Good morning, everybody, and welcome to ANGLE's half year interim results for the 30th of June, 2023. I must say, I'm pleased to be in London, with actually a pretty full room of analysts, which is great. We are finally putting COVID behind us. Clearly, it's been a very difficult set of conditions externally, not just for ANGLE, obviously, but for all healthcare stocks and indeed for our investors and shareholders and investment funds interested in our story. It's also been pretty challenging for some of the biopharma customers that we're dealing with. But despite all of these adverse external conditions, I'm very pleased to report that ANGLE has had an excellent half year, and we've made progress on multiple different areas that are critical to our future development.
I'm pleased to be able to reconfirm that we're well focused on our mission to support personalized cancer care with the only FDA-cleared platform which is available to provide the best sample, intact living cancer cells from patient blood. And obviously, this is critically important if the objective of personalized cancer care is to be achieved, because cancer changes over time, and it's necessary to do repeat assessments of what's happening. For that, you need intact living cancer cells. So we're the only FDA product cleared to do this, and we believe that we have the opportunity to materially improve patient care and also, at the same time, reduce healthcare costs. So in this first half to the 30th of June, we've achieved multiple key deliverables. First amongst that is we've begun the anticipated hockey stick growth of our revenue.
So we've achieved a 3x year-on-year increase in revenue, obviously off a relatively small base, but we're seeing some very good signs that this is accelerating now. We've also, as planned, strengthened our management team, both at a top level with Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, and with a number of senior executives, all focused on the commercialization of our system. We've expanded our pharma services business significantly during the period. We've added new customers. We've announced about Crescendo Biologics and Artios Pharma, and we've added repeat contracts from existing pharma companies. In addition, we've expanded our distribution network. This is critical to get our products sold widely.
We've added new territories during the period of Scandinavia, Southeast Asia, and New Zealand, which gives us a pretty strong global distribution network, which is now beginning to come on stream. Additionally, we've made strong progress on content development programs. The term content I'm gonna use multiple times in this presentation, and what I mean is ways to actually analyze the cancer cells that come out of Parsortix to deliver some useful outcomes. And we made progress on those content development programs, and I'll discuss those a little bit in later slides. Following on from the half year end, post-period end, we've had continuing encouraging progress, and momentum is building. We've had encouraging results from molecular platforms, which I'll explain when we get to that point of the presentation.
We've also done well in terms of conserving the cash position, and we've done a review of our ongoing costs, and we've deferred a number of activities in order to increase the cash runway. So we've identified GBP 5 million of savings, which extends our cash runway right into Q1 of 2025. So basically, we're highly focused on delivering successful commercial outcomes from all the work that's gone before. In terms of our financial results, these were encouraging. Both the products and the services revenues were strongly up. Overall, our revenues increased by three times, and we maintained our gross margin at 62%, despite partnering with a number of our customers in developing new assays.
We've been building our future revenues, and we have already sold GBP 2.5 million worth of future revenues for our services business, and this is because our pharma customers want to have longer term contracts. Sometimes some of the clinical contracts they have may last several years. So we've already got GBP 2.5 million of future revenues sold. And importantly, cash position at GBP 22.2 million, with R&D tax credits coming in of a further GBP 3.7 million, is significantly ahead of forecast, and we will definitely be significantly higher at cash position at the year-end than currently forecast.
As I mentioned, we've done a further review of costs, which will take GBP 5 million of costs out in the period to the end of 2024, and that extends our cash runway, through to Q1 2025, giving us a good time in which to secure the commercial outcomes that we're seeking. The company has two major business areas, a product business and a service business. The product business is involved in selling Parsortix instruments and Parsortix consumables, the Parsortix cassette, and some other consumables that are under development. The services business is where we use the Parsortix system in our two clinical labs, one in the UK and one in the United States, in order to provide services for customers, and that is primarily at the moment in relation to services for our pharmaceutical customer base.
So both those business areas are going very well. It's an integrated business strategy. The services business is used as an accelerator and demonstrator with the view that, subsequently, other customers external to ANGLE will adopt similar approaches, and utilize our products business. The product business is obviously the core business, and that's highly leveraged. We got third-party manufacturers. We have very good gross margins on all the product that we sell, and we can increase the level of sales in the product business without further investment in CapEx at ANGLE. On the right-hand side of the slide, there's some information here on the two senior hires.
They're both very strong, highly focused leaders in our space with a lot of experience, and we've also added a diverse range of experienced executives in the team as well, sales, marketing, product, et cetera. In terms of the products business, we're driving sales of new products in new markets. So there's two elements there, new products and the new markets. So really, that's pioneering the development of new approaches to cancer. It's not simple. It requires a lot of effort, and we've been giving this a sustained and focused effort to deliver sales, which I'm very pleased to say is beginning to deliver very good results.
So we've built a global distribution platform with identified distributors who are being onboarded at the moment, trained and brought up to speed, with coverage across the map, as you can see in this slide. In the half year, we added in Scandinavia, Southeast Asia, and New Zealand, and we now do have a good initial global distribution network. We may add to it in the future, but at the moment, this is a strong position for what we want. To drive sales down these channels, what we need is the content, as I mentioned, methods of how to use the cancer cells, and then also clinical data showing that if you look at those cancer cells, you get useful information that can be used to benefit patients.
So we have, alongside of the products business, we've got a services business, now very well established. It's differentiated in the market, and we've got a good, strong pharmaceutical customer base, which is growing. On the right-hand side of this slide, you can see four examples of our pharmaceutical customer base. Three of those have already signed repeat contracts with us, and the fourth one, Crescendo, is a new addition, so we'd expect to build that relationship as well. So these customers, once sold, are very sticky. We look to have long-term relationships with them with many, many different projects. And we've already had experience from customers, individual projects in excess of $1 million each, and that's how we've managed to build out, not only the current revenues, but also future revenues, as I mentioned earlier.
These contracts are very profitable, and they can be built out because we have something that they can't get otherwise, the ability to get intact living cancer cells from patients on a repeat basis, and we can then analyze those cells in our laboratory to give them critical information that can reduce their costs and improve the development of their trials. So it's a new approach, but it's been very well received by the customer base. We've got a good pipeline of new customers coming through, including very large pharmaceutical companies. So we're very pleased with how that business is developing, and we're expanding it by assay development.
So we're developing new, different things that we can do with the cancer cells to offer to our customer base. And in terms of content, so what you can do with the cancer cells, there are two main streams. One is imaging, which is looking at the cancer cells under a microscope. We call, we call that Portrait. That's the internal name for all of our assays for imaging cancer cells. And what that does is it identifies the presence of the cancer cell and distinguishes it from other component, blood components and identifies the phenotype of the cancer cell. So is it epithelial, mesenchymal, or EMT in cancer cell? Enables the enumeration, so counting how many are there, and it enables the examination of the cancer cells for particular proteins that may be targets for individual drugs.
And obviously, by repeating that, you can then assess, is a protein present, and therefore, would a patient benefit from a particular drug. You can also look at the prognosis of the patient. It's very well established that the more cancer cells that are present, the worse the prognosis for the patient. And obviously, if you monitor that over time, you can see whether treatment is being effective or, or not, and indeed, whether it should be changed. So those imaging assays are called Portrait. We have recently, this week, in fact, launched Portrait Flex, which I'll talk about in a second. Now the second area is landscape. Landscape is molecular analysis of the cancer cells. So this is leveraging the large-scale investment made by many other companies into sequencing, molecular sequencing for DNA or for RNA.
DNA is mutational variance, and RNA is gene expression. Both of these information give you an idea of how the cancer is evolving, how it's evading the immune system and the current therapy, and can guide what therapies should be offered, and targeted for that particular cancer. Overall, we believe that this approach, so repeat testing of cancer cells for DNA and RNA sequencing, offers the potential to make cancer controllable, to stop the spread of cancer. Remember, over 95% of patients who die from cancer, die from the metastatic spread of cancer cells in their bloodstream. They're the very same cells that our system recovers, and can analyze. The target here, long term, is to stop the spread of cancer and make it a more controllable disease.
In terms of our content for Portrait, we have got the Portrait Flex assay, which we have launched in our clinical labs, announced this week. And that detects the type of cancer cell that's present, enables the enumeration of them, and the flex bit is the customer can request which protein they're interested in their trial, and we can add that. So it is a flexible assay, hence the name. We already have a Portrait DDR assay, which we developed for our customer, Artios Pharma. And this is looking at two proteins associated with DNA damage response. And that has been very successful.
They have accepted that assay and are now integrating it into one of their phase one trials, which will be starting fairly soon, and we expect it to be used by multiple other trials that they have going. We're also offering it now to a range of other pharma customers who are expressing a lot of interest in the DDR assay. We're working on Portrait PD-L1. So this is looking at a target, PD-L1, for immunotherapy, and we hope to have the PD-L1 assay in our labs being offered to pharma very, very shortly. So all of these Portrait assays are ones in our clinical lab. Now, that contrasts with the Portrait+ kit.
So this is because it has a plus on it there, what that means is it's being offered as a product to be sold to customers around the world, not just from our clinical labs. And here we're taking the antibodies that we've spent a couple of years working on optimizing these antibodies for the detection of cancer. And we have basically productized them by lyophilizing the antibodies down into a essentially into a solid powder form, which makes them stable. They can then be shipped, and they can be stored on a shelf.
And the idea of this is that all our customers, external third-party customers, can use the same antibodies that we've spent a lot of time optimizing, so they can then get consistent results with all, all of the other customers out there. And it makes it much, much easier for adoption, because at the moment, prior to our launch of Portrait+ , our customer who buys Parsortix has to define their own method to do antibodies and their own process in their lab. And that's, that's actually quite tricky, which means that the sale of the product is primarily limited to high, high-quality labs, so really top-notch labs. What we can do now is we can. The aim is we can democratize the use of this, make it super easy for anybody to use it.
They just get this kit, they follow our instructions, and they can then look under the microscope and get their own information. And that's, we believe, a critical element to expand the sales of our products. Also, on the content side, we've signed a deal with BioView as a collaborator, and we're developing an imaging assay for HER2. HER2 is a protein that's specifically relevant in breast cancer, and there's a number of drugs which are being developed to target both HER2 positive and HER2 low cancers. The challenge is that the patient's status, breast cancer patient status, is determined when they present, when they have a biopsy or when they have a lumpectomy or a mastectomy.
But there's no way of repeating that test, because there's nowhere to go back and do a tissue biopsy again. And because it's a protein on a cell, you can't do it with ctDNA. You need to get the actual cells to look at HER2 again, and the HER2 status changes, so these patients are not getting drugs that they should get. So what we're doing here is developing, in collaboration with BioView, and the first round of this is generating GBP 1.2 million of revenue for ANGLE. We are developing a way to look at the cancer cells and determine HER2 status. And that'll be launched first in our lab, and then the aim is that we will have it as a kit that can be sold more widely as well.
So again, this is all things that you can do with the cells, which will drive interest in buying the equipment. Now, moving on to molecular, there's very well-established large-scale companies, including some of the ones on this slide, who are involved in either next-generation sequencing, NGS, or digital PCR, which is very, very sensitive. And they're focused on DNA and RNA. Now, what we've been doing is working since we decided to move away from our in-house RNA platform, we've been, over the last year, we've put a lot of effort and resources into working with third-party molecular platforms, which already have a big installed base, to show how to use them with Parsortix.
The key to this is that once we've got data supporting this approach, our salespeople and our distributors will be able to go to customers who already have the Illumina NGS or Thermo Fisher NGS or QIAGEN digital PCR or Bio-Rad or Stilla or any other ones that we validated, and say to them: You've spent a lot of money on a sequencer. Why don't you buy a Parsortix or five Parsortix, and then you can get cancer cells from patient blood and put it into this platform? It's a fully automated approach. It's two machines talking to one another. There's not flexibility and variability once we've completed this work.
So this is a major, major focus, and we think this is the largest market opportunity that is available to ANGLE in this liquid biopsy space. So here's a little snippet of what can come out from this kind of molecular analysis. There are already third-party independent studies which have demonstrated the value of combining information from analyzing circulating tumor DNA, which is what the industry broadly is doing, fragments of dead, little fragments of dead cancer cells, with information that comes from CTC analysis. It's widely accepted that that is, you can get additional information if you combine those two sources.
The good news is that the work that ANGLE's been doing has our early results certainly do confirm that, and that there is additional information that comes from the circulating tumor cells. In fact, we're finding that by looking at the DNA mutational status of the circulating tumor cells, there's actually quite a bit of stuff there that's not on the ctDNA. So what does that mean? That means that there's some kind of mutation which is present in living cells, which is spreading the disease, but is not present in dead cells. So that means that that particular mutation is not being killed by the immune system, nor is it being killed by the patient's therapies. Which leads you to believe that this is possibly the clonal evolution of the cancer and how it's evading the immune system in order to spread.
We've got one patient sample here on the right-hand side of this slide, which is a patient with small cell lung cancer, which has metastasized to two different sites, the bone and the brain. And it's a bit of a complicated sort of scientific thing, but if you just look at the two columns, the first column entitled cfDNA, that's cell-free DNA, means ctDNA. The numbers there identify the mutations found in the ctDNA. And then just to the right of that, the circulating tumor cells from the Parsortix system, analyzed in an absolutely identical method, same machine, same process, same cancer gene panel. What you find is you've got some overlap, but you've also got some differences.
The ones that jump out there are the third one down, EGFR, and then about two-thirds of the way down, PIK3CA. These are both major mutations which have already got FDA-cleared drugs addressing them, EGFR inhibitors and PIK3 kinase inhibitors. And yet they are shown strongly in the CTC sample, but they're not shown in the ctDNA. So it's quite likely that the doctors treating this patient have no idea that those mutations are present. But if they did know that, then it could potentially change their way that they selected drugs for that patient.
So overall, our objective is to provide large-scale evidence of this kind of impact with a view that every lab in the world that is looking at DNA, and there are many, many labs now adopting ctDNA and sequencing, should, in addition, be looking at ctDNA. And we will provide them with the protocols for how they do that. So that's, we think, a major development for the company, which we're hopeful that by the end of this calendar year, we will have a lot of data to support the evidence behind that. And the reason I think that we will have that evidence is because we've been building out a biobank of samples. So clinical evidence is critical to clinical adoption.
It's very easy to talk about things, but unless you can show it with a significant number of patients, people won't—the doctors won't change their approach. So we're running three major clinical studies, and we've been investing in these for some time now. We have an INFORMED study , which is, I'm pleased to say, actually working with six NHS trusts. We found actually that the NHS trusts are a better source of samples than the Americans that we've previously been dealing with for this purpose, and lower cost, so we're very pleased about that. And this study is targeting up to 1,000 patients with six different time draws, so over a period of several years, six different time points, with up to four tubes of blood per patient.
So it's a pretty big endeavor. And so far, we've had 600 patient blood draws come through on this program. They've all been processed with Parsortix, and the output from the Parsortix has been stabilized and frozen in a freezer, ready for the molecular analysis. Once we've proved out these third-party molecular platforms are working to the requirements that we have, we can then go to this biobank, and we can pull out samples. We have a patient record at each time point, so we can then compare the patient condition with the output from our molecular analysis. Second one is in pelvic mass. So these are women with the abnormal pelvic mass who may or may not have ovarian cancer.
We ran the EMBER-1 study with 200 patients, which we reported last year, using the in-house molecular platform at ANGLE. We got very good results in detecting ovarian cancer. So we've retained parts of those samples, so the same 200 patients in our freezer. We've continued enrolling that study. We have another 200 patients, so we now have 400 potential ovarian cancer patients with their patient record stored, waiting to be analyzed with a third-party molecular platform once we're satisfied that we've got the platform working to requirements. Additionally, we've run a prostate cancer study with Solaris Health in the United States, and we have secured 100 patient samples from that study.
These are men who are having a prostate cancer tissue biopsy, so they're high risk, but undiagnosed for prostate cancer. Again, those 100 patient samples have been processed with Parsortix. They've been stored in a freezer, and we're working on getting the molecular platform in place to analyze those samples. So collectively, these samples give us a tremendous asset for testing out the Parsortix capability and for demonstrating key clinical applications, including the identification of ctDNA mutations that I mentioned, the highlighting of the evolution of the patient's cancer to guide the oncologist's response, and crucially, the identification and detection of cancer in prostate and ovarian. As well as in prostate, we're looking to assess the severity of the cancer as well.
So we're confident that we will get the first results coming through, headline results, by the end of this year. And we believe that this approach, the combination of the content development and then clinical data, is what's critical in achieving our objective of getting the Parsortix system widely adopted so that it becomes the norm in patient treatment. Remember, this is all about a simple blood test. It's non-invasive for the patient, and it's relatively low cost compared to a lot of other approaches. So as well as that, we need third-party evidence. We need external parties who've used this system to basically generate data showing that other people believe in it, and we've been pretty successful with that. We have now incontrovertible, solid evidence of value.
We've got 87 peer-reviewed publications from 39 independent cancer centers, covering 24 cancer types. So every cancer type it's being used with, it works without modification. During the half year, we had a further 8 new peer-reviewed publications in top-level, peer-reviewed journals. Those publications, there were 3 in prostate cancer, 2 in breast cancer, 2 in lung cancer, and 1 in glioblastoma, which is brain cancer, which is a very, a very important focal area. So the momentum continues to build externally of the company in the use of this product, and that momentum is now demonstrated in our outlook. We have, as I mentioned, strong revenues in this first half. That's continuing to grow, and we're confident that both the products and the services business will continue to grow through the rest of 2023 and beyond.
We've got new pharma services customers lining up, including some large pharmaceutical companies. Our cash position is being very carefully controlled and managed, and is higher, higher cash balances than forecast, and that will continue through to the end of this year. The cash runway is now extended into Q1 2025. We've got new content coming. The Portrait Flex and DDR, we talked about. We've got Portrait PD-L1 coming, Portrait Plus product kit coming. We've got the molecular protocols coming, so lots and lots of content coming. We've also got the clinical study data coming, that I've just been referring to, from the headline results of some of these major clinical studies. So the combination, as far as I'm concerned, the equation is FDA-cleared Parsortix system, plus content, plus clinical data, equals adoption.
We know it's been pretty difficult for our shareholders with the stock market conditions and so on, but we very much appreciate you sticking with us. We believe that we are going to demonstrate to all of those long-term investors the value of their investment, and we're gonna change the way that cancer is diagnosed and treated worldwide, and make our shareholders a lot of money. Thank you very much indeed.
Questions, please.
Hi, Andrew. Hi, Ian. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to start with understanding it might be a bit too early to talk about 2024 expectations. You mentioned you have a few decent commitments on the service side, and you did say that your cost controls for longer term discretionary spending won't be quite affecting your expectations for the next 24 months. I just wanted to ask, given that expectations in 2024 are still quite high, what are the key risks for you to get close to these expectations? And to what extent do you have commitments that make you confident on you getting there?
Yeah. So the business falls into the two sides, as we've described, the product side and the service side. In terms of the product side, we've got a very good pipeline developing. It's still new with regard to the distributors. So you're asking on the risks. Well, it's a new way of getting to the market that's not yet delivered. We've got the established sales, the research, whose only customers, and the FDA clearance and the differentiation and, you know, building a leadership position. We're seeing that convert into, excuse me, into stronger sales with those leading cancer research centers. And the other work we're doing to sort of make it more accessible and more straightforward to use is also bringing in sort of the next tier of customers. So that, that's the visibility.
But the distributors is new, and it's got to be proven, and we've got to add in, again, the content to help those distributors. But as Andrew showed on the slide, we've targeted distributors who are already selling some of the downstream analysis kit to the leading hospitals. So they're already familiar with, you know, both NGS or dPCR type analysis, and we're providing another sample. We're building the evidence and the data, but we've still got to convert it. So that's the risk. It's, it's a new route to market, but it does open up all those other geographies that we would struggle to deal with, particularly, you know, Asia and some of the other markets. In terms of the service side of things, probably the biggest risk at the moment has been the external environment. It's challenging.
We've seen a number of the portfolio companies have had to ratify or look at their own drug development programs, and that's, you know, we've seen a few customers defer things, but we're also seeing other customers say, "Well, actually, we need to... You know, how can we increase the chances of success of our study? How can we use biomarkers that mean we can actually run a smaller study?" So we've got both tailwinds and headwinds in that pharma service side. But again, as we generate more data and evidence and add the content, that's gonna open up that market more for us. So there's probably, on that one, I think the need is evident. And you know how expensive developing drugs are. So the customer base need this.
We've just got to move it a bit more to make it that we're more essential in being part of the solution, as opposed to more of an exploratory endpoint at the moment, recognizing that CTCs are new. As Andrew's highlighted, though, it's attractive for pharma as well to be able to have multiple forms of liquid biopsies, so hence, the sort of BioDetect, both the combined ctDNA and CTCs, is gonna make it an easier sell, because you're then giving pharma a more enriched solution. What we think is, in the earlier parts of sort of the asset development stuff, they'll probably be more interested in the high multiplex solutions, but then as they get into the actual development of the drug, it'll be more sort of a targeted panel that we'll be able to offer through that.
As I said, the other thing that the industry is getting to see more widely is that there's an increasing recognition that you have to add RNA into the solution. DNA alone is not a complete solution, and you can't get that with the ctDNA, but you can get it with CTCs. So yes, we've got a way to go. We don't, you know, we've disclosed the sort of sold order work, but for the first time here. We've got a way to go to build that up, close those contracts, and, you know, we need a few large customers to close out to give us that visibility.
Understood. Thank you. And if I pick up on your last point there, and going to the asset development you're doing on third-party platforms. So both on the digital PCR front, but also NGS, are you still focusing on the treatment or residual monitoring part of the testing market? As in, is this where you think the complementary value of ctDNA mostly lies when it comes to the exact market segment for cancer testing?
So at the moment, what we're seeking to do is to identify the difference between ctDNA readings and CTC DNA. The hypothesis is that, if, if a DNA mutation is in ctDNA, but not in CTCs, then maybe it's already been dealt with, because the immune system just killed off those cells, and they're not alive anymore or, or maybe the therapy did that. If it overlaps, you've got ctDNA and CTC DNA, then the theory would be that, you've got therapy or immune system doing some of the work, but it's not yet finished, because there's still live cells to be killed off. And then, if you find them just in live cells, in the CTCs, but not in the ctDNA, then this is being missed completely by the immune system.
So, the hypothesis, that's a very high-risk area, and it should be one where there should be therapy decisions made on that. So, for example, one of the platforms that we've been working with is the Thermo Fisher Ion Torrent system, which has a cancer gene panel called Oncomine Dx. And this panel includes all of the targeted genes that are in the FDA targeted therapy drugs, and also the ESMO ones from Europe. So it's -- I think it's... I may be getting the number wrong, but it's around 52 different mutations and hundreds of variants of those mutations, but they're all of the targeted therapy ones.
So if we can find those mutations in the CTC DNA, then that is wide open, and Oncomine Dx, the Thermo platform, results, the report already comes out and says, "We found this EGFR mutation. We recommend these drugs." So it's much easier for an oncologist to actually read that report, and they're already doing that for tissue, and we hope to enable them to be able to do that for CTCs in the future. So obviously, to do the commercialization of that, once we've got very strong data, you know, we'll be talking to Thermo about it.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks for taking my questions. So, you talked about the content and the data coming in the coming months, which will benefit both the products and the services businesses. Do you expect that benefit to favor one of those more in the, at least in the near term?
Shall I do that? Yeah. So, yes, it will favor the pharma business initially, because they can contract with us immediately. The adoption with distributors and so on, I think that will take a little bit more time to actually flow through. But we're already talking to pharma about some of these applications. So we've got active discussions going. We've got a list of pharma companies that we're already discussing things with. So I expect to see the pharma business is a near-term major opportunity. It's already growing. We're already getting large contracts from it, and we can just do a lot more of that. The product side is where there's very large-scale opportunity on long term.
I'd probably just add to that. So you'll have seen as well as we build the data and some of these solutions on the content, it does open it a little bit more on the corporate partnership side. Hence, similar to the BioView deal we did earlier in the year, which is on HER2, as we get some of the other sort of targeted mutations, we're able to provide that data. I think that opens up that corporate partnership route, as well.
Great. And the install base has gone up to 290 from around 260. Is that the kind of increasing, increases you're expecting, and s hould we be expecting a kind of similar increase over the coming interims? And can you give us any more detail on those placements in terms of the customer base and or geographies?
So the install base is, that's across both our internal R&D lab, our clinical lab, out with key opinion leaders and some of the other leading researchers. As you know, part of our approach to get the leverage R&D is to place instruments out with some of these parties, where they do sort of R&D for us. So they're free issue, and then obviously, what we sell to customers. The bit that we're trying to increase, obviously, more significantly is the instruments out with customers. So we will have to increase a little bit internally, to sort of enhance the lab capacity, but we're not planning masses of increases in those areas.
Certainly, with the key opinion leaders, there'll be some going up, but the main target and area for growth is to sell instruments. That's via direct sales and through the distributor network. We'd expect that number to go up in future years as those sales come through.
And just another thing on install base, which is not our install base, but the downstream install base. The Thermo Fisher Ion Torrent system I was talking about has got an install base of over 1,000 instruments. Every single one of those could have multiple Parsortix systems aligned with it. The QIAGEN QIAcuity system, I believe that's got over 2,500 worldwide. Again, they could all have Parsortix systems aligned with them. So that's what we're sort of targeting, is people who've already got. They've already spent maybe $500,000 on building on buying sequencing capability, and now we can just put Parsortix next to it, and then they can get more flow through.
A couple of questions if I could, please. So first of all, as someone who hasn't been in a lab running diagnostics for over 20 years, could you just help me understand a little bit about when you talk about developing protocols for the third-party systems, can you explain a little bit for me what that actually means in terms of what you have to do at ANGLE and how you then, what, when you go out to these customers that have these Thermo Fisher machines or, or the QIAGEN machines, what are you actually then showing them?
And then just related to your last points about sort of selling the Parsortix machines, when you get to that point, are you looking at sort of reagent, rental, or leasing type contracts, or are you looking for an upfront payment from customers, and then they'll then buy cassettes from, from you? And then, I guess, linked to that, you know, you've talked about the Portrait Plus kits. Do you envisage kits for the molecular side as well? You know, you go into labs these days, and you see little QIAGEN kits on everybody's shelves. Is that something that you're sort of thinking about for ANGLE as well?
Yeah. So, if I do them in the sort of opposite order, so the Portrait Plus kits, we, we've had to develop that because they're not available in the market, and we think it was a major step to enable the market to adopt, just to give them that way of doing it. So we have been through a process of optimizing the antibodies. The standard approach has always been, which third parties have been using, is a DAPI nuclear stain and then an epithelial stain for the cells and one stain, which is usually EpCAM, and then a single stain for CD45 for excluding blood. We've got much more complex. So we've got multiple blood sign stains, which are all combined together.
We've got multiple epithelial stains, which all combine together, and we've got multiple blood cell line all combined together. So we've done a lot of optimization, and so that bit, we had to-- We had a couple of years work to get to where we are. With the molecular, it's not that at all. So we're not developing any kits. The whole idea of this approach, and the reason we moved away from our in-house system, is we, we want to use the existing stuff that's already there. So we're going-- When I mentioned Thermo Fisher Oncomine, they've done all, all that. They have panels. They've got all the stuff there. What we're doing is we're testing the-- So generally speaking, the, the, the standard approach for looking at tissue does not work with circulating tumor DNA or CTCs, because it's not sensitive enough.
So you have to do something to make it sensitive enough. Now, these companies have invested a lot of money on ctDNA to make it sensitive enough for that, the fragments of dead cells. And what we're showing is we use the exact same kit on the CTCs, which come out of Parsortix, and we're getting successful results. So really, it's about, okay, well, it's incredibly simple, like, when you take the cells out, you add a lysing reagent, and then you put them into the standard kit that they've already got. So that part of it should be very, very simple, and it's literally us just providing written instructions for use. And then, what was the other part? It was about reagent rentals.
Yeah.
Do you want to do that?
Yeah. So, today, it's mainly been outright sales. We've had some sort of rental models. As we keep selling into the research use space, we envisage it will stay mainly as outright sale because they're mainly buying stuff out of CapEx budgets rather than OpEx. When we get into selling into the different clinical labs, I think that's when the model will change because they'll want to pay as they get paid for customers as well. So we're flexible on the route there. Initially, we think we'll have to finance it. It'll be a rentalized model off a higher cassette price, so volume with minimum order is our thinking on this.
As we get sort of higher visibility and more clarity, we'll probably be able to bring in an independent sort of finance provider to bridge the two, where we get the cash early and obviously, the customer then pays. Typically, it's going to be over a three-year period. So we're flexible on the revenue models to get this out and being used with the market, but we do envisage that the different customer types will have a preference for the different pricing models.
... Hi, Natalia Watts from RBC. Just a follow-up question. You talked about sort of adding content on both the imaging and the molecular side, and you've talked about a lot that you're going to be rolling out as well. Just curious to hear if pharma customers are asking about any other services that you're not currently providing, that you could provide in the future?
We do have that, especially with the pharma, which is why we developed the Portrait Flex, because the Flex means that we can add anything that they ask for. So when we first engaged with Artios, they were the first people who said, "Well, we want to look at gamma-H2AX and phospho-KAP1." So essentially, they paid us about GBP 250,000 to do a development, so that we could get those two proteins. And other customers can ask for other things as well. So there are a lot, you know, lots of pharmas are targeting different pathways and different aspects that they want to look at. So we can offer that as long as they're prepared to pay for the development, we can offer that.
In terms of molecular, as Ian mentioned in one of the earlier answers, the idea is we'll use a fairly comprehensive panel, which is being developed by one of the big suppliers, and that panel will cover pretty much all of the things that the customer might want for molecular. Generally speaking, there are multiple levels that the vendors offer. They offer targeted stuff, which is already FDA cleared, would be one set of panels, and then they can offer a much wider panel for research use. And we're seeking to access both of those different approaches. And then, if pharma wants to do discovery, you can do NGS, where you look at all the mutations or all the RNA.
So pretty much those sorts of solutions are already in the market. It's a question of us getting demonstration that we can use those particular approaches on the CTCs out of Parsortix. And you can't use all of them because some of them are just not sensitive enough for a small number of cells, but you can use some of them. So those are the ones we're focused on.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. You've mentioned that you've had some hires and some key hires. Whenever you get someone senior coming into a firm, it's good to have a fresh pair of eyes in there. What have these people come in and seen that they like and confirm the reason why they've joined? But probably more importantly, what have they seen that needs improving, and what can they do to improve it?
That's a great question. Would you like to answer that? I would say that... and, it's a bit unfair to put words in their mouth, but I do know what they've said to me. So the CCO is very excited about the fact that we've got intact cells because he's seen so many things where either they're looking at a free-floating protein, which can be upregulated for reasons other than cancer, or they're looking at fragments, and you can only get partial information. So he's particularly keen on the complete solution because you've got an intact living cancer cell.
And I think that our CSO she really likes this, both those things as well, but she also likes the idea, which I haven't talked about in the presentation, but the potential to have a so-called killing assay, where we take out the live cells, and we actually test drugs on those cells. So she's got in mind that she might have some of her contacts who would want to actually pay to put that in place.
It's not something that ANGLE's going to do with our current resources, but if we've got a customer who's got enough money, we could easily run programs because inside the Parsortix cassette, the cancer cells can be retained gently, and then we can use the machine to actually flow drugs through and look in real time what happens to the cancer cells. So that's the sort of thing she finds exciting as well. In terms of the what can we do better? I think, for example, one of the things we can do better is to streamline some of our regulatory control processes. We're possibly a little heavy on some of the stuff, so they're bringing in views from other places which are a little bit more relaxed on some aspects of early development.
That would, that would be an example. Another is that, which we already know about, but it's really important, is that in a, in a company with lots of different parts to it, it's really, really critical to have good communication, and we've got obviously U.S. and U.K., so sharing, sharing information, et cetera. So we, we do a lot of that anyway, but, so I would say those are my- Okay. Well, thank you very much, all the analysts here in FTI, and thank you very much, all of you on the webcast. I appreciate your time. Have a good day.