenes, whether it's on ERP integrations, how we're leveraging CRMs across our sales teams, and then how we're leveraging our manufacturing excellence, excellence systems. I'm just going to make a point. You've never seen us miss a quarter because we had a failed ERP, right? There's good reason for that. We have great people doing this. So when I mention ERP, I don't want to scare anybody in this room. It's already been happening. You've not seen a blip in terms of our ability to deliver to this market, right? So the good news is, we have this incredible foundation to leverage, but we're really at a tipping point of converging all of our websites together and enabling our customers to derive more value from our system. So what that looks like for us is really amping up our e-commerce and data sciences capabilities, our ability to promote our entire portfolio. Oftentimes, people will be leveraging one part of our portfolio and literally not know. For example, they might be leveraging our R&D Systems branded antibodies. They may not know that we're also ProteinSimple, right? And so that story is kind of coming together here, and we're going to be deriving kind of value across that whole, whole portfolio. Second thing is cultivating kind of the brand equity that we've got. We've got these incredibly powerful brands that we bring, bring together. If we look at kind of the search, and Chuck mentioned the amount that we invest in kind of search, everybody's looking for solutions in this space, and they might land at different places within our ecosystem right now. In the future, they're going to land in one place, the destination of choice. So as we think about, you know, how does this... you know, what- how is this a game changer, right? So we've had this tremendous growth. We've got this great market leadership position, and I think we have a huge opportunity as the destination of choice comes together if we think about that virtual cycle of feedback. So if you're a customer over the next couple of years, the more you use our website to research, find, decide, buy, whatever you're doing related to your protein sciences work research, the more value you will get over time, right? Of course, huge benefit for us in that we expand kind of our share of their wallet, and we also enable science and our mission, right? So that's the other kind of underlying piece. In addition to that, we see huge productivity gains internally as those systems are kind of more standardized across the board. So this, I think if we go back to, you know, the left side of the strategy, and we think about we're leveraging our core content across the portfolio, but we're also making sure that core content is available to everybody and is super accessible, and they're deriving lots of value out of it as customers. So there's significant upside there. So I'm going to close the session and just bring us back to the golden age of proteins, right? So we hit here on gene therapies, protein therapeutics, high-throughput proteomics applications, and we also link that back into our incredible advantage with the core content that we've got and how that gets deployed across the active customer base. So if we think about all of the combined investments, so the track that we've laid for cell and gene therapy applications and our tremendous opportunity and penetration into that space, to the ability for our customers just to access our general content and leverage that as we get this huge drive in protein discovery that we started the conversation with. We already are the destination of choice for our customers in terms of finding the best solution. We're going to be the destination of choice for all of their research kind of going forward as we execute on this strategy. So with that, I'll conclude, and thank you. I think we've got a break. Is that right? Yep, we've got a 15-minute break, and look forward to the next session with Kim. Yeah, we'll start at 10:00 A.M. Yep. ... Yeah, my dear colleague, Will, you, you had your chance. Thank you. Thank you for coming today. My name is Kim Kelderman. I've managed the diagnostics and genomics segment now for five-plus years, third investor conference, so it's great seeing you again. And actually, we're really, really, really excited to talk about the progress we made, substantial progress, I should say, and to talk about the strategies for our businesses going forward. Let's start with a quick overview of the segment. Three divisions. The first division is the Diagnostics R eagents Division. In that, we have reagents, standards, and controls. And since a couple of years, we also design assays, and we do this for our large IVD customers. So most of this business is actually an OEM relationship into the large IVD customers, such as Roche and, Becton Dickinson, and others. In the middle, you see the Molecular Diagnostics Division. That's actually a combo of an acquisition of ExoDx, ExosomeDX, about six years ago, and the combination of Asuragen, which is an acquisition of two years ago. I'll talk more about the ingredients in this business and why this is such a perfect fit, those two acquisitions, and how we have evolved organically since. Last but not least, we have the spatial biology division. That's actually a division that looks at tissue as a sample, not liquid biopsy, but tissue. Tissue is still the gold standard, so there's a lot of important information that gets processed and generated in this division. We have two key units in there. One is the 6 years ago, ACD acquisition, with a beautiful portfolio of RNA reagents. And then since 2 months, we have Lunaphore into the fold, which is a company that brought us or brings us automation as well as proteomic content. So if I dive into the first business unit being D here on the left. Bio-Techne has a real long track record of collaboration. We make these standards, controls, and reagents from basically any chemistry. We have a broad portfolio of raw materials. Some come out of Will's business, and, of course, we produce and put those standards and controls together under stringent quality as well as regulatory regulations. Two years ago, I showed you that we are in this market of clinical controls, which is about $1.1 billion, and I told you that we were going to go into the adjacent space of assays, and we have done so successfully. So we are now delivering assays to our customers, and it's been a real nice driver. As you can see, that market also grows a little bit faster, and the nice thing is it has the exact same customer base that we were already serving. So there's a true synergy there. Now, how did we become a provider of these assays? Well, that's because our core was capabilities, really, to make those standards and controls. And in order to make those, you really need to understand how the assays get designed, right? And very often, we would tell our customers, "Listen, the standard control is not optimized because your assay is not optimal, so this is what you should be doing." And at some point, these customers go like, "Hey, can you maybe design those assays for us?" So we did, and we do, and we have designed COVID assays and many other important assays for those large companies. We do this for a fee.... And of course, while we design those assays, we design in there our own materials, right? Our antibodies, proteins, and other proprietary materials that we design in. We hand over the design, and the moment this customer starts running this assay, we get pull-through. It's nice to get the pull-through because it's more sticky revenue than you would get with those large one-time projects. We like the sticky revenue. In summary, this business, of course, is focused on being a first choice partner, right? Because it takes decades to develop these relationships with these IVD companies, and we want to make sure we maintain that. Secondly, we want to pull through our reagents because we have such a big portfolio of it, and we do that now even better through delivering those assays I talked about. We want to continue our journey in operational excellence, integrate more of the IVD materials that Will has been talking about, and we want to increase the portion of our third-party controls. That's basically products under our own Bio-Techne brand. Sometimes customers of, for example, a Siemens machine, do not like to run the Siemens controls because they think there's maybe some benefit that it is the same manufacturer. So in that case, you can go to a third party, which would be us, and we like, we like that business because we sell directly to our customers, our standards controls. The second business that that is in my segment is the molecular diagnostics segment. As I mentioned, it's the combination of Asuragen and Exosome, and I'm gonna explain to you why this is such an exciting division. Because we basically brought the best of those two companies together, right? First of all, we believe that Exosomes have the best position in liquid biopsy. I'll tell you a little bit later why we believe that. And it's really important for early detection. And I think everybody understands why early detection of a disease is important, right? So that's the, basically, the fundamental benefit from this Exosomes division. And then later on, we added Asuragen, whose capability really is to make kits, very high sensitivity kits, with a full workflow, including software, that then eventually gives you an answer, right? So in the middle here, you see that all organs continuously release exosomes, and those exosomes sit in the biofluids. Those are easily obtained in a sample. We call it a liquid biopsy sample. Then you could use that sample in a workflow where you have a kit, you have it in your laboratory, you use widely available instrumentation, such as a qPCR box, and then you use our software for a really easy readout, and you get a high-precision answer. That, of course, is a tremendous competitive advantage and a perfect fit of those two divisions. Now, if you think about those capabilities I just mentioned, combined with the current product offering we have, and you layer on top of that the global megatrends, and you see a couple of bubbles with global megatrends that we are and have been taking into consideration, we have fine-tuned our strategy. The strategy sits here in four buckets. First bucket is to continue to build out the disease signatures based upon exosomes, based upon liquid biopsy samples, right? The second bucket is to build out our oncology monitoring kits, right? And that's, that's something that Asuragen already has a stronghold in the BCR-ABL marker, very important marker, and we want to continue bringing out menu on that easy workflow I mentioned earlier. Reproductive health is important for us, too. We have a nice genetics portfolio, and we have a stronghold in the Fragile X market, horrible disease, but we have great products there, and we want to build that out, and utilize our technologies for that menu. Last but not least, very fast-growing, here is, again, controls, but these are molecular controls. And we use those molecular controls for our own testing, but we also sell those to third parties, other testing, and it's a very neat business on the side. Makes us more independent and important part of our strategic pillars. Now, these strategies have, of course, informed our product portfolio, right? I'll talk about the current products in the development programs pretty soon, but in the top you see three bullet-bubbles, and those are very important because we are really focused on screening products. Screening products is if you have something going on and you go to a physician, and they usually come up with a screening, a wide test, which means there's a lot of patients coming into the funnel, and therefore, there is a high volume of these tests necessary. Now, in the middle there, once you get screened and there's something off, you get a diagnosis. At the back end, when there's a treatment plan and people want to see whether your disease is progressing or not, and how the medication is working, that's when you have monitoring. So the monitoring part is where people would repeat testing for the patient and see how the progression of the disease is, right? Also, a bucket where the volume sits. So therefore, you'll see our R&D funnel is a little skewed to those two buckets where the volume sits, and also our technology is strongest. Now, the current product on the market are 12 products. Two of them are IVD approved. And of course, you see in both the ExoDx Prostate Test. I'll double click on that one. That's the one we've talked a lot about, and that we have tremendous success with. For us, it is basically a proof of principle that this exosome-based testing is really, really working. Now, if you look then at the R&D funnel, you see that we have three other projects here on both, that I will double click on. And on the right-hand side, the solid tumor testing. That's really a testing that goes into the monitoring bucket as well, and is something that I will talk about more. And then last but not least, where you see the little check mark, there you see the transplant rejection testing. That's the test that we've generated data for. Very powerful data. We got several partners interested in this. Eventually, we signed a deal with Thermo Fisher Scientific. They are now producing the test and running clinical studies, and they will go to market with the test. So the little red box indicates the transplant center markets. We do not have a channel in there. That's why we partnered, and Thermo Fisher will serve that channel and utilize their might there. You see the two blocks, blue boxes at the bottom, which are our channels. We do have a urology channel in North America, and we do have a laboratory channel in America as well as in Europe. And then for other channels, if we ever needed one, we will sign an agreement. We will partner with people that do have that channel, and we will then utilize our signature and our exosome benefit and our testing to then have, do good deals across the industry. Now, why do we believe that we have such a competitive advantage to start working on all these tests? That's because we have the exosomes, right? Exosome-based testing. The exosomes are basically little vesicle that comes out of a cell, out of living cells, that pop out, and they're actually designed to transfer information to other cells. That means the quality in those little exosomes, of the information, the quality of the information in the exosomes is really high quality because it's protected. Think of bubbles that you come out of a lava lamp, right? So they, they come, they pop out of the bigger bubble. Other companies actually use, cell-free DNA as a marker, or they look at circulating tumor cells. But we believe that looking at exosomes is a much better solution. If you look at the key properties here in the middle of the slide, you see, circulating tumor cells compared with cell-free DNA, compared with exosomes. And yes, exosomes do carry all the analytes you would wanna look at, RNA and DNA. They are abundant in the early stages of a disease, right? Which is very important for early detection of a disease, because that's a major advantage if the disease gets detected earlier. You have the ability to enrich. As I mentioned, very high-quality information in there. And yes, the outside of the exosome has the same proteomic fingerprint as the originating tissue. So you can actually see where these exosomes came from, while you're testing, and that's also how we enrich them, right? So you can fish them out. On the right-hand side, you can actually see data. On the y-axis, you see that there is, cell-free DNA plus exosomes used, and on the bottom line, you see, cell-free DNA only. If those would be of equal power, those data points would all be on that dotted line in the center. But you see, they are significantly skewed upwards, meaning if you look at exosomes in addition, it will give you a significantly better signal, up to four times as sensitive as we see at DNA alone. And that totally makes sense, because if you read the bottom part there, that one cell secretes tens of thousands of exosomes per day. That cell secretes zero cell-free DNA up until it dies. And when it dies, it only sheds two copies, so it's not a lot. It's hard to find. That's why we know and believe that our exosome platform is going to be so powerful. Now, first test that we brought to market, and is our proof of principle, is the ExoDx Prostate Test. You know the test and how it works, so I'll jump to the key points. The important part of this test is that, unlike some of our competitors, we give you—we give the urologist a score, and he takes, other data, such as the PSA score and the family history, into consideration like they always do. Competitive tests mingle that again into the, into a score, which makes those scores kind of funky. Our, our score is really helpful, and the moment the urologist uses this score, he's gonna make much better decisions. In order to obtain the sample, which is a urine sample, easy to obtain, you do not need a digital rectal exam, like with some of our competitors. And that really made it possible for us, and you see the top right, to make an at-home collection kit. And we thought this was going to be important during the pandemic, that the patient can take their sample at the convenience of their house. But it's still very, very popular. We see 40%-50% of our volume still going through the at-home collection. So it's a competitive advantage and lasting competitive advantage. As you can see in the third bullet, we have obviously validated this test significantly, size of population of over 1,000, and we have been added to the NCCN Guidelines. Medicare coverage was in 2019. We got a renewed coverage this year. Several changes to our advantage. One big change to our advantage was that the testing was covered for once in the lifetime of a man, but now it's covered for an annual test, which is obviously enlarging our addressable market significantly. We also had two different publications. One was around a 2.5-year follow-up. Very powerful data, basically shows that the physician makes much better decisions, meaning men that do not need a biopsy and do not have a risk for high-grade prostate cancer gets to continue to be monitored, and the ones that have a high risk get pushed into the standard of care and there with the decisions are much better. Urologists all were a little skeptical at the beginning because they thought they make money on doing a biopsy, obviously, and they thought that this test would take away people that are not showing up for biopsy unnecessarily, right? But they were worried about losing that revenue. And our economic study, which has also been published, and there's a PR around it if you want to study it more, basically, indicated that the urologist becomes much more efficient. So that means that men that where the urologist said, "Hey, you should go to a prostate prostate biopsy," very often do not show up, right? As you see here, 39% in the standard of care would only show up. Now, if you get an EPI score, and it tells you that you really should be going, then the compliance is over 70%, so a huge difference. And the patients that will show up are actually really needing to show up. So there's tremendous efficiency there, and that's why we feel we got such adoption. It's the adoption we feel is actually driven because of the non-invasive nature of this sample. We have a really high predictive value and you know real strong clinical data and economical data around this test. And therewith we also had a tremendous success this last year, 90% growth in this product and continuing very strong. The nice thing about this is that it really educated us about the workflow. So the EPI workflow is very much the same as this workflow you see here. You get a liquid sample in there, you pull out your cell-free DNA as well as your exo, exoRNA, and we have proprietary products to do so. You run it a qPCR machine, and you get easy data readout. So it's the exact same format as for EPI but we are going to apply it to many other markers, specifically in oncology. The very first marker that we are going to bring to market within a year is in breast cancer. And we all know that breast cancer is a horrible disease, and it's still very frequent. In this table, you kind of see that once a patient gets diagnosed with breast cancer, the one L basically means first line of treatment, meaning a treatment gets chosen based upon information. And then once you're on this treatment, there are these little tubes in there. Those are basically monitoring tests. So the patient gets monitored to see if the disease got worse, the disease gets better, and/or if there's resistance building against the medication. Now, if there's resistance building, you want to find it quick, early on, and then you want to switch your line of therapy. So you go to your second line of therapy, et cetera. Now, you do that really well, it doubles the survival chances of this patient, right? So there's a bunch of testing in between. You know, you just see three there, but it really depends on how long the disease pro- goes on and when resistance pops up. But it's obviously frequent testing, and it needs to be simple, it needs to be fast, and that's exactly the workflow I just showed you. And this ESR1 marker, the first one that we're going to bring to market, is a marker for resistance. So this will tell the doctor, "Listen, this medication is working, it's working, it's working," up until there's resistance from the cancer, and it's not working anymore, and then you quickly swap your, your treatment. We-- In the blue there, you see the channels. We have all the channels, meaning our laboratory channel in U.S. and our laboratory channel in Europe will be a perfect fit for this test. And, yeah, it's going to be the first of many in this menu of oncology monitoring. Very excited about this part. Now, you also saw me talking, heard me talking and saw on the slide, the screening tests. Screening tests, in general, are, you know, large market opportunities and complicated tests. But in order to crack that nut, we are working and are actually putting in action a multiomics platform internally. What does this multiomics platform do? It basically takes in any sample, any liquid biopsy that you, that you would like to look at. We look at various analytes, so we're not just looking at the exoRNA, but other analyses as well. In light blue, you see the analytes that we have proprietary information about and that we are using and have a differentiated offering. And then on the right-hand side, you see all the different types of analyses. Now, of course, you have to pick the analyses that would make most sense for you, but we're building out this whole toolbox so that we can deploy that in our CLIA labs. We have 2 CLIA labs in a centralized offering. We can deploy that system for the, for our partnership with big pharma in CDx. And of course, if we choose to, we can make it a kit, like I mentioned earlier, and then distribute it through our laboratory channels and, and then use this test in a decentralized way. Now, we have quite the pipeline behind this, this multiomic platform. The very first two tests that we have been working on is a prostate cancer rule-out test in oncology and a colorectal cancer signature, also in oncology. You see some other applications in immunology and neurology, and of course, a broad portfolio of partnerships in pharma. I will not talk about those. Those are with other partners, and we'll work on those in the background. The two cancer applications are the first ones I want to talk about. Here's the early detection for prostate cancer rule-out test. This test would live next to our current exosome prostate rule-out test. However, it's a screening test, meaning it will be run regularly, because this is for men at risk after their prostate biopsy. Once they're in the gray zone, gray zone, they need to come back and repeat, repeat their testing if they are having to go further or whether this is still safe to not go to any radical treatments. The interesting part is that this test will have a 2-3 times bigger TAM, and of course, we would utilize the same channel, the current channel we already have. It's over 40 people in North America selling these prostate tests. The next one is the screening early detection of colorectal cancer and, very importantly, advanced adenomas. It's obviously a huge market. We also know that this is a crowded market, so there are tests available currently. However, we do believe that this exosome-based testing, that our tests would significantly outperform all current solutions. That's because our sensitivity and specificity is so high. We do not intend to go to market ourselves, but we are gathering data in collaboration, and this data will then be used for negotiations to see who would like to partner with us on this test and license it from us. These negotiations, I foresee the first discussions will happen in 2-4 quarters from now. When we have a compelling data, just like we had with the ExoTRU test that we licensed to Thermo, once we have the compelling data, the negotiation will start, and we will partner on this test. Now, the last one of the screening tests we will not partner on, this is really in our wheelhouse, and that's a genetic screening test. It's called the Carrier Plus Kit. As you know, in laboratories, they run these large panels on genetic screening, basically looking at all inherited diseases, and that works fine. It's an NGS test, we're not going to compete there. But 5-10 of those markers are just really hard to read. NGS is just not the right technology for it. And the laboratories then end up running these markers in home brew setups and offline, and they have to get additional sample to run them. And it's a logistical nightmare, operational nightmare for those laboratories. And that's the reason why we have signed an agreement with Oxford Nanopore to basically, through long-read sequencing, to basically be able to run these 11 genes that are hard to do, all in 1 workflow and 1 test, in 1 readout, right? So that really would clear would resolve the nightmare of the laboratory director, and then they'll just put one test in to do all the hard-to-do genes. And this is right up our wheelhouse because, you know, we know how to design those kits, we have the channel, and, yeah, we will really get some traction really quickly because it's pretty messy out there right now. Now, there's a lot to digest, but in a nutshell, Bio-Techne will build out a leadership position in molecular diagnostics, and that's how it is. And why? Because we have the complete diagnostic solutions, right, all the way from sample to a very easy answer. We do have this tremendous competitive advantage of being able to look at these exosomes, which gives you higher sensitivity. We have strong channels in urology as well as in the laboratory space. A wonderful genetics portfolio from the Asuragen acquisition, which we can build around. We have access to those molecular controls and a great team building those out. And then we have a fantastic team working with pharma, a companion diagnostics team, and they utilize this multiomic platform I talked about for these pharma partnerships, where we make some good money and we can, you know, we can participate and know where the market is going. But also, this multiomic platform will be used for all these screening tests that we have in the pipeline, these high-value screening tests, which in some occasions, we will use for our our own portfolio, and in some occasions, we're looking at the high-value ones that we do not have a channel for. We will look at partnering them with for those. Now, last but not least, we have the spatial biology division. Yeah, this division looks at tissue, and tissue is still the gold standard. If you think about a liquid biopsy and how easy that sample is to obtain, tissue is not, by definition, pretty invasive. So you want to maximize the information you get out of the tissue, and we have a fantastic portfolio of products to do so with, the ACD franchise, and we now have automated solution with the Lunaphore franchise. So Kevin, I see that here six minutes, but that is not correct, right? Oh, okay. Excellent. Well, then I'll continue talking. Our core portfolio, this is the ACD portfolio of products that we've had for six years. It's been growing so nicely, very profitable, and, you know, that's not a coincidence. We have 47,000 unique probes in this portfolio, and if you think the nearest competitor sits in the thousands, nobody's passed 10,000 yet. We're sitting at 47,000, right? A huge portfolio of probes. Highly specific, and by the way, any tissue and over 400 species, so not just humans, mice, but over 400 species you can utilize those on. Our customers really picked up on it, and over the last 10 years, have published more than 8,600 peer-reviewed articles. And then, as I mentioned, highly profitable, but we also passed $100 million in reagents only last year. Yeah. And why is this business so successful? It looks like a complicated picture, and I'll start in the top left. You know, basically, right now, we have the capability to give true spatial insights, right? True multiomic. And when people talk about RNA, they usually talk about messenger RNA, and messenger RNA is relatively long, and therefore, I wouldn't say easy, but it is easier to detect. So if you look at the eleven o'clock position, there you see mRNA, and we came up with this RNAscope product, which has become the gold standard. You can look at those long RNAs, you can look at long non-coding RNAs, you can look at viral RNAs. And that was all fantastic because we did that best in the market. But we also invested in pushing it further because no other technology can look at short RNAs. So we really found a way, and it's a true innovation, to look at microRNA. We call it miRNAscope. You see that at the seven o'clock position. And with that product, you can look actually at short interfering RNA, microRNA, ASOs, and those are therapeutic vectors. So those are all kinds of applications that are really important in the cell and gene therapy market that Will just talked about. You keep going up, and you say, "Okay, we also want to look at single base pair differences." Well, that's why we invented BaseScope. So you can look at splice variants and point mutations, so you really look at one base pair, right? Nobody else can do this. So now you have all varieties of lengths of RNA, and eventually, we also made steps into being able to interrogate proteins. So there are different markets, research markets, where this is being used, namely oncology, inflammation, neurosciences, and as I just mentioned, gene therapy, right? But most new researchers were really interested in having automated solutions, and that's exactly the reason why we added Lunaphore to the Bio-Techne family. We brought this company in because it's, first of all, a fantastic solution for automation, but they also have a real broad proteomic portfolio, and therewith, we would complete the circle that I just showed with way more, way more of those little boxes and have a full, a full gamut of solutions. So this company, as I mentioned, is fast-growing. It's nine years old. The technology is well-patented. It's got over 120 employees based in Switzerland, and, you know, their vision was really in line with ours, and that was to bring spatial omics. Spatial, meaning you can see where, what happened, and omics, DNA, RNA, and protein, bringing it all together. And their first platform is called the COMET. That platform can run RNA as well as proteins, and it's pretty amazing. It's, it's just world-class, because it has full automation, basically walk-away automation. You can build custom panels, meaning all these markers you want to look at, very easy to build a panel. You can use your own antibodies. This is very important for some researchers because if you have used antibodies before, you want to use the same antibodies because you already have data, and you want to compare. So you can use your own antibodies, any antibody, really. You can also buy panels from us. We call them SPIRE, and these panels will give you, you know, a palette of different antibodies you can use in certain research areas. The machine has excellent reproducibility, and that is very important. So in any lab, at any time, at any temperature, really, you'll get the same results because the box has temperature control, and it's really, how you call it? It preserves a tissue. It's really non-destructive, and that means you can run the same test one more time, or you can run different markers. It also means that you can run NGS after it, and that's important because your tissue sample, you usually don't have too much of it, and you want to be careful... to use all of it, and that's why it's so nice that you use this, this technology, in front of other research tools. Now, the nice thing, too, is that those have an end-to-end solution, and that means that your complex data that comes out of this machine goes into the software, and then eventually you can get your image analyzed, and you get really nice data off this box. Now, what did this do for our addressable market? Two years ago, I was talking about the ISH market we're in. You see the lower left, ISH is the in situ hybridization. That's a $2 billion market in the dark blue circle. And it was mainly RNA and some DNA. But if you think about it now, with adding automation and adding a full proteomic panel, we are basically stepping it up into the full spatial biology business. And that then translates into a much larger market, which would be $5 billion, still growing those double digits, and gives us a much broader opportunity. Now, I'll, I think that we will be taking market share pretty rapidly, and that's because we just have this fantastic combination now. If you think about a fully automated, same slide, multiomics workflow by combining Lunaphore and ACD, this is going to be the best solution in the market. As I mentioned, very fast and flexible assay design. So think about it. You want to take some RNA targets. We got 47,000 in the library, so have at it. You can pick them, and then you can use your own antibodies, or you order some of these SPIRE panels with predetermined antibodies. You can basically buy any antibody you really would like. Will, by the way, has a ton of antibodies, so, he would probably want our customers to use the Thermo, the Bio-Techne antibodies. Good catch. And, and, you know, we'll work on that together, and of course, our AI and our website will guide people in making the right, decisions here. If you think about, the workflow in the middle bubbles here, there's always standard tissue processing. So for any workflow, you would have to put your tissue on your slide, and there's some work that you have to be done. But after that, in our solution, you put that slide on the machine, and all the way through hybridization, amplification, the RNA detection, the protein detection, all the way into image analysis, outcome, out comes an image. So you could basically walk away, run it overnight, and it's really, really smooth workflow. Now, the bottom gray bar here, you see that you can load 4 slides onto our box. Most solutions have just 1 slide. The throughput is really, really high, so you can run up to 20 slides a week, and that's also unique in this, in the market. As I mentioned, you can run... It's Multiomics, so it runs the RNA as well as the protein, on the same slide, all in the same workflow, and it's fully automated. You know, some people talk about automation, but, yeah, you still have to do cumbersome hybridization steps on your slide, or it comes from the stainer, and it goes into the imager, and you have to transfer the slides, and it's not fully walk away. And we do have a fully automated solution. And as I mentioned, at the back end, it basically has wonderful software to do your image analysis. Now, where does that get us? It gets us to a space where Lunaphore and the proteins give you all kinds of information a pathologist would like to see, and then the whole gamut of RNA information can be used from the ACD corner, basically looking at any species, any organ, and gives you a fully automated, full spatial biology toolkit. Now, how does this fit in the overall market, right? There are other players and how does this interact? Well, we do have automation partners, but before I go there, I'll talk about the different phases the technology usually goes through. Through these stages, you have discovery, right? This is where a researcher tries to acquire knowledge, right? So you look at hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of markers, and this is where players such as TenX Genomics as well as NanoString sit, right? We really feel this is symbiotic because out of those large panels come novel RNA biomarkers. And those biomarkers, once you know which ones you are interested in, you want to run them with more slides, but you want to run them very precisely, high sensitivity, and very repeatably, right? And that is the area we call translational. So this is the translational research. And if you think about it, we have, of course, partnership, meaning we are now part of the same family with Lunaphore for HiPlex, if you look at many markers. We've also enabled standard Standard BioTools Hyperion system because there's over 100 in the market and they are high-power users, so we have enabled it. And then if you want to go lowplex, but with many, many samples, and you think about 30 slides at the same time, that's when you can, you can go and use the Leica system and Roche. We have enabled both those companies. And if you really wanted to, you can also run this assay manually. So the interesting thing, though, is once you get more and more data on those markers of interest, there might be that one marker that you really want to make a diagnostic tool, and that one marker would then, you know, you would have to run it repeatedly and very, very precisely... And for that, you would be able to use a Leica system, which we have deployed and enabled for the clinical industry. Now, the clinical applications, a couple of years ago, people were not sure if spatial biology instrumentation would make it into clinical, but we've made it. Like, you know, we've got over 10% of my revenues are right now coming out of the clinical space, and it's growing faster than the rest of the portfolio. That's also another surprise, because if you look at this, our best and earliest application was or is HPV, human papillomavirus. This is related to head and neck cancer. And if you look at the other tests, right, IHC, and there's a DNA ISH test, and then you have the RNAscope ISH test. The other test. First of all, they have over 20% false negatives, which is horrible because you think you have a disease, and you might not have it. Secondly, it does not really show if the virus is active. It could be also a dormant virus. So our assay shows whether the HPV virus is active, and as you can see from the sensitivity/specificity table, with 2 blue boxes around it, we are best in class when it comes to sensitivity and specificity, and therefore, adoption has just been really strong. So that means that our assays, in general, not only do we have the right quality systems and thinking in place, but our assays can really perform in a clinical setting. This chart could look familiar because I showed it 2 years ago, but fortunately for me, there are more check marks on there. Meaning otherwise, Chuck would have not been so happy, but I made fantastic progress, I think. So if you think back in time, right, I just talked about looking at RNA, right? So we, of course, came up with RNAscope about 10 years ago, and there is the RNA solution. Then the big innovation I was talking about is looking at those shorter RNAs, right? That's the microRNA innovation. Then we wanted to look at DNA. Then you want to look at more markers, so we started multiplexing. And that's the level I was at 2 years ago, September 2021, when we had the investor meeting. And since, we've really broadened to multiomic, meaning adding protein capabilities to it, and then we wanted to get it automated, and that's why we have the Lunaphore acquisition from 2 months ago added to this product line. Now, that's where we are today, and where is my next launch here? And that's in co-detection of RNA and protein, fully automated, and that's quarters away. Of course, the Lunaphore team and the ACD team are working together and building out that menu really rapidly. There are further image analysis tools that I would like to add to the portfolio. Of course, our successes in clinical will also depend on menus. So I would like to broaden the menu in the clinical space with other assays. And I know we can be very, very successful there, and I want to build a stronghold in the clinical space. Now, all in a nutshell, our spatial biology division is basically the only one that has a fully automated multiomic view of health and disease. So on the left-hand side, you see all the targets again. So there's all these different RNA targets, and proteins in both, right? Because that's what we just acquired. It's a seamless transition. It's very interesting because if you look at the left-hand side of that circle, that's a fluorescent signal, and that's a signal, an amplification type that they really use in research, and our system can, of course, do that. But pathologists use the chromogenic amplification, so you see it looks very different, and our system can also do that. So that means we're compatible both ways, and that means that the step into clinical is much easier using our technology because we can accommodate both those amplification systems. And as you can see on the right-hand side, we already have a footprint in clinical, but we want to continue broadening out that portfolio. Now, this is back to the segment level. These are the three divisions. I walked you through what they do, their strategies, and also their sustainable advantage, right? Because each and every one of them does have a sustainable advantage. And I'll talk about that a little bit more in 2 slides. First, I want to talk about the strategic progress we've made in this segment. The first header is build out our product portfolio, and yes, we started building out the capability of assays, making assays, and delivering assays to our customers inx DRD, right? We've really developed the best-in-class exosome-based liquid biopsy. And again, this is really important because the sensitivity is so much better, and therefore, you can detect diseases much earlier. And our proof of principle is EPI, the exosome-based prostate test, and there we passed a 100,000 test mark earlier this year. Then in spatial biology, we obviously already had a broad portfolio of RNA detection, but we added the Lunaphore company because they are providing the best-in-class automation, but also the proteomic portion that we are just tippy-toeing in, but they already have that fully available, so it's a match made from heaven. On the channel side, we fortified our links into the Chinese IVD companies with DRD. We build out a North America promotional channel for urology, and then we build out a channel for the laboratories in Europe. And this we did while we were building some of our fundamental capabilities. You know, we continue to drive Six Sigma and DRD. We have a market access team. That's a team that basically increases your coverage of your test, right? So we're bringing out a menu of molecular tests, so you need to work continuously on them being covered. And we also have built out a bioinformatics team, also important for the development of these tests and generating the right data. And those two capabilities we've built out, and then we also build out our medical and clinical capabilities across the segment. Now, that means we've made great progress in the segment and that we have real, game-changing projects ahead. And on the right-hand side, there's a couple of shorter-term things that we need to do. One is to build out the Spatial Biology channel to also be able to sell instrumentation, right? They've been selling this $100 million business of RNA reagents, but you need, we need to make sure we can sell instruments, too, and build that capability. Of course, we want to unlock the Bio-Techne capabilities for this new acquisition. And then very importantly, the IVD portfolio. You saw the portfolio in monitoring as well as in screening. That portfolio is going to be very important, so we need to progress the pipeline very rapidly. So that's high on the agenda. Now, my very last slide is the care cycle, and this is why these businesses kind of link together. I'm trying to describe to you how this really works, because some people might say, "Hey, you know, how do you come up with those three divisions?" Now, this is the reason. You know, on the 12 o'clock position, you see that blood tube. That's basically routine testing. That's the testing that we would do at your annual checkup, right? Now, that's a very crowded market, very competitive. So we're not playing in that, other than that, we create the standards and controls and the agents that we sell to the people that play there, which is these large IVD companies. And the IVD has long-standing relationships there and real deep understanding of the assay standards and controls. So that's how we play in that market up there, and that's our competitive advantage long term. Now, the moment one of your tests is out of range, usually you get sent to get a screening test. Now, here we want to play more, like the ExoDx prostate test sits there, the colorectal test would sit there. This is the portfolio we want to build out for the screening test I talked about, and we believe that our competitive advantage, our long-term competitive advantage, is that we can look at these exosomes, which gives it more specificity, and you will check the... You, you will find the disease earlier than other technologies. Now, again, once you then get flagged, and you end up having to go, further down this chain, you will - they, they will look at, you know, get obtaining a tissue sample. Yes, tissue sample is more invasive, but it brings a lot of information to you. And as I talked about the spatial biology division, we have fantastic assays to, to really optimize the information to, you get out of this tissue. You know, our sustainable advantage there is the RNAscope portfolio and fully automated system, so we feel very comfortable in that corner. Now, once your diagnosis and your treatment plan gets made, so meaning the doctor decide what you're going to get treated with, then usually you want to see how the treatment is working and if the patient is recovering or if there is resistance building up. And that's where these monitoring tests come in, that I talked about earlier. Here we have that easy workflow. This first test would be this ESR1 that I talked about in breast cancer, and we'll build out a portfolio. Again, the reason why we feel that there's a sustainable advantage is because of our exosome portion of that test, which will make it more sensitive and which will make early detection of these events much more likely. Now, once this patient is healthy again, after treatment, you go straight back to the twelve o'clock position, and that's how the circle is round, and that's how these businesses work together. And that's how I believe we have sustainable advantages across those businesses. And that's how I think Bio-Techne will become a major player in the molecular diagnostics industry. Now to the more exciting part, which is Jim and the numbers that we've been waiting for. Thank you very much for your attention, and looking forward to seeing you next time. Thanks, John. Only at an investor conference is the numbers the most important or exciting part of the presentation, I guess. But, thank you both, Kim and Will, for, you know, just a tremendous job, incredible job, describing the capabilities of our platforms and the, and the future potential of them. I'm just always in awe when I hear them speak in depth about their businesses, and, and, for me, it really drives home, you know, our mission as a company, right? To, to catalyze advances in science, to enable our customers to improve the quality of lives of patients. At our core, that's what we do. Of course, fulfilling this mission wouldn't be possible without, as Chuck talked about, the empowerment, passion, innovation, and collaboration of our colleagues, over 3,000 of them, that make up our Epic culture. But of course, there's another stakeholder that also stands to benefit from our company executing on its mission, and that's our investors, of course. So I'll spend the next, you know, maybe 20-30 minutes or so, going through what those strong financial returns might look like and how we get there. And I think you'd do me a favor if you could flip the, the, or was it already on the? Never mind. I'm good. Well, I'll do what Kim does when he's stuck. Yeah! Yeah, okay, we're good. All right, so before we get into the future, we'll talk a bit about the current and how we've gotten here in the past, and a lot of how our strategies have already provided strong financial returns. You know, our revenue breakdown today, this is as of fiscal year 2023, so those who follow our company, well, that's just ending here this past June, with $1.1 billion of revenue. If you look at it by segments, roughly, three-quarters of our revenue does come from the Protein Sciences segment. Dig down a little deeper, one of the reasons for that is, you know, the majority of our core portfolio, that being our RUO proteins, RUO antibodies, and our ELISAs, our legacy products reside within that segment. And albeit that diagnostics and genomics is today a lot smaller than protein sciences, two of our four major growth platforms for the future, that being spatial biology and liquid biopsy, do reside in that segment. You know, moving over to the products, looking at the products, Chuck, you already saw a preview this from Chuck earlier, but I'll repeat it here quickly. You know, over 80% of our revenue is driven by consumables and makes for a fairly resilient and recurring revenue, not to mention very, very profitable revenue. And as Chuck also alluded to, the instruments make about 10% of our portfolio, but it's a very, very strong pull-through of very specific consumables that can only be used on that instrument, which drives 10% of our total consumable business model. So we think of our ProteinSimple as more of a closer to a 20% contribution to our overall company, as opposed to just the 10% that's pure instrument. Moving down to by geography, in the Americas make up roughly 60%. The rest of the world is around 40%. And the key point I wanna draw on here is, Asia, China and APAC combined, is over 15% of our revenue today. And we've talked about one of our major growth themes and pillars is that of, regional expansion, especially in Asia and lately primarily in China. And that remains true going forward as well, which we can get into in Q&A. But to put that in perspective on why that's been so important for us, and Chuck said China was 2 or 3%, and total Asia was around 5% of our revenue ten years ago, and now it's north of 15%. So essentially, that region has tripled the growth rate of the rest of the world. And then finally, by what I call end market on the lower right, you see the pharma biotech now makes up 50% of our revenue, more than double that of our academic customers. Roughly, again, ten years ago, that was closer to a 50/50 kind of split. That's purposeful. Our strategies and our product development and applications have been geared more heavily towards the biopharma end markets, simply because they're more scalable. They have larger budgets, and they usually have more stable budgets. It's not to say academic's not important, and we've been growing there as well. And you need to stay relevant in academic as a life science tool supplier, because as you all know, today's academic is tomorrow's biotech. The one changing note I notice here from what we've shown historically is this, diagnostics slice of our revenue profile. So most of this revenue is out of our diagnostics reagents division, and I think which we, we refer to as our OEM model for diagnostic instrument suppliers, the calibrators and control business. But a lot of our molecular diagnostics, scaling up quite well in, in the future, so will, diagnostic uses for our spatial biology platform, as well as, for our instrument platforms, namely Simple Plex. We thought it's important now to start calling this out, as the end market, it really is ultimately, which is diagnostics. So again, today, that consists of our diagnostics reagents division largely and our molecular diagnostics division. The last bit there is distributors. That's essentially a mirror of our Asia business, because most of our Asian business is transacted through distributors. All right, talk a little bit about our capital deployment historically. It's obviously been a key driver for how we're positioned today. As Chuck alluded to, also, you know, no longer required to do M&A to double the size of this company every 5 years. We think we have a pathway to get there organically, but it's because of our deployment of capital over the past 10 years that has allowed that to happen. You see over two-thirds of that has been geared towards M&A, and aside from bolstering our core, it's been fairly evenly distributed in terms of our investments into our key four growth platforms. That being our instrument platforms in proteomics, our spatial biology, liquid biopsy, and cell and gene therapy, all between $400 million and $500 million of investment into each. Cell and gene therapy, if you add the $50 million for the GMP protein manufacturing facility, that gets you to over $400 million there as well. It's been a fairly purposeful M&A strategy over the past 10 years, and it's why we have four fantastic growth platforms in the future today. Talk a bit about our profitability. As we've talked in various investor conferences and one-on-one, we've explained this quite a bit. I think most of you have to understand this, but nonetheless, it's worth repeating that when we do M&A, it's gonna impact our margin profile, at least in the short term, you know, for at least a year, sometimes two years. And I think this chart illustrates that very well, where right before the ProteinSimple acquisition, which was the first major one we did nine years ago, we arrived at about 40% operating margin. If you look at our acquisition history, they tend to be smaller companies with lower revenues, but very fast-growing revenues that on the verge of that tipping point of scaling, on the verge of profitability within a year or two. And so therefore, for the first year or two, they tend to be diluted to our margin. You see that step down that occurred after the ProteinSimple acquisition for a couple of years, and then just as it started to stabilize, we had the ACD acquisition. There was another leg down in our margin from that, together with Exosome. Then when, you know, the COVID period hit, there wasn't a lot of M&A going on, and neither from us. I think we went two years or so without a real acquisition. That, coupled with the, you know, the amazing growth we had in all of our growth platforms and the COVID halo impact that scaled our entire portfolio, including our core, how quickly we ramped up to close to 40%, following that. It really wasn't until we made the Asuragen acquisition a year and a half, two years ago, and then NanoCell last year, and now this year, Lunaphore, that that curve starts to come back down again. Chuck already gave you the figures on ProteinSimple in terms of where it started and where it is now. I'll add to that ACD. ACD was $25 million-$30 million in revenue, and we purchased that five years ago or so. It was not breakeven at the time, and now we're sitting in a business, you saw Kim show over $100 million of revenue and operating margins at 30%. So, you know, it's because of these acquisitions that we look for that, because their unique position, their unique differentiation from the competition, their IP and the market ahead that, that allows them to scale, gives them all very strong gross margins. And those gross margins, usually will turn into very high operating margins, as it has in our core portfolio. The other thing I'll point out with regards to this chart is the absolute figure. It looks like a dramatic drop and then increase, and then a dramatic drop. But let's keep in mind here that we're still talking about a range of somewhere between the mid-30s and 40%. So we definitely have a leading industry profitability margins, and that's been a core financial competency of this company since the very beginning, and something we're proud of and will continue in the future. I won't say really much more about ROIC, except for the fact that it basically mirrors more or less the profile of operating margin in these acquisitions, and also mirrors the profile of a industry-leading ROIC to begin with. With ROIC ranging from the, you know, low double digits to nearly 20%, depending on the timing of when we do acquisitions. And that's exactly why we have a pretty high threshold for ROIC on new acquisitions, because we're proud of our high history of a high ROIC, and we want to make sure that continues going forward. All right, now we're going to transition to the future, and I know I can't get away with talking about the future without addressing, without addressing the targets from two years ago. So this will be the one slide we'll do it. I'll get off it. I'm never going to talk about fiscal year 2026 again until maybe into fiscal year 2025, okay? You know, but we recognize for sure that there are headwinds to that target we put out two years ago, right? I mean, it's just, it's, it, it's pretty obvious. I kind of categorized them into, into some themes. And the first one, believe it or not, being cell and gene therapy. Despite how well cell and gene therapy has performed for us and will continue to, you know, it's, it's a nascent market, and when you've got nascent markets, you know, you're learning every day about how that market's going to develop. I don't think we were alone in our thinking two, three years ago, and we're probably not alone in our thinking now with regards to how that's evolved. Mainly is that, you know, we talked about the number of trials that are out there, but it's a relatively low amount that are getting through to commercialization. And, you know, there's reasons, there's personnel reasons from the FDA, but I think a bigger reason is that there was a perception 2-3 years ago that cell and gene therapies would get through the clinical trial process at a similar rate they say that biologics did, or even small molecule drugs did in the past, call it, you know, 3, 4, 5 years kind of time frame. Well, I think what we all missed is that cell and gene therapy, aside from being novel and new, they're actually cures for disease. They're not just treatments for disease. To prove a cure does take more time to demonstrate. So I, you know, basically, the market leaders out there are saying now that the average time for approval could be stretched as long as 7-10 years. So we had in our, in our initial assessment that, we talked about that inflection point that was going to occur once our customers, got through the clinical trials and became, and got commercialized, and that would probably happen in the latter part of our five-year period. I think it's more realistic now that that will happen outside of that original five-year period. So, we estimate that about a $100 million impact to our original assessment, two years ago for fiscal year 2026. The other item is the ExoDx prostate. Yet again, another test that's now performing remarkably well, with 90% revenue growth over this past year. But about a year or so later than we anticipated, two years ago. Partly because we were hoping that the folks going back to see their doctor would happen sooner than it did, but it did luckily happen, start happening last year. But also these LCD reconsiderations to get the Medicare reimbursement to equate to what the NCCN guidelines were, it took two additional passes, and at the time, we were hoping it would be one additional pass. The last one didn't get through until, I think, January, February timeframe of this past year. And that's important not only for getting paid, but it's very important to get doctors' acceptance into their practice, because they don't want to issue a test where they feel like the patients could be on the hook for paying for it. So that was very important, even from a doctor's perspective. But again, the delay has, we believe, and we extrapolate that out to 2026, potentially $100 million of impact. And now, you know, you get to China. So clearly, China has been an issue all this past year. They've probably suffered most from the, as we, as we pointed, the COVID hangover, and, you know, they're not out of it yet. They're still working through it. We're very confident that they're gonna, they're gonna come back soon and come back strong, but they're not there yet. And when you extrapolate, because they're such an important part of our growth, given the fact that they triple our growth rate everywhere else, when you extrapolate that, call it macroeconomics slowdown pause to 2026 is about a $50 million impact. You know, this is not necessarily organic, but unfavorable foreign exchange rates, they are what they are, and the US dollar is definitely stronger now than it was two years ago. So that has a, you know, somewhat significant impact. And then there's this kind of big question mark, because it's very hard to quantify, which is why we're not gonna say a new 26 target. We're gonna think further out than that. But at the end of the day, these targets were developed in, you know, summer of 2021, when we were at the peak of what I call the COVID halo, right? I mean, our customers were flush with cash with all the COVID testing and COVID vaccine that was going on and research going on. VC, private equity were flush with cash and pouring into biotechs. You know, at the time, no one saw an end to that really, because there wasn't even a vaccine out really at that point in time. I think everyone's thinking that that kind of momentum would last, you know, potentially last for 4 or 5 years was an elevated thinking from the get-go. So I mentioned that because I think that's mostly impacting the biotech space. We don't see biotech space as crashing or dying. The levels that we see, it's funding going on, it's probably familiar with what it was in fiscal year 2019 before COVID hit. It's just that it was abnormally high during the COVID halo, right? But nonetheless, it's a big, big impact to, you know, we extrapolate that out to 2026, and I'm not even gonna try to, try to, dollarize it. I'll let, I'll let you probably do that. But, that's the last I'm gonna talk about fiscal year 2026 and get off the Debbie Downer, and instead, let's talk positive, because we have an amazingly positive story. Starting with, yes, the last three years, right? So even though, you know, we're telling you that there's major headwinds to our fiscal year 2026 target, our growth these last three years was tremendous. And as importantly, or more importantly, it was even more tremendous in the key growth platforms that are what is gonna carry our company for the next 10 years and beyond. 54%. 54% more annual revenue as a total company today in fiscal year 2023 than we had just 3 years ago. And well, let me keep going, and I'll come back to my point. Cell and gene therapy, right? So I just explained cell and gene therapy, the reason for a headwind in 2026, but it still grew more than 3x in 2023 versus 2020, and the GMP proteins component of that grew over 4x. Exosome Diagnostics, despite the late start, 150% higher revenue than 3 years ago. Our bioprocess analytical instruments, which have been around the longest, 9 years in our portfolio, still grew 80% over those past 3 years, cumulatively. Spatial biology, yes, not to our aspirations two years ago, but still grew 60% over the past three years without automation. And then finally, China. Everyone's down on China, down on China. It contributed 65% of to our growth last year. And, you know, they're holding their own on consumables right now, at least, which is good to see. So and that's the last point I wanna make here, is that we benefited. We were positioned extremely well, and, and as a result, we are a much bigger company and even much, definitely more stronger company than we were three years ago. And it's not temporary. As 2023 proved out, where a lot of companies in our space are calling revenues down and, and, you know, negative growth as a result of the hangover, we still, we still grew 5%. So what I'm saying is this is sticky revenue. It's recurring revenue, and it forms a new baseline, very strong baseline, healthy baseline for our growth going forward. So what about our growth going forward? We did a little different approach this time than we've done in past investor days. You know, we talked about how our five-year plan, and Chuck showed you, it's geared off of our prioritization process that we do internally. What we've, you know, kind of the learnings off this 2026 being probably the first time we've—it could be likely a material miss from what we thought. We said: We need to step back a bit and look at these markets bigger, broader, and for a longer period of time, because so many of them are still evolving, namely liquid biopsy, cell and gene therapy, and spatial biology. Those three, I think everyone believes will be huge markets, but in a nascent developing market, it can be lumpy, choppy, and trying to pinpoint those inflection points is very, very difficult. So the 10 years is a significant amount of time. So we thought that was a pretty... And by the way, we, you know, this management team now has been in place and our strategy has been in place for 10 years, too. So I thought it made sense, if we're looking 10 years back, let's look 10 years out. Chuck showed a chart that was very similar to this by our product and markets. His was more looking back historically to where our market sizes are today. You know, starting from that third column, we start talking about what the growth rates we believe look like in the future. And these aren't crazy growth rates for these, these big markets. Low double-digit growth. I feel like we're being somewhat conservative here. It is over a long period of time, but these are, these are hot markets, right? And they can be. As Will showed us, you know, the monoclonal antibody market exploded from $5 billion to $125 billion. So this could be way conservative, depending on how you look at it. But under this view, we still, our markets by themselves, we believe that we are very well positioned, and in total, we'll more than double over the next 10 years. And as we continue with our positioning, our very strong positioning in all these end markets, we will continue to well exceed the growth of the market. And these growth rates you see here for biotech in the long term are, you know, in all categories except for one, are essentially less than the growth rates we've experienced the last 10 years. So I think there's some conservatism there as well, given that the inflection point in some of these markets still haven't hit yet. If you do the math and you run that all out, it just says, "Hey, all the way from a conservative, believe it or not, conservative perspective, we could be a $4-$5 billion company in 10 years, double and double again." And that's what we're setting out to do. And what for me is even more exciting is that 10 years from now, it's one thing to say you can double and double again, and then if you're done, your multiple goes to, like, 9 or whatever. But you'll see, we believe 10 years out, we'll still have a very, very small market share, and still plenty, plenty, plenty of room to grow even beyond that. But I know this room, and I know that, you know, very few of you. There's a few that do, and I love, I love those investors, but very few of you have a 10-year horizon, right? And I just hope most of you have at least a 3- to 5-year horizon, right? Because that's what we're in for, we're in for the long game. I missed my cue. Before I get to the shorter term view, which is the 5-year view that you're probably most interested in, I do want to also take this 10-year view and flip it on its side a little bit and look at it from a pure end market perspective, as opposed to a product end market. So if you think about it, there's really two broad end markets that are going to propel our growth over the next decade. If we keep talking about it, it's cell and gene therapy. You can see from this waterfall here, cell and gene therapy alone can contribute $2 billion to our revenue over the course of the next ten years. You can see there that the biggest buckets of contribution to that growth, of course, is our GMP reagents for all the reasons that Will got into. We are including now Wilson Wolf in these figures. Now, we typically don't include any M&A, and we still don't. But Wilson Wolf is essentially ours, and it will be officially, if no later than fiscal year 2027. So if we're going to look at years beyond 27, it makes sense to start including that in our views. So you see the Wilson Wolf contribution there. And then a very healthy and nice contribution, believe it or not, from the proteomic analytic tools that Will talked about. So the key here is that as an end market, we talk about our GMP proteins because it's a huge piece of the growth for us in that market, but it touches our entire portfolio. No different than the biologics drug therapies do or even small molecules do. We play across the board in our portfolio in all of it. Same thing with diagnostics. You look at diagnostics, you know, we're sub $200 million in diagnostics today. That's including our core diagnostics reagents division. But we see a potential for $1 billion or more revenue growth over the next decade from this end market. And if you look kind of in the center there, by far, the biggest contributor of this would, we believe, is our ExoDx platform. Again, for all the reasons Will talked about, it's a superior platform. And if we dissect that a little more, right down the middle, you see there's ExoDx that's in two different buckets. There's the ExoDx prostate growth, and there's kind of the all other. And the ExoDx prostate growth, the growth from our Asuragen products and our core diagnostics reagents, that's all the products we have today. And particularly prostate is still nascent, has a long ways to go. So really, three-fourths of that growth is going to come from what we have today. But of course, we're not stopping what we have today. You heard about the pipeline that we have within ExoDX. But also you heard, you know, Kim talk about where we're going. This spatial is ultimately in the clinics and diagnostics with that platform. And you heard from Will about our opportunity with Simple Plex as a diagnostic platform, and it's not pie in the sky. You heard him mostly, it's actually already happening now. It's just still very small scale. And we know diagnostic markets from our own history with ExoDX take a long time to evolve. So you'll see there are very small slivers of contribution from spatial biology and Simple Plex, and that's why we have the significant upside potential to the right, because if those, you know, if our strategies evolve to where that can be pulled in. We're trying to be conservative somewhat in this view, so if they can get pulled in sooner, there'd be much more significant upside to the billion-dollar bogey we have right now for fiscal year 2033. So again, diagnostics, cell and gene therapy, those two end markets alone can get us to $4 billion of revenue in 10 years. So now, what does this mean for a shorter term view? You know, again, we kind of did this top down, starting 10 years out, and we combined that with our bottom-up prioritization process to make sure it held together and made sense. Our new five-year view for fiscal year 2028, I know honestly, looks very similar to our last target we had. So you might be just saying, "Oh, look, we're kind of kicking the can down the road." There's actually more to it than that. I mean, it is true that the strategies are still the same. There's no major shift in our strategy. We're actually starting a stronger point than we were even 2 years ago... But there are nuances within this that I think make this forecast that actually de-risk this forecast and make it even that much more achievable. I'd rather share with you what I believe is, you know, more realistically achievable and then show the upside potential next to that. I'll go through this a little bit piece by piece so you understand where I'm coming from. I'm actually gonna work backwards from the top of the chart down to the left, starting with Wilson Wolf, right? So our outlook now in this greater than $2 billion in fiscal year 2028, does include Wilson Wolf for the reasons I just mentioned in the, in the 10-year view, right? That was not included in our, in our prior forecast. We hadn't bought the company yet, or hadn't even bought a piece of it yet. Cell and gene therapy is a very large contribution in the 10 years, but you'll notice, relatively speaking, not as much in the 5-year. That's because in this forecast, we haven't assumed any commercialization of our customers. Where our growth, you know, we're growing like crazy in cell and gene therapy, and where we're taking share dramatically is in, I'd say, early clinicals and pre-clinicals. You know, the ones that are already in clinicals, they wanna get through their clinicals. It's very, very difficult for them to wanna swap out at this point. But we are mopping up everything that's below, say, phase 2 and phase 3. And it's really a pyramid. I mean, the 2,000 clinicals that we all share is the tip of the pyramid. We know firsthand from our own customer interactions that there's at least 10 or more indications in the pipeline for every one that's in a clinical trial, and that's the space that we're waiting. But it's gonna take longer for that to get through the various phases of the clinicals and ultimately become commercialized. So we've, we've stripped that out. This is all growth from new customers and customers progressing through clinicals. Now, is there a chance that some of these customers that we're currently doing is selling proteins to and other products could be commercialized in year 4 or year 5? Sure. And that would be, that would be upside, but we're not baking that right now into our plus $2 billion, greater than $2 billion dollar figure. Moving down to the left, the Exosome Asuragen, our liquid diagnostics business. So here I'd say the fundamental difference is, again, learnings from the past. This is primarily growth of our existing Asuragen carrier screening products and our prostate test, and a little bit of ExoTrue dribbled in, you know, once that... I hope that goes live in the next year with Thermo. But all the new products and pipeline activity that you heard, Kim talk about, we understand how long it takes to get that to market. And some of that's in our 10-year, as you saw, but we're not putting that in our 5-year. Could some of that happen in our 5-year? Sure. And if it does, it's upside. And then finally, I'll speak to the spatial biology space. So this is, this is one, probably the only one, where we've actually taken our expectations higher than where we were two years ago. But the reason we've done that now is because, of course, with the Lunaphore acquisition. We truly believe that Lunaphore, combined with our ACD and our RNAscope, will be transformational for that product line, too. And when I mean transformational, it's not like it's been shabby growth. We've still had double-digit growth, but the number one, we believe, the number one limitation of much more vast and quick adoption of this technology has been a lack of automation. And now with that, you know, we think it's off to the races. So that would be a very nice contributor to our revenue growth the next five years. When it comes to our proteomic instrument platforms and our core reagents, just because they're already of significant size, even more moderate growth rates have a significant contribution to the overall revenue number. I would say the growth rates we've assumed for these two categories are more in line with what our growth rates were pre-pandemic, meaning actually a slowdown in the growth rate versus what we've experienced the last three years. If there's two categories in this waterfall that are actually ahead of our plan that we put together two years ago, it's these two. So we've actually been conservative in taking those growth rates down to pre-pandemic kind of growth rate levels, which is still double-digit growth, by the way, for our instrument platform and mid to high single-digit growth for our reagents. Okay, my final slide, I'll do that on cue here, is, you know what? These are basically the key financial metrics that we're gonna be focused on and working towards every day, to achieve by the end of fiscal year 2028. First and foremost, growth, revenue growth. You know, 10 years has been about transforming this company from a low, slow grower to a best-in-class growth company within the life science tool space. And we're hell-bent on making sure that continues, and we think we're positioned better than ever to make that continue. Secondly, as I talked about before, our profitability. You know, it seems like in this space, there's always a choice that has to be made. Would you wanna be a growth company, or do you wanna be profitable? And we've never believed you have to make that choice. And I think we've proven over the past decade that you don't. And maintain our very, very strong profitability. I think that's very unique to a company that's hard to find in any company, much, much less any company in our space, is a company that is a growth company that also has industry-leading profitability. So that is extremely important to us. The level of profitability, of course, will depend on what future M&A we do and the timing of that M&A. Adjusted EPS, for those who want to get down below, operating margin, you know, we expect that to be a high teens growth simply because we should have some leverage off this kind of scale, off our fixed cost, but also assuming no further M&A, which is what this assumes at this point, we should be able to rapidly pay down debt and, and save on interest expense. Operating cash flow, shooting for 20% kind of target, is with that kind of earnings growth on the very bottom line. We also expect to get leverage off our working capital. Many of these growth initiatives don't require massive amounts of inventory, for example. So we should be able to exceed our cash flow slightly more than our earnings going forward. You know, another beautiful thing about our business, high consumable model, very low capital intensity. And, you know, the capital we do spend tends to be more for capacity to support our growth than anything else. So over the next five years, we're assuming about an average of between $50-$55 million of CapEx. I'd say about half of that is sustaining, and roughly half of that is capacity expansion. We do have some major investments. I say major, it's all relative, but we do have some big investments to make still with regards to our GMP antibody capabilities as well as our regenerative medicine protein, GMP protein capabilities. And that's on the, it's on the docket to do this year, in fact. And then finally, with all this cash flow that we expect to generate over the next 5 years, cumulatively, we believe that will give us roughly $5 billion of dry powder to continue the strategy that's worked the last 10 years, which is focused on M&A and bolster our existing growth pillars with that M&A, and/or find new growth pillars because it's life sciences, and there's always, there's always a new mousetrap out there, some- there's someone that's changing the world, and our reagents are usually touching it some way, somehow. And by the way, that $5 billion is after the purchase of Wilson Wolf, the billion-dollar purchase. And last but not least, at the end of the day, you heard Chuck talk about prioritization, and how that's a core competency of our operating processes. We will continue to be absolutely rigorous in our prioritization of investments to make sure that 5 years from now, our portfolio is positioned as it is now. Essentially, 5 years from now, when we're up here talking to you, it's a rinse and repeat to get to those 10-year targets that we talked about. With that, I believe that's the end of the prepared presentations. I think it's time for Q&A. Hello? Oh, there we go. Thanks, Jim. Yeah, just raise your hand and wait for the mic to ask a question, please. Who's gonna pick them? Yeah. Hi, guys. Thanks for a great presentation. Jim, I wanted to actually start with the op margin outlook- Yeah. 35%-40% Yeah. and see if I could just understand that. Is the way to think about that, that includes some level on M&A, and I just think it depends on how much? Correct. If so, could you sort of give a view on what organic op margins would look like if you took that $2 billion, stripped out Wilson Wolf, where would we be? If we stripped out Wilson Wolf, where- Yeah. So if we just looked at M&A- Yeah. Where would op margin, where are margins going? So if we did no M&A in the next five years, and you strip out Wilson Wolf, I still think we would be north of 40% or at least at 40%. And you never see me put on a presentation or even talk in a conversation about anything north of 40%, and I'll tell you why. You know, I think you get to 40%, even high 30s, you're talking about rarefied air with regards to profitability. So, you know, we're making, we're making these trade-offs every day, every quarter in our prioritization process that we believe about what's more important, margin or growth? Margin or growth? And my answer, of course, is always both. And so we have to walk a fine line to make sure we deliver on both. You get in that rarefied air of close to 40%, I'm more inclined to take whatever extra margin that would come, normally come from in this process and reinvest that for even faster growth. That prioritization process, which I've talked about, is roughly a third. And we're talking about, you know, 300 or so projects that come up every year. Roughly 100 of them don't make the cut. And it's not because they're bad projects, and it's not because they have bad ROIC. It may take longer, it may have a longer duration to get to that ROIC, but I would go further down that cut line to further accelerate growth in the future. So that's the rationale for not ever showing above 40%. I'd also add that, Wilson Wolf is a special case. You remember the, the chart that Jim showed, after acquisition, the dilution we, we have, that won't be the case of Wilson Wolf. That's accretive. It's running at 75% op margins right now. And, as they scale and come more under our control, it'll probably still always be around 50. So we'll have, we'll have a little bit of a bank to draw from to make sure we can surely attain the 40. But as Jim said, we're. I think we'll be above 40 overall, and that, and that will probably position ourselves at 40 with more investment for growth, so. But again, the reason for the 35-40, just like we're sitting here today, we're not at 40, we're between 35 and 40, because we will do more M&A, and hopefully a lot of it. Yeah. That's where the margins will end up settling out at the end of the day. And, you know, depending when we do that M&A, it could still be early stage M&A that's done late in that cycle. So it'll have the, it'll have the impact of margin dilution, with maybe not seeing that revenue until the next two or three years out, and you just can't predict that, right, but... Okay, and maybe just to follow up on the mid-teens target, and it's an ambitious goal, but you do have a lot of high-growth things that you're targeting there. One of the things that we talked about, at least in the last couple of quarters or years, is the difficulty of comps and just the ups and downs in the market. Can you talk a little bit about your assumptions for things like academic budgets and pharma development spending, and just what it is that you would expect out of the trajectory from 2023 to 2024- ... in order to get to that target. Do you feel like the things in the hopper can sort of supersede the comp issue that we sometimes talk about? It's hard to grow mid- to high-teens every year. Just talk a little bit- Yeah. about the path there. Well, first of all, comps are gonna get-- are getting easier now, so we've got something to work from there. And I think we all expected there to be much more investment, much more funding coming off of COVID. I mean, the country went crazy for a while, and I'm actually a little surprised at the backing off there is on academic funding. We'll see what ends up getting through Congress, but most countries are still committed, and there will be another X factor out there. You know, there's, there are variants now. I think COVID's seems to be coming back right now. So who knows? But I think the trend will be largely, I think, maybe just like pre-COVID, 8% kind of numbers long term, I think, for academic growth. I think it'll be safe for us. You know, we've been mitigating a lot of our sensitivity to that anyway. These high growth areas we're talking about, within another couple of years, they start paying the bills here, right? They become material, and they kind of, you know, live outside, you know, the ground rules we're currently all living in. So even so, you know, tough macro environment we're in, we're still a 50%+ grower in our, in our cell and gene therapy area, as an example, you know. Nearly 100 in exosome, you know. So it's, so, you know, we'll break some rules that way. Then maybe Will can follow up on the detail around his segment, which- Yeah, I think, you know, thinking about sort of outside potential for proteomics within that pharma space, right? Even if there is some leveling off, what we're seeing is this pent-up demand to get kind of the answers, whether it's a mechanism of action for a drug and leveraging that genomic data. So, you know, as I mentioned, in these academic parts, you can see moving to multi-omics. But if you look at what's happening in big pharma, and all of the big pharma, the top 20, they all have high-throughput proteomics platforms that are really linked to the genomic data they've got. So it really is enabling, not just on MOA, but going kind of backwards and looking at drug candidates. So I think, you know, they look at ways they want to deploy whatever kind of investment strategy they've got, it's going to be overweighted into the proteomics side. So I think there's a really nice advantage there. If I could, Dan, I'll get to part of your question, which I think you mentioned academic as well, as part of your question. You know, I'll be honest with you, I think 10 years I've been trying to build an algorithm that ties NIH funding with our academic growth, and I've yet to find one. And I don't think it's just us, I think it's across our industry. I mean, as an example, we know academic budgets were increasing double digits throughout COVID, but no one was talking about double-digit growth in academic and life science tools. And ironically, since they've been talking about flattening the budget or maybe even slightly decreasing it the past six months or so, that coming, our academic... Actually, our academic growth has been the best it's been in two years, those two quarters. So my thesis on this, and it's not even—it's not mine, but I'd like to thank my dear friend, Frank Mortari, there in the back, for explaining this to me. That for us, for biotechnology, sure, when all boats rise, it's helpful and looks good, and water levels go down, it's, it's a headwind. But for us, what's more important is where that money is being spent, what kind of grants that money is being spent on. And much of those increases that occurred over the past two years in academic funding was directed towards COVID. If you think about it, as long as they don't dramatically reduce it by 20% or more, there is more money to work with, way more money to work with than there was 2, 3 years ago, to get redirected back into areas like oncology, immunotherapy, neuroscience, and that's where our strength is. It could actually be a tailwind for us, potentially. But don't forget, it's 15% of our revenue exposure, so we've mitigated a lot of that exposure, so. Pretty solid partners there. So, Chuck, and the team, thanks for great presentation. So maybe just on the flip side of the 8% that you mentioned, even if we do 7%-8% next year in terms of growth, even if we are not modeling 15% for the next two years after that, you know, your target moved from FY 2026, ex Wilson Wolf, now including Wilson Wolf, FY 2028. But I guess my question is, it does look, you know, when we run this forward to FY 2028, it does look a little bit conservative. It seems that you can do over $2 billion. Maybe just help us understand how much Wilson Wolf are you imagining in that number? Well, the chart- -for FY 2028, and then- Yeah. You know, what else is there for you to get to that $2.5 billion potential target? Well, you know, it's between $2 billion and $2.5 billion, because that was on the slide. It did say 2+, right? But it, it's hard to... We're not going to nail down a number when we've had to come clean every quarter, you guys want to know where we are with this $2 billion goal. And, you know, it's kind of it was hard to really kind of work through it with COVID and everything else. So we're going to give you a range. It's 2+. The 2.5 is also a plus, 2.5+. There's upside. We have been conservative on the Wilson Wolf number, because just like us and everyone in the industry, their clinicals have gone a little bit flat, too. They're making lots of bottom line, as we talked about, but they're not growing like they were two years ago. But they are the standard. They're the ones in all the clinicals. They have eight of our customers. So as things turn back on, there's more prioritization put by the people doing clinicals, they stand to gain because they're not getting thrown out anywhere. It's just a matter of this industry being in a bit of a lull. And it's hard to really pick, you know, the next five years, where that triggers, it's a range. It's a good number. We're gonna be picking them up no later than 2027. And I fully expect it'll be north of $200 million in revenue at the very least, so in 2027. If I could add just one sort of an X factor, if you will, on how big Wilson Wolf has. So right now, Wilson Wolf has 2 FDA-approved drug processes and a third that's in Europe that'll probably come here. So it'll move to 3 then. And I think you're all really aware of how this works, right? There's an initial therapeutic approved, and then the indications expand or the timeframe. They don't have to go be nearly dead to now get access to the treatment. So that's happening, right? If you look at the 13 approvals that I mentioned earlier, right, and there's now 18 indications, so Carvykti's got multiple indications now, right? It's starting to get used earlier in the process. So I think if we have those shots on goal, and as they start treating patients earlier, you know, the potential of that to really skyrocket is pretty tremendous. The other part, I think the casting this really wide net, if you look at kind of the product mix within Wilson Wolf and this pressure that's happening in the market, it's really favoring an adoption of their platform. Because they've got a system that scales from very small scale to large scale. You've probably have done your research on that. But with that financial pressure, people don't wanna, you know, move forward with the Miltenyi others, right? And they do see a future in a system if they're already not in it, right? So, you know, again, I think you're a really nice upside with that. I wanna take it back to one of my slides. Our five-year-old predictions have been pretty close overall. There are a lot of things we've talked about today and looking forward short term, that weren't anywhere on the game board 5 years ago when we were here. And that'll be the same case in 5 years, and I'll give you one that's not in the charts today. It's just a totally upside, and who knows how big it will get, but it will be a huge bogey if it happens, and that's TC Buster. If the world finally moves on from viral in 5-10 years, and you know, we have over 20 successful preclinical experiments with customers. We don't have one customer that's turning this down. Everyone has been shocked at their dramatic results, and we have 40 in the pipeline right now that want to get access to this technology. 40 customers. It's almost everybody. What's worth in 10-20 years if the entire industry goes towards that instead of staying with viral, it's massive. We have zero of that right now. It's gonna be something, and we're selling $ millions in revenue right now. It's actually selling. There'll be more of these coming. It just is the way our engine runs, and innovation is live and well here, and we'll have more, and we'll have more M&A. Somebody will be up here in, you know, 10 years and talk about the next 25 acquisitions that we did, on top of the $4-$5 billion that we just talked about today. You know, get ready. It's gonna happen. Thanks. And the follow-up is on M&A. Maybe just one part is broadly talking about M&A, where what sort of - what are you seeing out there at this point in time, which is a sort of somewhat of a softer environment indeed across tools? Are valuations, you know, coming down in your view? And, you know, there was an acquisition of RUO antibodies in the space, too. So does that... I'm wondering if that changes the competitive landscape in that space, because now it's a more scaled player is going to potentially power that. Yeah. We can all chime in here on that one, but since Kim did the last one, let's let Kim tell us what he's seeing. Thank you for the question, Puneet. I think that there's certainly a much better expectation as to when it comes to valuations in the market, right? The labor market, but also the acquisition market as you know, other options, such as certain exits have just you know, reset in pricing. So that's interesting. It gives us a better environment. Why I hesitate a little bit is that the real you know, value companies, where there's true value and competitive advantage, long-term competitive advantage in markets that are growing fast, I mean, those targets will always have a higher value just because that's what they're worth, right? So I don't think we've done anything that's really cheap, but we certainly have paid fair prices for acquisitions that have tremendous potential. So that's all in all, okay. I think two years ago, three years ago, we basically did not acquire because, you know, expectations were just, you know, a little bit too wild. That's why we've been, we've been careful in, in taking on more projects. But now we're back in an environment where I think you have to just pick your gems. Just, last one actually had it for Kim. Kim was on the screening side, those trials are sizable, and they're expensive, and you go into screening. Colorectal cancer screening, $15,000-$20,000. Prostate cancer screening, maybe even along that, you can correct me, but how are you thinking about that? It seems like you want to pursue partnerships, but I just want to be clear, what level of investment are you willing to pursue in that space? Thanks. Yeah, also a good question. Thanks. Thanks, Puneet. So, so what we basically do with those large opportunities is the model that we've laid out for ExoTrue, right? ExoTrue is a kidney transplant rejection test. So rather than clinically running the whole clinical trials that indeed are not only long but also very expensive, we became really good at creating data sets that show that our signature and our approach would be a winning approach in the market. And so for those larger clinical studies, we usually defer that to the partner that has a channel and that has a position in that market, and for whom it would be the right investment, because otherwise they'll be backward integrated, meaning that they will get pushed out of the market because our tests will be better. So that's how we lay it out. We usually have some upfront payments to partner and hand over the signature and technology, and then a loyalty stream down the line. So that's how we participate in it, and that's the way that we like it also to protect our profitability, but also from an expertise point of view. Hello. Dan Leonard from Credit Suisse. Two questions that are unrelated. First off, can you speak to the concept of market share gain? It seems mathematically with your ten-year view, what the business can look like 10 years from now, compared to your view on the growth rates of the markets you play in, that you're expecting 5%-6%, 5-6 points of share gain annually compounded over that time. So can you speak to your view on share gain? Who wants to jump in that? I'll start it, and you guys can jump in. It gets back to our positioning. So, you know, I'll pick a few to begin with. I mean, let's start with spatial. Our scope is the gold standard, and there isn't any real viable competition in that translational space. So it's ours to not only grow with the market, but as we move downstream into the clinical space, take more of that market share that way, as an example. You know, pick our exome platform. I typically believe absolutely the best platform out there, and we're really proving it in the prostate cancer with the other two competitors that were out way before our test was. They're now basically just going away because we're taking all the share there. And, you know, cell and gene therapy. I think cell and gene therapy is going to be so big that anyone who gets in it is going to win to some degree. But we're positioning ourselves to be a top three player in terms of suppliers into that space, and in the case of regenerative medicine, the top player. So again, more than growing with the market, but taking share from others who are trying to participate but won't be able to compete. So I, you know, I think—and then going back to our instrument platforms, you know, Simple Western blot, I think that's the cleanest example. There is no competition. There is no automated solution for Western blot other than ours, true automated solution. So it's about market conversion. Even though that market might only grow in mid-single-digit%, we can, as it has the last 10 years, we've been growing mid-teens+. In fact, in the COVID years, it was 20%+ because of the rapid market conversion. There's still a lot of market to go after, and as Blair outlined, a lot of new applications that those platforms can be used on that would take share from other platforms that are used today. Yeah. Maybe, maybe I'll just supplement that last, the last one on the instruments. So if you look at the just use, you know, consumables as a leading indicator, right? In a year that everybody would say was somewhat challenging, right, the three platforms are 15%, 19%, and 21%, and the consumables kind of pull through, right? So we see that as a great leading indicator, even though, you know, the capital component has slowed down a bit, those consumables just continue to, to drive and take share. So it's a good leading indicator for share gain. So. I hate to ask a shorter term question, but Chuck, you said in the opening that you're seeing a light at the end of the tunnel in China. Can you circle back to that comment and perhaps elaborate? Thank you. Well, we stay close to the team, as you'd imagine, and right now, all our current information is that they're still on track for funding infusion come October. And we'll be one of the first to see some of that, because we're at the reagents and the consumables end of the model. And the team feels pretty good about that. I don't think it's going back to 25% growth overnight, but we certainly expect, you know, double-digit run rates or better by end of the fiscal year, and it should start beginning, we hope, you know, in October. As was mentioned, you know, we had decent growth last quarter, and we're going to be quick in, quick out, as we think in China. Partly because comps get very easy, partly because we're not that big. And, the funding impacts have a pretty good leverage effect for us. And, you know, we work through, you know, 30 different distributors. We have pent-up demand with our instruments. Our instruments are highly, again, gated towards productivity. And so, as you know, they had a lot of strong growth two years ago, and it's coming off of that, but then we expect that ramp to begin again. So that demand, that natural demand will start occurring. You know, unless, you know, political and macro events get worse or something, right? But in the way things look right now, that's what the team is saying. It's a top funding priority for the Chinese government, so it's going to be a place where they put money back in first once they start, you know, start actually funding their budgets. We're not even talking about stimulus. We're just talking about funding their normal annual budget. So it can't go on, you know, inevitably forever. So, you know, that's why we do- Well, I think also the... We pumped our economy with lots of stimulus. We've been printing money for 20 years in this country. They haven't started yet. So they're just getting around and trying to figure out what to do with their economy. And, you know, I think they're going to be doing some stimulation, things that we haven't-- we're not ready to, we're going to be surprised, probably. I just don't think they're ready to give up and let this thing crater. They had no economy for almost a year.... There were nobody in the streets. They spent so much money on testing. We had employees that would test every day. Every day, every citizen had a test in China, let me get, and it was paid for by the government. They spent all their money, and so I think they're just trying to figure out what to do now. But I, I just been going there too many years. I just know that culture pretty well, I feel, and I just think they're, they're pretty fast. They don't mess around. We have a great government, but when they decide and they're going to do stuff, they do it quickly. There's no, there's no, you know, arbitrage. And I just believe they'll come back better and faster than, than probably people are thinking. Chuck, if I could add- Yeah, go ahead, Will. Yeah, I'll just add one thing. Just kind of a, you know, just kind of where things stand right now. One thing they are funding right now is their hospitals, right? Yeah. The interesting thing is, their hospitals, they actually do research, too. So if you're a physician in the hospital, you actually have to publish, right? So what we're seeing is really nice uptake of our, our consumables in that space, particularly ELISAs. It goes to, I think, the exposure and kind of the agility of our team in China. They're going where the money is right now, and I think our ability as it trickles in and wherever it kind of ends up first, as it gets funded, we'll be in a good position. But we're seeing that, you know, the reagent solution side of the business performing pretty well there, and it's really driven by the team shifting their time and resources where there is some funding in China, which is just possible. And again, we, we had great growth in our, our instruments through COVID, with 50% growth over there. And so that's, that's bound to have a dip for a while. But the, the acceptance of our platforms in China, because of their low capital position, under $100,000 mostly, it's really strong. So, and, and we've had the same leader there for since we acquired ProteinSimple, and he's, he's very bullish of a comeback. So I, I have no reason not to believe him. I, I don't think it's overnight, but I do think we'll start seeing the green shoots come October, hopefully, so. Chuck, if I could add in terms of we're sounding perhaps more optimistic than what you're hearing from others. I can't speak for them, but from what I read from other companies doing business in China, they have a higher proportion of their business downstream, whether it's in biologic processing and CMOs, things of that sort. And a lot of that business, they might be Chinese companies, but those Chinese companies are doing the business with American companies. So in other words, it's export back to the U.S. or Europe or what have not. And that is what's, you know, seems to be changing a bit there in terms of companies diversifying their supply chain, whether it's for geopolitical reasons or not to have another COVID situation again. That's not where we're strongly positioned. We're strongly positioned in research, China for China. And when you hear China for China, you often think, well, it's made in China for China. Our stuff's not made in China, but it's sold to Chinese customers for Chinese research, not for American companies. So that's why for us, it's much more about when the government turns the spigot back on funding in this space, and it's inevitable, inevitable that they will. And they can't, they can't go too long without doing it, as opposed to perhaps some of our peer companies that are more have a much more biased revenue towards these perhaps structural changes that are going on over there. Mm-hmm. I’ll apologize for asking another 2028 question, kind of like Sundeep’s, but you’re pointing to mid-teen growth. Chuck, I heard you on 2 plus, and I’m guessing the plus is carrying you there. But if you take the $2 billion, you back out Will’s role, Jim, you get to a growth, organic growth rate that’s less than mid-teen. Mm-hmm. Is there something about this that you're assuming maybe lower growth at the beginning, given the current macro that accelerates, or is it just kind of the broader- Well, let's remember, fiscal year 2024 is part of that five-year plan, right? So and I think it's where it kind of evens out. I mean, you know, even we, you know, we've, we've been cautious about definitely the first half of this fiscal year. We think it should come back the second half. But that's, you know, it's kind of a, you're starting off a lower growth rate to begin with. So the growth rates will need to accelerate to get to mid-teen, even, even after backing up the, the Wilson Wolf. I think the bottom line here is of us missing this $2 billion goal is that we've always talked about it being more of a J curve, and it's been pushed out a year to two years. That's the issue, so. Got it, thanks. And then maybe one for Will. We've seen several deals in the protein, the antibody space by some larger players, including Sundeep referenced the antibody player more recently. Just curious, obviously, you're highlighting about your platform, but kind of what you're seeing from a competitive perspective and what those deals mean from that side? Yeah, you know, I think like a lot of these types of deals, right, it's disruptive for the companies being acquired, especially if they're being acquired by kind of a larger one, right? You're really referring to the Abcam deal that just happened with Danaher, right. You know, Danaher's got this wonderful track record. They've got DBS. There's probably no doubt that they saw an opportunity to deploy that with Abcam. When we look at that portfolio, they're getting their legs in the space a lot of ways and transitioning from this OEM shop to doing things themselves. They've tripped on things like ERP and a lot of these execution things. I would imagine that over time, that'll get unraveled, and they'll probably improve. You know, I think our view, you know, we don't react to kind of the day-to-day of what's happening with everybody else. So we talk about our ability to deploy our best-in-class content on our systems. They don't have that, right? They don't have 40 years of experience there. They're not a market leader in ELISAs. They're really, you know, they were a me-too in antibodies and starting to become basic. So I think if we reacted to every one of these transactions, right, we'd lose sight of what we're trying to do. And what we're trying to do is go way beyond where they are, right? We're not super overly concerned about those things. So kind of regardless of where they are, it's not as relevant, quite honestly. Right? But not to be dismissive of those competitors- No. We're just on a totally different ship than they are. ... We gave almost the same answer almost two years ago now with PeproTech being bought. What have you heard? What have you seen? It, you know, it's kind of true. I mean, Mark got a little mad at me, but, you know, it's from my comments, and it's all true. They've got a lot of money to put behind it, but they don't have a lot of domain knowledge. And it creates a lot of good disruption, and you'll see it in this case, too. I mean, we've picked up talent, as others have. You know, it's -- they have the wherewithal to do a lot with it, but, you know, this stuff's hard. It's the same reason why we're still the leader. In all these years in proteins, we don't have a single patent in proteins, and we make gross margins that will knock you out of your chairs still. Why is that? It's really hard. It's so freaking hard to do protein design, you cannot imagine. And his comment earlier, you know, having AI help you with the software coming out, you know, it's just gonna make us better. It's like, you know, I just always use the analogy of what did professors do when they finally started letting you use calculators in your tests? They made the problems a lot harder, you know, so that's what's gonna happen. So not too worried. I actually kind of like the distraction. Allows us to continue what we're after, which is a much bigger game, so. All right, Alex Miller from Craig-Hallum. Thank you for doing this. Just kind of a question around the OneLab system that you set up, you know, going back years that was super, super successful. You know, how do you adapt that for the cell and gene therapy? Because you're building this end-to-end workflow. Pharma's super smart, but you even mentioned that they don't even realize that they might be ordering certain components from you and not realize you have the other components. So how do you show pharma when cell and gene therapy is still so new, that you do have this end-to-end workflow, and that they ultimately can- Yeah. Put everything together with you? Yeah, thanks for the question, Alex. You know, in a way, you are conflating kind of two things. So certainly the OneLab and kind of, you know, bringing the masses in and seeing the value in our offering. That's one part of the equation. The part of conflating a little bit on the cell and gene therapy, because they are such a defined group. What we've done commercially is we have an enterprise selling team that's calling at kind of director levels and above into those accounts. And so, you know, if you're one of those 500+ kind of targeted accounts in North America, for example, we're engaging at director level above with our teams and kind of deploying the broader resources in it. Because it is, you know, it's really essentially a production kind of, kind of workflow. Where we are capturing them then, with this, the destination of choice that I spoke about, was really at that, that front, front end, right? So if they're really doing just the basic research upfront of looking at, you know, a new modality or CAR, then, then that will help us get that access. I guess the nice thing about cell and gene therapy customers specifically, is they actually are not that difficult to find, right? So we think a destination of choice will bring value there, but it'll bring value much more broadly to, you know, academics and broader kind of research other than these really specific application spaces. Okay. Yeah. That's helpful. And then, follow on to that, I think in the past it was mentioned, forgetting the numbers now, but maybe Wilson Wolf had maybe 600, 700 customers. You were calling on only a handful of those. Where do those numbers stand? And then a second question with regards to, on the diagnostic side. You know, we talked about protein sciences, how we build these kits, we give these kits to pharma. We let pharma really turn it over to do with it. On the diagnostic side, you build this toolbox, Asuragen. Why, why develop those tests internally and then turn them around, versus ultimately selling an entire toolkit, selling the API and letting someone else figure out what to do with it? There's one for each of my presidents, then, so. There you go. I'll grab the first one. The second one's more complicated, so I'll let... Thanks. I'll let you have it. So Wilson Wolf is over 800 customers now, right? I mentioned that as part of this already. And, you know, we're, we're now well over 400. We grew our customer base by more than 20%. I think we shared that in our earnings call as well, right? If you, if you look back at that transcript. So kind of both are growing in the, in the right direction. Yeah. Jim? Yeah, it's a good question around the multiomics platform, but basically, the moment we create a signature and a test, it's much easier to play in the downstream revenue line. Meaning, the moment you partner it out and there are revenues coming from a specific test and you have a royalty-based income, that's really the reason why we would not, you know, just exploit the platform or sell the platform. We'd rather exploit it and use it as a continuous competitive advantage over all our signatures and all our tests. You saw on the chart, it was actually quite conservative, what it could be 10 years out. I mean, it's, there's a dozen different indications that could come out of that easily in 10 years. There's no way we have the bandwidth, the money, you know, or, you know, the, the channels to actually do all this ourselves. We're gonna have to do a combination with partners. And, you know, there are different jurisdictions. We happen to be in NGS, which is not one of the easier ones. You know, so there's gonna be decisions we make of when to let things go and when to make sure we own it ourselves. And I think it's a, you got to think of that as a portfolio-based approach all by itself. But I still think it's a billion-dollar-plus platform long term, and we've been talking for years now, why it's just so superior to cell-free DNA. But they've got a big head start, right? It takes years, and, you know, and we've been warned by many of you, that it'll take a while to become anything in diagnostics, you know, and we believe you, but we're getting there. Good afternoon. Just pivoting to spatial a bit. So I understand the TAM expansion with the Lunaphore acquisition, but can you help us understand sort of the customer mix there now and how you're thinking about growth amongst the different customer cohorts going forward? And then lastly, any thoughts on return on, you know, maybe capturing share from traditional sort of high throughput sequencing in the market? Yeah. Okay. So the slide talks about going from $2 billion-$5 billion, right? That's obvious, because there's now an implementation component as well as a proteomic component in there. You're asking about the customer mix. This platform gets used in the research, as well as in pharma, as well as in clinical, right? So, how it will evolve, I think, is academic and biopharma will continue to grow in double digits. One might outpace the other over the long term, and I think biopharma. Pharma, biopharma will be outpacing over the long term. And then, you know, we're entering the clinical space, where we would take share away from, you know, other tests, right? Mainly IHC and there are other tests available, that are not as good as ours. So I would think clinical, because it's a new space, will be the fastest growing. Biopharma will outpace academic. But overall, the spatial biology business is just such an important territory, and just because you can see what is happening where, that I feel the low double-digit market growth might be at the safe side. But we'll certainly outpace it and take some share. Appreciate it. And then, Jim, on the margins, it sounds like, you know, most of the reinvestments are in the R&D line, and you're making these high-growth acquisitions. But if we sort of strip that away organically, how should we think about sort of the G&A line and maybe index that to underlying core growth over the long term? I mean, you know, frankly, the best way to think about it is how it's, how it's progressed the past 10 years. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, we, we take internal innovation very, very seriously. So much of our prioritization is around the R&D side, and where we're going to spend our R&D dollars, and we will continue to reinvest 8%-10% of revenue rate back in the business, depending on the product line as to what that rate, what that rate is. Some are actually higher than that, but on average, between 8%-10%. That's how I think about that in terms of% of revenue. And from the SG&A perspective, you know, I mean, I think it's, as you... You know, if you double the size of the business in two years, there's certain infrastructure investments you need to make that impact SG&A. But, I'll tell you this, at mid-teens revenue growth, we won't be, we won't be growing expenses, particularly SG&A, by mid-teens. Actually, another reason I can say that, you look at where that growth comes from, whether it's the cell and gene therapy. You know, these big growth platforms are going to drive accelerated growth. Cell and gene therapy, exosome platform, those two in particular. Sales force for ExoDx Prostate Test is already in place, so there's no real incremental cost going forward to capture that revenue. In the case of cell and gene therapy, it's a much, you know, even though 1,000 or 2,000 customers, it's not 1 million customers like it is for general research. It's a much, much, much more concentrated base. And as a lot of that growth comes from customers just going through the pipeline of clinical trials, so it's not having to capture new customers constantly. So it doesn't require additional sales effort to do that. That's just going to naturally happen because of the pipeline. So there's a lot of leverage to be had going forward, particularly in our SG&A line, given where our revenue growth is going to come from. You mentioned, scale-ready, which is a commercial venture, but without stating intention. At some point, you come out with a closed-loop instrument. So maybe help us understand or remind us on the timing of that. What do you think, relative to Prodigy or Wave or Cocoon specs need to look like, or where you'd be most differentiated? And then what the potential economic uplift of an integrated system would look like in terms of contribution, relative to the three separate products? I'm glad you. Sure. Yeah. That sounds good. So the system, the aseptic system, so components of the system are already available, right? We've got this, you know, 800+ customers in G-Rex, 400+ leveraging our GMP proteins, right? So we're already in play. We'll close the system really over the next six months, like, components of it will come out, and we'll also offer aseptic deliveries to other systems. So, while we think most of that value will certainly happen in G-Rex in that bio, bioreactor, you know, other groups do want to tie into the other platforms, right? So, you know, the fundamental differentiator of a G-Rex-based platform. One, accessibility, especially early on in scalability and processing, hence the term scale-ready. Like, literally, it really does translate. So in that format, you can move from, you know, 50 ml to, you know, 5-liter bioreactors and get the exact same results, kind of based on the structure. That's kind of the advantage of the, the G-Rex itself, right? The entire approach and, and everything is kind of protected from that perspective. And so imagine the difference of, if you want to serve, you know, 50,000 or 100,000 patients with these platforms. So in a room this size of, you know, 10 of those other systems, you know, and these are going to be relative numbers. But to, to give you a sense- ... you know, maybe you could satisfy a few thousand patients. With G-Rex and the way that it's set up, you could service, you know, 100,000. So it's not even, it's not a 20x, it's more like a 50x advantage there. And then kind of the early accessibility. What you find is a lot of these bioreactors actually use G-Rex to get started. It's kind of interesting. So use it to prime the pump. And I'll give you kind of other just examples. It's not anything that was presented by the team out of UPenn, right? So they had some supply constraints with their kind of status quo, and they ended up moving over to G-Rex in that particular process, and they presented it at a conference, so there was a poster on it. And their results are, yeah, this is incredibly easy to put to port over into the system. So I think there's lots of just technical advantages to. I think what we're really finding now is in that user base that's considering what their options are, the amount, that falling knife of funding has really affected people's decisions, and they can access G-Rex and do so much more with it earlier in the process, that we're getting a ton of wins. I mentioned earlier that mix changing a little bit, and then while the, I think the revenue numbers are somewhat static right now, that mix change and the number of customers being added is really, you know, that's those are the tickets that we're going to be able to pay off over the next couple of years. So- I want to also add that, with John Wilson's, up to, you know, the ScaleReady investment, we just paid this guy $250 million for phase one of the acquisition. He's committed over half of it already to ScaleReady. He, this guy doubles down, and guess what, the workflow is going into ScaleReady? Ours. So we're getting... He reminds me every day, "You're getting a twofer." So, he's all over it. So, and his, and his... He's trying to do is just what you're talking about, improve that mix, but it's speed up the market development and all this, and by franchising the whole workflow, which is what he's after with ScaleReady, which is gonna be like a gonna be a really, really good outcome for him yet again, so. Tim, back to COMET. Obviously, with our new acquisition, we have to deal with a variety of different platforms in this space, as you showed with the Leica Bond. I'm curious to hear from a full automation, resolution, availability standpoint, where you think there's perhaps the most room for improvement or potential for the platform to develop in the next few years? So you're talking about the roadmap of the COMET? Yeah. So this is already the third generation to begin with. We had a COMET PA, which is in key academic centers around the world, key customers, I should say, not only academic. And then the COMET launch was just a couple of months ago. We will certainly not stop innovating this system, but we're really happy with the characteristics it has right now. As I mentioned, it is significantly better than anything you could buy in the market for translational. There's work to be done to make it more fit for clinical, right? So the clinical, once you have one marker and that you really like, and once you want to make sure it's foolproof, that would take evolution to kind of... I wouldn't call it dumbing it down, but to make it, you know, extra easy and lock it more down, like, so that it can be approved in clinical setting. But you've seen the same kind of life cycle with qPCR machines and NGS machines, where eventually you have to lock them down to make them clinical-ready. So that's certainly a dimension we're gonna evolve in. So I think we're actually out of time here, and I'd like to thank everyone for joining us. If you're hungry, if this presentation made you hungry, please join us for lunch. Thanks again for coming out. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.