Good afternoon, and welcome to the Diaceutics PLC half year results investor presentation. After the recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, can be submitted any time via the Q&A tab situated in the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply click Q&A, scroll to the bottom, type your question, and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. We have the company review all questions submitted today, and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Nick Roberts, CFO, and Peter Keeling, CEO. Good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
Afterno-
Thank you very much indeed, Paul, and indeed, welcome, as Paul said to the webinar. It's myself and Nick presenting. Nick, just as a reminder, joined the company some six months ago. He's certainly been working diligently to introduce a couple of new KPIs which we will feature in the deck today. I'm gonna walk you through a brief introduction to changes in the market space, what we've been doing for the last sort of six months. I'll hand over to Nick, and he'll take you through the kind of the key financials at a headline stage, and then we'll come back and take a little look forward as to where the business is going. If we move on to the first slide.
Just as a reminder, Diaceutics works in a particular corner of the precision medicine market. We're focused on helping the pharmaceutical industry commercialize the diagnostics upon which their drugs are dependent. To put that into perspective, the number of drugs that are being launched alongside the diagnostic continues to increase every year. If you look back over the last five years, the FDA have approved some 30% of all of their approvals have been for drugs, whether it's a diagnostic dependency. In other words, you have to solve the diagnostic problem. That's good news for patients, these drugs are clinically more effective.
However, there's an issue underpinning that, and that is that because the diagnostic and ecosystem underpinning many of those drugs is not yet fit for purpose, up to 50% of those patients will not get access to the drug because of bad testing. The test isn't available, the turnaround time for the test isn't adequate. In combination, that 50% represents several billion dollars of lost revenue per therapy for the pharmaceutical industry. We spent some time this year really validating that number alongside a number of our customers as well as our peers in the industry, and we will be publishing shortly in the Journal of Clinical Oncology just to prove that 50%, that number does seem to be the kind of the issue of the moment.
Now, the pharmaceutical industry has been aware of this for quite a number of years and has been investing to eliminate or eradicate those diagnostic hurdles. Historically, if you look back, you know, at the beginning 10 years ago, they might have spent $3-$5 million to investing in trying to eliminate those hurdles. Today, that number is somewhere between $5-$10 million, and we see over time that that wallet increasing. You'll see in this deck further down, I think Nick will cover it. The evidence that we have to show that pharma will actually invest that amount per therapy is already pulsing through our own our own metrics and our own spend programs. We will come back to that.
In an overall context, what we have is a situation where the pharmaceutical industry is seeking a solution to the diagnostic problems holding back access to these drugs. What do we do? Move on to the next slide. In essence, what we've created in Diaceutics is a very dedicated business model focused on this issue for the pharmaceutical industry. In its combination, we deliver health tech data and services to really solve for that. When we look at our pharmaceutical customer base, we have over almost 80 therapy brands under some form of management. 41 of those we engaged in the first half of this year. We will continue to engage with all of those brands over time.
Some of them, sometimes they go into a few months where they will pause, waiting for the next phase of their commercialization stage. Really pleased to see that level of engagement, ongoing engagement that we've been building up over many years. We do continue to add clients. In fact, in the first half of the year, we added seven new clients. Five of those were pharmaceutical companies. Two of those were interestingly diagnostic companies. Starting to see that new customer base, coming onto our books. What we in essence do, and I'll bring this out in more detail further down the deck, is we are servicing that need via a platform, and the platform has three value drivers. The first is we have our lab network.
That lab network which we're building, it really helps to solve the problems of testing on the ground, right at the front line, to make sure those patients are being tested the right way in a timely fashion. The second thing we have on our platform is we have created a series of bespoke products, data and technology-enabled products, which are really allowing our pharmaceutical companies to engage easily and simply with this really complex problem and in its combination, fix the issues in a timely way, to solve them. I have a slide further down in the deck where I will walk through an example of how our customers are using those products. Lastly here, we have a data set, which is really underpinning everything we do.
We believe today that we have the largest single testing database of any company, operating in this space. We use that data to guide not just the investment decisions for our pharmaceutical customers, but indeed our own behavior inside the company. If I look very quickly at the metrics on the right-hand side, and I said Nick will open these up in a little bit more detail. Really pleased to see the kind of ongoing platformization of our business. Now, to put this into context. We assumed when we launched the platform in October 2020, that we would have 20% adoption in year one, 60% adoption in year two, and 80% adoption in year three.
We are actually sitting in the latter end of year two of the platform rollout. We're looking at potential adoption hitting at 76%, probably 80% by the time we get to the end of the year. Really pleased to feel that we're a year ahead of our adoption targets there. In terms of our revenue build, the platform again has really enabled us a switch and a change in our business in two ways. One is in terms of the revenue growth that we've delivered in the first half of the year. We're seeing some 25% growth, and 18% on a constant currency basis.
The growth that we established in 2021, in the first year of the platform, really continuing to build momentum through the first half of this year. The second thing we're doing is, for the first time, we're moving towards that subscription model, so subscribing and licensing to the platform. What that provides us with is to be able to build a forward book of business for the first time in Diaceutics life. Again, Nick will give some detail and some flavor to the revenue shape, not just for this year, but 2023 and 2024. If I move on to, you know, what's been happening in the last six months. I've touched on the kind of sundial here of this slide.
I've touched on the key aspects on the bottom right of the slide. You will note that we have launched our Signal product at the latter end of last year, which is driving a really healthy switch towards subscription revenue. Thirteen subscriptions signed in the first half of this year, representing 30% of our total contract value going forward. Indeed, we really see the quality of the revenues changing for the business as the platform gets into its stride. What's driving that growth? If you look in the left-hand side around the seven o'clock on this sundial, there's a real differentiation and expansion going on in our customer base in a number of different ways.
We continue to bring on net new clients. As I mentioned, seven net new clients have joined our customer roster in the first half of this year. We're also increasingly seeing the move outside oncology. Oncology has been the kind of bedrock of where precision medicine has evolved. Now we're seeing introduction of the same type of biomarker and drug dependency in diseases like cardiovascular, infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases. In fact, only today, you may have noticed news of new Alzheimer's drugs being approved by the FDA. These Alzheimer's drugs increasingly will need a diagnostic component to make sure that they're getting to the right patients in time.
From a market perspective, we really see our own order book transforming in front of our eyes, and we anticipate that trend will continue. Of course, 2021 wasn't just about us kind of launching and having year one of the platform. We also invested very heavily in a transformation of our sales and marketing team, most particularly a 12-person key account team, supported by a further 10 people in terms of sales operations and solution selling. That team have really started to make a difference to the business in terms of penetrating sideways within our top five customers, where we are having now multiple therapies under management, as well as bringing new customers on elsewhere.
Through this year, we will continue to kind of nuance and perfect that key account management team. We certainly feel they're just beginning to get into their stride. A big event on the kind of precision medicine calendar is a meeting called ASCO. It's held in Chicago every year. At least it was until the last two years when obviously COVID interrupted it. This year, we're pleased to see that ASCO was back in full force. It's a very, very significant science meeting. All our pharma customers go to it, and indeed many of the key doctors in the space. We took a 22-person team to ASCO this year.
First time we've ever done that, with significant success, able to reach more clients, more customers, and indeed really understand their needs as we're going into the second half of this year, and forward. I really feel as if we're building that sales and marketing capability to walk with the significant opportunity that's in the industry. Of course, we're underpinned by the platform, and in the top right, you'll see here yet again, we've continued to evolve and improve the platform. We've added new patient records, up now around 600 million patient records. This, as I said, we believe is the largest single testing database. It's not just data in the US, it's data in all the key markets that pharma's focused on. That top 10-12 countries.
We're being able to look at this both at a patient level, at a disease level, at a lab level. It's multi-dynamic data sets, really serving the needs of our pharma customers. A second thing that we've done is to continue to expand our lab network. Our lab network is our, if you like, our reach down into the front line of testing. By working with these labs, we're able to effect a change on behalf of our pharma clients to really improve clinical testing quickly. Without this lab network, the level of change that would take place in the market would in terms of frontline testing could take three, four, five years.
By bringing this lab network on board to our platform, we can create a shelf-ready team working with us, working with our pharma clients to really get out in front of the clinical issues. The other thing component of our platform which we're really pleased is that we're continuing to enhance the features and the capability of that platform all the time. Listening to our lab network, listening to our pharma customers and saying, "What is it that you need now to really embed this in?" For some of our customers, what we're doing is basically bringing the data all the way through into their own CRM systems without any hands touching that data at all through the platform. For others, we're introducing levels of content and education that really support those labs moving on.
As we should with a platform business like this, really listening and evolving with the market space that we're in. More to come here, but really pleased with the level of market reception that we've received with the platform to date. I'm gonna hand over to Nick to cover a few of the top line numbers, and then I'll come back and talk about some of the other things that we're working on going forward. Nick.
Thank you, Peter. I'd like to start off by talking about just some of the high-level financial KPIs and to highlight that we've introduced three new KPIs for this reporting period. The first one is regarding the lifetime brand spend, and I've got a slide on that next, which I'll talk about in a little bit more detail. But really that talks to validating the total addressable market, and that's pharma wallet that we're looking to pursue per brand. That ten to fifteen million dollars that we'd like to realize. We've also introduced on this slide here, two new metrics. Total contract value, GBP 20.4 million in a period. That is the value of contracts signed during H1 of 2022.
As you can see, that's more than double what it was at this time last year. We've also introduced the order book. Again, I'll talk about total contract value and the order book in a little bit more detail in a moment. Overall, really pleasing set of results for us. We've seen revenue grow by 25% to GBP 7.5 million. We've seen the platform adoption, which Peter touched on earlier. Now 76% of our revenue is generated through the platform. We are a high-margin growth business, and those margins remain robust. We are seeing continued EBITDA profitability and, importantly, increased operating cash flows as well. Finally on this slide, we finished the period in a really strong position.
Net cash position of GBP 20.4 million. We don't have any debt, and we have an order book of GBP 10.2 million. I mentioned we'd go into a bit more detail on the sales performance. The total contract value of GBP 20.4 million really reflects the investment that we've made in our sales and marketing team. The enlarged product suite we have and our ability to now sell in multi-year recurring contracts. That increase in total contract value has dropped into two areas. One, it's been realized immediately as revenue, which is why we've seen that strong revenue growth. Across the two platform business divisions, which are the data and the tests, they're 52% up on the comparative period.
TCV, when not realized immediately, then drops into order book, which gives us a lot more forward visibility. Six times what it was at December 2021 at GBP 10.2 million now. It's the first time we've had a meaningful order book, and that gives us visibility into H2 of 2022. The pink block at the bottom right of the graph, that is the H2 revenue rollout. That's GBP 3.8 million. But we also have visibility into 2023 of GBP 4.1 million and, 2024 and beyond of GBP 2.3 million. As we've increased our revenue, we've seen our gross profit increase from GBP 4.4 million to GBP 5.1 million.
We look at two different types of margins so that we can be more readily compared with other platform business. Look at it both including amortization and excluding amortization. We've seen the margin ever so slightly reduce in the half, from 74%-68%. That is a temporary timing difference between H1 and H2. There was some early-stage non-digital service deliverables right at the end of H1. For the full year, we see that washing out at a 70%+ margin, as we've seen in prior periods. I think it's really important to highlight that we continue to invest in the growth of the business.
Our profitability, our operating cash flow and our net cash position enable us to continue this and will enable us to scale both the platform, the business and achieve more of that addressable market that Peter talked about earlier. Our EBITDA profitability, which is level on the comparative period last year at GBP 0.3 million, and our operating cash flow, which has increased from GBP 1.3 million to GBP 3.3 million in the period. That P&L strength allows us to continue to invest in our people. Recruiting more people to scale the business, investing in those people, and we've seen an increase in sales and marketing, but also our data analysis and customer support functions. Our strong net cash position, which has gone up ever so slightly from December 2021, from GBP 19.7 million to GBP 20.4 million.
That puts us in a really strong position. It allows us to continue to invest in the platform functionality, which we've seen here on the graph on the left is reducing in intensity over time. As the platform matures, we're seeing less and less need to invest in that platform. However, we're still looking to invest in the functionality of the platform. Peter mentioned earlier, we developed the platform such that data can be ingested, turned around, and delivered straight to our customer CRM systems, enabling them better insights in a more timely manner. We continue to invest in data. Data is key to our business, and our high quality market leading insights that the data gives really will be driving revenue growth now and in the future periods.
It's important to highlight that our investment in data, although is relatively similar in period to period, is now being supplemented by the increasing lab network. We've seen we now have 777 labs on our network. The exhaust data that comes out of that lab network is being captured by our data repository and enriches that data, allows us to sell on to our customers. Finally, I'd just like to step back for a moment and put the financial performance of this period into a bit more context with the journey of the business so far. Just to remind you, we IPO'd in April 2019 with the goal to raise funds and develop and launch the platform, which we did in October 2020 on time.
2021 saw our first year of performance with the platform products in place, and this first half of 2022 has been really promising. Just to pull out some of those positive metrics for the half so far. We've seen revenues from the platform grow 76%, a significant shift to multi-year subscription contracts. That's reflected in the order book. 37% of our revenues are now generated through subscriptions, and we see that trend continuing. We are achieving revenue growth rates of about double what the precision medicine market-wide growth rates are. We are a high margin and scalable platform.
We have successfully launched the tech-enabled service product suite, at the end of 2021, and actually won our largest company contract to date so far, $3 million, in 2022, and we're starting to see that revenue flow through now, and as that TES division grows. As I mentioned earlier, we continue to invest in growth, of the business, but we're seeing that intensity, reduce over time.
Thanks, Nick. What I want to do is just again sort of reflect on some of the kind of key drivers, if you like, underpinning the business. To do that, let's step back and say what's really happening in the marketplace. Our pharmaceutical customers have really clarified that they have a set of needs that span a seven- or eight-year timeframe, and it spans from before they launch these drugs through the launch period and indeed beyond into the lifecycle management of that. They ask a number of key questions.
For example, pre-launch is, "How many labs am I going to need in order to make sure that these patients are tested the right way?" During the launch period, they'll ask questions like, "How can I accelerate the adoption into those labs so that patients aren't missing out on treatment?" Indeed, when it comes to the lifecycle management, when the lab network is established, when they believe that they're sort of at a steady run rate, they're basically saying, "How many patients am I losing because of bad testing? What's going on and why am I not hitting my forecasts or how can I optimize my forecasts?" These questions have really defined how we've responded in building our business.
Another metric on this particular slide I'd like to pull out is really the number of therapies that really are pulsing across this market. There are some, if I move literally from right to left, there's some 200 therapies already approved. There's 25 new therapies plus every year now coming to market that need these diagnostic that have a diagnostic dependency. Behind that there is a tsunami of therapies moving through clinical trial not just in cancer, but indeed in many of the other diseases that I've already mentioned. I do want to also talk a little bit about there's an urgency here within pharma that we see in the last year to 18 months.
Part of that urgency is driven by the fact that there are some really important new therapies coming to market in the space. You'll see on the right-hand side just a few examples being pulled out of that recent meeting in ASCO that I mentioned. Secondly, we've reported on this before. You know, COVID has really built up a kind of waiting room of patients who didn't get tested the right way because of COVID. In cancer, that creates a delay in diagnosis. It's creating more of a pulse in patients. What we see here going on in the market is more therapies and more urgency, and indeed, more understanding, I think, of the needs of our pharmaceutical clients.
As we think of how we've addressed that, I come back to the lens of our platform. The platform has really been built over with years of understanding of the needs of this industry. That platform, which is a global network, reminding you that those labs are critical to do the change management at the front line of testing. If you want to change something quickly, then you need to recruit and collaborate with those labs. We're building that lab network. It's up around 770 labs. Our intention is to continue to build that to 2,000-2,500 labs. Why that number? Because that's the number that we believe represents 60%-70% of oncology testing.
Now, as we move outside of oncology, we will come back and look how that lab network can be optimized. The lab network is a huge asset building underneath our business. Our data, I mentioned 600 million patient records, really important. We're slicing and dicing this data increasingly in ways, partly in response to our customers' needs, partly in what we understand will help drive their levels of investment in the industry. We've been introducing new data products in the last six -nine months. I'll speak to that in a second. Of course, our network collaborations. Our collaborations is the vehicle, the innovation, if you like, but where we bring all of this together, where we bring pharma and laboratories really working in harmony to fix testing.
Change management in healthcare, as many of you will know, is probably one of the toughest things to achieve. I think what we've cracked with our platform is the Enigma code of how to do that. We're really engaging on some of the most meaningful projects at the minute to provide that real level of change at the frontline of testing. If I consider the needs that we talked about on the slide before the last one, those questions that pharma has asked. What in essence we've done is we've broken those questions down into these bite-sized chunks reflecting the phases of our engagement with our client. Some at an early stage, some at a launch and pre-launch stage, and indeed some in the lifecycle management.
By breaking it down into these bite-sized chunks, represented by the gray boxes here, and saying, these are the areas where we have observed pharma is willing to spend, to invest in order to improve the overall diagnostic ecosystem. Against each of those needs, we set either a data product or, represented in blue, or a technology-enabled service product represented in pink or a professional service represented in black. The big message to take away from this slide is our ambition here is not to manage bits of this, but to manage the whole thing. By managing the whole thing, we will ladder up to that $10-$15 million that we believe is available from every one of these therapies that we're engaging with. I want to describe one customer journey.
Just go back last slide, if you could. I just want to describe one customer journey represented by the little pink, green and orange buttons on the left-hand side. What this customer experience has been, it's a customer launching a drug in breast cancer. We started working with them back in 2019 with a piece of data to help them understand what was the scale of the opportunity to fix the diagnostic lab network. Subsequently, we have been upselling and enhancing alongside them what they're doing, training laboratories, moving on to standardize that next wave of laboratories to make sure that we're building that lab network, not just with numbers of labs, but with the highest quality of testing, which is really important to our pharma customers.
Indeed, what we believe will continue here will be to provide additional data of what's going on in the marketplace. We anticipate living with this particular therapy example for many years to come. You can see what our, you know, our salespeople, our key account management people are looking down this list and saying, "We've helped you in these following areas. Now, there are some of these other things that we know that are important to you." It allows us to build our land and expand strategy with each of our customers. If I touch just on the data, it powers everything that we do. You've heard me say already, I think twice, we believe it's highly differentiated, strategically in the market.
By living with these datasets for over the last 10 years and augmenting them, we've really begun to understand how to flex and cut and slice these data to create some of the most high-value products in the industry today. An example of that is our Signal product, which we launched in October last year. What Signal is doing is identifying in the previous week by ZIP code, how many patients were tested positive for a particular biomarker. By bringing that data in, ingesting it, doing all of the standardization and integration that is required of these large datasets, and by feeding it through into our customer CRM system, so that it's sitting on the iPhones of our customer apps, our customers' reps app in front of them. It really is guiding just-in-time education physicians.
Yesterday, a pharma rep may have walked into a physician and saying, "Perhaps, doctor, you may be seeing patients in the next three-four months that are positive for this biomarker." Today, what we're able to do in saying is, "Doctor, you're likely to be seeing patients right at this minute that are biomarker positive. Let me remind you what the opportunity is to treat them the right way." This Signal product is really changing just-in-time education. I'm delighted to say that since we launched this product, we've identified some 18,000 patients. These are cancer patients, where we believe the opportunity is to get them onto the right drug. A really significant breakthrough, I think, in the industry. Our data is an extremely sophisticated engine driving everything that we're doing. There's more here.
There's more innovation, there's more product to be delivered out of the data as we go forward. If I kind of really almost conclude for the minute, I know we'll get into Q&As. Around a sort of a picture of what's next? Where are we going? I think I've mentioned already the little up arrows on the left-hand side, the precision medicine market that we operate in is changing in extremely dynamic ways. More drugs coming to the market, more therapy brands, brand teams considering what's the right level of investment to make sure that more of these patients are getting through the diagnostic access issues and onto their drug.
Indeed, we're beginning to see diseases outside oncology, not just in some of the large diseases like the autoimmune and cardiovascular infectious diseases, but indeed, some of the rarest of diseases on the planet, where the patient need is quite often a life and death need, and where you might be looking for 1,000 or 1,500 patients every year. What we're able to do with our data is to find those patients, again, making sure that our pharma clients are really addressing that clinical need in a meaningful way. From a market dynamic, we really see the marketplace beginning to tip. It's beginning to lean in to the precision medicine promise that has been building in the background.
For us, that has represented an opportunity to step into that market at exactly the right time. With the DXRX, I think we've built the right product. It's fit for purpose. Of course, we're not finished. We'll continue to perfect, add new data sets, listen to what our customer needs in terms of the platform engagement. Our ambition there is that we become the preferred partner in the long term to our pharma clients who are saying, "What's the right option for me? Who is the right partner to help me really understand how I'm going to eliminate these diagnostic hurdles?" Key to that is building those important customer relationships.
Trusted customer relationships that we've been building up over many years, making sure that we're delivering against the needs, and we're making sure that we're bringing the highest value, platform capability, to the table. Scale is really important in a platform business, and I've mentioned in the previous slides that while we are dealing with several hundred therapies in this space today, what's coming behind that is a doubling or a tripling of that space. Again, I think what we've anticipated that tipping point in the market and the platform that we've built and that we will continue to evolve, will be fit for purpose. Couple of things to just look out for, I think, in this space. Obviously more subscription we
As we shift the business towards that level of subscription revenue, certainly more proof statements, if you like, that the platform is making a difference, and some of those publications will be coming out either in the second half of this year or quarter one of next year. Really starting to get into our stride as a company that's making a difference in this space. I think that brings us to the Q&A.
Yes, Peter, Nick, thank you very much indeed for such a comprehensive presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the team take a few moments to review those questions already submitted today, I'd like to remind you the recording of the presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Peter, Nick, as you can see, we've had a number of questions through during today's meeting. If I may just ask you just to read out the question where appropriate to do so and give your response, that'd be wonderful. Thank you, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Yeah. Thank you very much. There's one here on ownership of data. I'll take that one. Yep. Okay. Do we own our data? Yes, we do. We're ingesting the data that is coming in. It's anonymized data that's coming into our database, de-identified as it's called in the industry. And those data sets come into our platform. What's really important, I think, in this space is to consider that we really aren't selling bits of data, we're selling insights. For us, the real intellectual property is it's important obviously to bring in those core data sets, but what's really important is that you turn that into the so what, the insights that are going to change behavior in the market. This is a real differentiator for us.
We know there are companies who do or aspire to sell testing data, and few of them have the level of expertise and the comprehensive living with this space to turn that data into the key insights that create the high-value opportunities for us to sell that data. Our data products are some of the most valued insights I think in the industry today, and we're constantly being referred back to that.
Our ownership, our stewardship, our shepherding of that data, the level of compliance that we put around it and the investment that we've made in making sure that we have the highest value and the highest integrity around how we're handling that data is something that I'm particularly proud of, and I think will really drive the business for many years to come.
The second part of that question, the multi-year subscription contracts, how do they work? Of the GBP 10 million order book, how much is deliverable this year? I think really the best example of how a subscription contract works for us is in relation to the Signal product, which Pete's talked about earlier. That is at least an annual, but it can be two, three, up to five or indeed longer year contract with a pharma customer whereby they get regular updates on data through alerts, and that's the information that can feed directly into their CRM system. They subscribe to this data feed over a period, and we invoice that on a monthly basis. In return, they get data on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.
Of the GBP 10 million order book, GBP 3.8 million is deliverable in the second half of this year. Again, it's giving us some really great visibility into this half, and again, building order book for future periods as well.
There's a question here. How far do we think we are from seeing some meaningful network effects? Network effects, I think, for our platform are coming in two ways. The first is obviously on our lab recruitment. What we're looking for is labs inviting other labs to join the network. We're already seeing that. Through our program for Lab Talks, we're really allowing labs to teach other labs. We really see that labs themselves are creating that internal referral. "You should ask this lab to join." Indeed what we're reaching out with that level of endorsement is happening. That lab network effect is already being triggered there.
I think the second part of that is the sort of the kind of the internal referral inside some of our larger customers. As we work with one therapy team, what we're hoping is that the service and the work that we're doing gets sufficient traction, that they're then referring us on to another therapy brand. I'm pleased to see that in our top five customers, we're working with four plus therapy teams, each of which really is an individual customer within that. I think that, again, that referral is ongoing. From a sort of a macro point of view of that sort of, you know, the platform really gaining that momentum in the marketplace, it's hard to say exactly when that tipping point is.
You know, we feel that 1,000 labs on the network, 600 million patients in the platform and a customer base like we have, we're pretty close to setting out a kind of the preferred product for the industry. It's a good question. I'm not gonna create a prediction around it, but I think we're already beginning to see the seeds of network effect already beginning to build the business.
We've got another question here. How has the headcount moved since last year, and are there additional hires planned for the coming year? Since I'll take the reference point of December 2021. From December 2021 to June 2022, we increased the headcount by a net nine. Within that, there were 20 new starters, as you'd expect. Usual, but an ultimate churn of employees, but also, new heads joining. Are there additional hires planned for this coming year? Yeah, absolutely. We believe it's right that we continue to recruit people to be able to scale our business and meet our ambitious growth trajectory and expectations. Of course, we'll make sure we balance that with continued profitability.
It is important that we continue, as I mentioned in my slides earlier, important to continue to invest for our future growth.
There's a question here. Of the $10-$15 million per therapy mentioned, is that per annum or is it for the entire life of the therapy? Actually we have a slide on this which, if I'd ask Nick to switch to in a second while that's coming up. Two things here. The reason why I think it's really important that we focus for a second on the $10-$15 million per therapy, I think it creates a real proof statement of opportunity that is in the marketplace. Now, on the left-hand side of this particular slide, you see what we call the lifetime spend extracted from the brands.
The brands aren't mentioned by name, but you can see here that of a brand at the top, what we've been living with for seven years, even before the platform arrived on our doorstep a year and a bit ago. We've been living with that brand for a sufficient amount of time to extract up to just under $8 million from that therapy brand. Others, where we've had more of, they've had more of the platform experience, we've seen an acceleration of that spend. Again, $6 million, $5 million, $4 million. You can see the direction of travel there, and that's spent over the lifetime of that brand. On the right-hand side, the graph really speaks to what's been happening this year or the first half of this year.
Again, you can see some really meaningful movement across those brands as a result of the platform. I think there's a sort of another maybe question I'd like to pose on top of that, and that is. Is that where this ends? You know, way back, five, six years ago, we published an analysis that shows for every $1 that a pharmaceutical company spends fixing diagnostic, there's between a $30 and a $60 dollar investment back. What does that mean? It means that what we ultimately believe will happen here is that as the pharmaceutical industry sees real, you know, additional patients coming into their drug that might otherwise have been lost because of that 50% of loss of patient leakage. There will be a propensity or a willingness to spend.
We've done some modeling around this to say somewhere between $35 million-$50 million per therapy is about the right level of spend for a billion-dollar brand. Now, I think it's important that we keep our feet on the ground. We're building a business, we're building that credibility. I do feel that as the industry understands the significant return on investment for every one of those dollars that we spend on diagnostics, I think we will see that number move upwards.
Next question. How much cutback are you expecting from pharma due to headwinds and the possibility of a protracted recession? Peter, did you wanna?
Yeah.
Probably go on that one.
I mean, this is a tough one. What I can say is that I think what the pharmaceutical industry experienced, for example, during COVID, was an abrupt number of patients that didn't present because of the pandemic. Outside of that event, really, you know, the pattern and the pace at which patients were presenting, both in cancer and other diseases, we do not see changing as a result of any recessionary fears. Obviously, there may be payment concerns around that. I can tell you that I think the pharmaceutical industry almost as a whole is anticipating a very, very significant growth period for the next number of years.
Largely driven by the number of new therapies they're bringing to market. The success that they're having with the FDA. These precision medicine drugs get through the FDA faster with a higher probability of success. So what will drive, I think, the pharmaceutical business for the next phase of time is locked in already. I don't think we'll be subject to those recessionary fears. From our point of view, I think, what we're making sure that we do is to diversify our customer base, so that as one customer might have an off year or their pipeline isn't quite where it needs to be, that we have two or three others filling that and backing up. I think we've been successful in that so far.
From our point of view, what we're leaning in, what we're preparing for, I think, is not a slowdown or a recession, but rather an acceleration and a speeding up of the marketplace.
Thanks, Peter. I think we've got one more question, which is, what was capitalized in the half and how does that change over the next two years? What was capitalized in the half, GBP 2.3 million. Now, that was GBP 0.9 million of data and GBP 1.4 million of platform development costs. But that intensity of capitalization is reducing. In the comparative half, it was GBP 2.7 million. That's dropped to GBP 2.3 million. If I remind you, it was GBP 5.1 million for 2021. Where we see that landing this year is around about GBP four and a half million.
Over the next couple of years, I believe that'll continue to decrease, and I think we'll find a steady state in and around possibly the GBP 4 million of spend. We'll have to appraise that as time goes on. If there's an opportunity to purchase potentially more data to help with growth and enhance that area of the business, then that may be something that we look at. Certainly that's my expectation as of today.
There is one last question there, which is how well do you think you market yourself to the wider media, not simply in the UK and the trade press? Are you celebrating your successes? I think this is one of those questions which is, I suppose there's never enough. What I can tell you is what we're doing and why we're doing it. In essence, what we've been doing with both the platform and our communication, if you like, is to make sure that our pharma customers have both the confidence and the proof that we can really support them. I think that's been evident in the business development build in the background, and that will continue. We have a very strong understanding and I think a presence with our key pharma clients.
That's priority one. Obviously, a second one as we move and really reflecting of the fact that we are a PLC. I think there's an obligation on us to really communicate to that wider audience. I think what we're aiming to do is really tell the story of Diaceutics. You know, I'm particularly proud of the fact that even since the beginning of this year, we've identified some 18,000 patients through our work that might otherwise not have got the right treatment. That's a profound impact, a profound clinical impact on patients' lives and indeed on their families. It's a particularly important point for my team inside Diaceutics. We're particularly proud of that, and it allows us to really understand how we at Diaceutics are connected to our mission.
Yes, I do believe that we will continue to tell that story, tell it louder and tell it more effectively. Obviously helped by the fact that we can now have proof statements behind us, that we just didn't promise to do this, but that we're actually doing it. Thank you for the question. I, you know, more to see here, but I think that we're at a very good point where we have a really strong story to tell.
Peter, Nick, thank you very much indeed. You've covered off every single question we've had through, so thank you indeed. If there's any further questions that do come through, the team will have the ability to review those. Peter, I was gonna ask you for a few closing comments, but yeah, I think you've just delivered them. Thank you again for that unless there's anything further to say. What we would like to do is get your feedback. Could I please ask investors not to close the session? You should be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but it's greatly valued by the company.
On behalf of the management team of Diaceutics PLC, we'd like to thank you for your attendance today. Thank you and good afternoon to you all.