Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the hVIVO PLC Interim Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, they can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll. If you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from hVIVO PLC, Mo.
Good evening, sir.
Good evening. Thank you for that. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy lives to get updated on hVIVO's first half performance of 2025. I'm Yamin 'Mo' Khan. I'm the CEO of the company. I've been here just over three and a half years, and with me here is Stephen.
I've been with the company coming up to nine years now, and I was made CFO in October 2022.
Good. Thank you.
Okay, this is the trading update or the interims update from the first half of 2025. To be honest, with regards to the financials, there have been significant changes since we last provided the trading update in July. Here is the obligatory disclaimer for the publicly listed companies that we are a name. For those of you maybe new to the story, I'll give you a brief description of background of who we are and what we do. In fact, we have changed some of our service provisions in 2025 through acquisition of a company called CRS in Germany, with two clinical trial units, one in Mannheim and one in Kiel. CRS is a contract research organization, a CRO that performs phase I, first in human clinical trials, as well as phase II, proof of concept trials.
In addition, we acquired a second company in London, called Cryostore, who provides biobank services. They're basically for long-term storage for clinical and biological samples. hVIVO, as a whole, now provides early-phase clinical development services to different biotechs and pharmaceutical companies. We remain the world leader in human challenge clinical trials, which is a specialized type of clinical trial whereby we inoculate or expose healthy volunteers to a pathogen, and then we study different vaccines or antivirals during those trials. In addition, we have a second subsidiary called Venn Life Sciences, with offices in Breda in the Netherlands, in Leiden, and also in Paris in France. You can see the combination of experience of the three groups is extensive, over 100 years of experience.
We also have a very large trial participant database, and we have now greater breadth in the services we're offering, as well as the therapeutic areas we are servicing. To that point here, you can see at the bottom, if I start there, the scope of the work we do right now is more varied than ever before. If you're looking at the clinical development process, starting from pre-clinical, even to the extent of being in the laboratory, to getting the product authorized, getting a marketing authorization from the regulatory authorities, we can now actually have different contact points with the clients, depending on the different stages through their development process, and provide relevant services. This basically means it expands and widens our potential client base. In addition, we are now offering services in more than just infectious disease and respiratory.
Historically, you may know hVIVO focused on infectious diseases and respiratory diseases, especially pathogen-driven diseases. We can now offer metabolic disease trials, as well as renal, hepatic impairment, and also immunology or inflammation and dermatology therapeutic areas. Going forward, as we look to complete the integration of Cryostore and CRS together towards the end of this year, in the future, we will be reporting through different service lines rather than by business units. For example, human challenge trials, when we conduct that trial here at hVIVO, we at hVIVO in London recruit the patients, we treat the patients, we take the data, then our Venn colleagues in Paris provide services in the essence of data management and also in biostatistics. Our Venn colleagues in the Netherlands provide the medical writing contribution. All in all, different companies within the group work together to deliver a single project.
We felt that it's best as we move forward and align these companies across service lines to report along those service lines. The second service is clinical services. These are all non-challenge trials we're running at hVIVO group, including CRS, for example. These would include phase I trials, phase II proof of concept trials, as well as clinical site trials that we perform at both CRS and in London. The third arm to our new service line is hLAB or laboratory services. This now includes the addition of Cryostore and the expansion of our biobank capabilities. Finally, of course, there's the consulting services that are driven mainly through the Venn office in Breda and Leiden, which effectively gives us access to clients across a broader range on the clinical development pathway. I'm just going to give you a brief highlight of the numbers from the first half of this year.
I'll ask Stephen in a while to give you a little bit more granular detail on some of those numbers. As reported in July, we recognized around GBP 24 million in revenue. We generated GBP 3 million of EBITDA. The cash position is healthy, GBP 23 million for us. The key message for today really is that we are on track to deliver the GBP 47 million in revenue that we guided in May of this year. In addition, as part of this interim update, we are providing guidance for 2026 and 2027. We expect to return to growth in 2026, offering high single-digit growth and also breaking even with regards to EBITDA. Some of the operational highlights of this year, one of the key milestones for us as a company was to go through our first major acquisitions through CRS and then also acquire Cryostore.
As I said, both of those service lines are performing really well. We believe that the acquisitions that we accomplished early this year were very timely and are helping us in the current challenging times that are impacting our human challenge clinical trials franchise. Post-period, we have had some good wins, which are listed there. We have also added a new challenge model in human metapneumovirus or hMPV, this being the world's first hMPV challenge model of its kind. Finally, we also appointed a new Chair in Shaun Chilton. Shaun has expertise all relevant to us. When we put together the requirement list of what we were looking for in a new Chair, Shaun ticked all the boxes. He has CEO leadership experience at a service provider for the pharmaceutical industry.
He's got depth experience in being a member of a board, and he also has market experience and knows many of the analysts and investors himself. It's really great to start working with him as of September , this year. I'll now pass on to Stephen, who will provide more details on the financials.
Evening, everyone. I'll take you through the key metrics and provide the financials because actually they haven't really changed significantly since we gave a trading update in July. First up is revenue. We delivered GBP 24.2 million, of which GBP 5.5 million was delivered by the acquisitions. If you take that out, you're left with about GBP 19 million, and that GBP 19 million compares to the GBP 35.6 million we delivered last year. Yes, human challenge clinical trials have suffered significantly this year with the macroeconomic challenges that we, economic challenges we have faced. Consultancy fees have also dropped ever so slightly. We lost one client, but the interesting thing was that that client had been with us for about 15 years. I have pointed out that consultancy revenue is generally very sticky, and it is, and that may come back because there are some discussions with the client at the moment.
The positives really, though, are the, you know, we did set out a strategy to diversify our revenue streams and our services. You can see almost 1/3 of our revenue, GBP 7.9 million, is coming from hLAB and clinical services. hLAB services are obviously mostly organic, but it's benefiting from the new facilities and the new space that we have in Canary Wharf in clinical services, certainly benefiting from having acquired CRS. Just to remind, we reiterate our guidance for the year of GBP 47 million for 2025. EBITDA, this is before pre-exceptional items of GBP 1.4 million. EBITDA was GBP 3 million. This is after net losses from our acquisitions of GBP 0.5 million. The underlying performance for the core business was a profit of GBP 3.5 million, and that's not a bad result considering the decline in revenue.
We really benefited from operational efficiencies achieved with the new facilities, as well as tight cost management control. This is evidenced by the year-on-year headcount reduction of 25% versus H1 2024. A large part of that is due to that we use, we have a significant amount of temporary staff, and obviously we've cut that back in line with the volume of work that has to be delivered. We've also delivered efficiencies, and the permanent headcount is reduced by 15%. The other factor that's also driving that performance is cancellation fees. We did have an abnormally high level of cancellation fees in the second half of the year, which is what led us to this re-rating on our revenue down to GBP 47 million in May.
The benefit of those in this situation is that we do not incur any variable spend, so that more of that revenue flows through to the bottom line. EBITDA for the rest of the year, for the full year, is expected to be low single digit loss. Cash, GBP 23.3 million, is definitely a healthy cash balance, certainly in the environment that we're working in. We do not have any debt either. The reduction is down to two things, [Ray] It is down to the acquisitions. We've spent almost GBP 14 million on supporting the acquisitions, acquiring the acquisitions, and also supporting a loss, which we expected, and working capital, negative working capital, which we expected. A third of the reduction in cash is due to the human challenge clinical trials and the lower volume of human challenge clinical trials being contracted in the year.
The one thing we wanted to give you some sense of is where we're going to be expecting cash, this is for the full year, at the end of the year, and this is rather difficult to really project because human challenge clinical trials have a significant influence on where you'll land at the end of the year. We are guiding a cash balance forward with declining further in H2 2025. There are a couple of reasons for that. One, human challenge clinical trials, if they sign in time before mid-November, we stand a good chance of collecting that cash, and that would be better. It's quite likely, our conservative projections, that the cash will be delivered in 2026 rather than in the current year relating to new human challenge clinical trial contracts.
The other impact on causing cash to decline further is that we do have a high level of clinical trial activity happening in November and December. We don't expect to receive that cash until January 2026. It's very much what we faced this year in the beginning of 2025 because at the end of December 2024, there was a large debtors' balance and had a lot of questions on that, but the cash had come through in January. This is because you're working through a large CRO. They like to true up the payments for the visits, for the volunteer visits to their EDS system. It can take a bit of time, and then they pay 45 days because this is for the big CRO. Other than that, we do have sufficient cash, though, to continue to invest and grow this business for the foreseeable future.
When human challenge clinical trials come back and come back to a sort of normal activity levels, we'll be hugely cash-generative again, as we have been in the past. This slide just highlights the cash split between what the core business was responsible for in cash terms. You can see the core business utilized GBP 7 million of working cash and really down to a negative working capital, which is the unwinding of deferred revenue. You look at the acquisitions. The acquisitions, obviously, I mean, we spent GBP 10.5 million acquiring the businesses, and then we've also spent GBP 1.1 million in cash-generated operations, a negative value, but also the working capital, they needed support on the working capital.
Part of the reason for that is that CRS is a lot of the contracts that we inherited with CRS, their payments and their payment milestones were back-ended towards the end of the study rather than sort of operating throughout the study. That's why that working capital is minus GBP 2.2 million, and we expect that for the rest of the year to grow a little bit to up to about GBP 4 million. That's one, again, another reason why we are expecting cash to be lower at the end of the year. With that, I'm going to hand back to Mo.
Into 2026 and even 2027, we are facing headwinds, and there's no getting away from that. The 2025 year has been challenging for hVIVO, especially with regards to human challenge clinical trials. We've had cancellations, we've had postponements, and we've had lengthening in the lifecycle of the sales process, getting our customers from proposals to contract signatures. I think that's a fairly well-known factor that we have communicated to our investors before. Those headwinds are currently still playing a significant role that are not only impacting us, but also impacting the broader CRO sector. On the one hand, there is depression in biotech funding that's seen by the industry, but on the other hand, there's also pressure on vaccines because of the changes in the vaccine regulatory guidelines coming out of the U.S., especially.
Considering they are the major markets for vaccines, it does have an impact globally because our customers are now looking to reassess the placing of future funds and deciding which of the assets or drugs to take forward from their pipeline. If you have uncertainty or volatility on future revenue projections, those decisions take longer and you invest in fewer assets in the pipeline to take forward. That is one of the reasons why we've seen this dip in human challenge clinical trials. In addition, there have been changes in the vaccine policy. Even last week, there were changes in the way the immunization schedules for COVID, for MMR vaccines will be working going forward in the U.S. That's something we hope will rectify.
As things will settle and the industry gets used to these new parameters, we should expect to see a pickup in the development of these drugs because these drugs are currently in early stages of development. Some of these companies do have funding, and they're just waiting for some stability and more improved projections as they go forward before deciding on whether to run a phase I or a phase II or a human challenge clinical trial going forward. Having said all of that, we have a number of opportunities that the UK is trying its utmost to promote more clinical research in the UK. There have been some regulatory improvements. The startup timelines for running or setting up clinical trials in the UK have improved. That should help attract more clinical trials.
In addition, the UK is setting up some very large super sites or clinical research centers where they're intending to recruit a lot of patients into future clinical trials. That, again, should make the UK an attractive location for future clinical trials. Admittedly, there has been some negative press with regards to some of the decisions being made by the big pharma, Merck, AstraZeneca, Sanofi, and so on, with regards to putting in future infrastructure into the UK. With regards to clinical trials, it should not be impacted by those kinds of decisions because running a clinical trial in the UK doesn't necessitate that you should market that drug in that country. The key goal for running clinical trials is really to do it as fast as possible, and you go to the countries that have fast regulatory startup timelines and have high patient recruitment rates.
One thing I do want to highlight is that the pricing pressure we've seen for medicines is something that will stay with us for a while. This includes the UK, for example, where the UK government is currently negotiating with the pharmaceutical industry. In the U.S., there's the most favored nation initiative whereby the U.S., who admittedly pay very high prices for medicines, are negotiating low prices with the pharmaceutical industry. We believe that one way to reduce prices for medicine is to shorten the development process. If clinical trials and the whole development process can be shorter and cheaper, then the medicine would be available to patients faster and effectively cheaper. Human challenge clinical trials is one alternative way of developing drugs that is definitely cheaper and faster.
As a comparison, the amount of patients required to do a challenge trial is less than 10% against a typical classical phase II trial, and it will take less than half the time. We believe that the human challenge can play a pivotal role in the future of clinical development, especially with these ongoing pricing pressures that we see globally. With regards to the integration, I think I mentioned this before. We basically divided up this whole process into three sections: people, processes, and systems. I'm pleased to say that we have realigned our people into global departments. We've updated job descriptions, and the departments are working functionally really well. With regards to the processes, again, we've updated the processes to be aligned globally, and that they're all in place. The third facet, which is the systems, is well underway.
Of course, this always takes a little bit longer than the other two, but it's something we have projected, and we anticipate that by the end of this year, we will have completed the integration task. We have already realized significant savings from the integration, and we've also recognized cross-selling opportunities and cross-selling contracts that CRS and Venn and hVIVO have been collaborating together on. This is one of the key reasons why we did acquire CRS. We believe, especially looking at the current situation with human challenge clinical trials, that our decision to acquire CRS was vindicated by the fact that these groups are now contributing significant revenue to the group's total. One of the areas we will be focusing on, especially within CRS, is in obesity.
As you may have heard, obesity right now is a very big market when it comes to clinical trials and also for the drugs currently in the market. This is just the beginning. You can see in the middle bar chart there, the number of clinical trials in obesity has increased year-on-year. In fact, right now in this year, there are more phase I and phase II trials being conducted for obesity candidates than ever before. This isn't just the GLP-1s that are currently in the market, but companies are now looking for additional mechanisms of action, new classes of drugs that they can take forward and actually conduct phase I, phase II, and phase III trials and get those to market. We have our Chief Medical Officer, Thomas Forst, at CRS based in Mannheim, who is a trained endocrinologist and is a key opinion leader.
We've also equipped our Mannheim facility to cater for these types of trials, and we will be making a big push in promoting CRS and hVIVO as a group to conduct more first in human clinical trials, as well as phase II and phase III clinical trials in obesity. We talked about our hLAB services a little earlier. Now, hLAB has always been there. In fact, the laboratory section of the company existed before even hVIVO was known because in 1989, when Retroscreen was founded, it was mainly a virology laboratory services provider. I'm pleased to say that we've used that experience and that expertise and even those resources to now sell laboratory services as a standalone service line. We have already seen success in that we are now running phase III studies for laboratory-only services that we have never done before.
We have seen an increased number of queries coming in. We have hired a new Head of Lab, Chris Forsdyke, and he is coming together with our new BD person, Maria, and they are promoting and pushing for additional standalone services for our lab. Remember, our lab will continue to support the human challenge clinical trials we run, but in the meantime, they are still able to generate additional revenue by providing these standalone lab projects for our clients. Our weighted order book at the end of June was at GBP 40 million, which is a healthy order book. There is significant room for improvement. One of the key successes we have seen is the diversification of the order book.
Whereas historically, we mainly relied on human challenge clinical trials, we now have a greater diversification including laboratory opportunities, phase I, phase II, field studies, all forming part of this growing order book. In addition, the proposals that we have seen this year have far exceeded what we saw in 2024. Getting proposals in is the first step in getting contracts and generating revenue to generating good EBITDA. This is one of the reasons we are optimistic of future growth because we are seeing increase in interest, especially in the non-human challenge clinical trial portion of the work. This is our final slide for today. The outlook: we are reiterating the guidance we provided in the second half of this year. We will be achieving GBP 47 million of revenue with a low single-digit EBITDA, which is an improvement of what we said in May.
I think we said mid to high single-digit then. The key for us is that we continue to diversify, continue to grow our non-human challenge clinical trial pipeline and portfolio of services, as well as working on the two key large human challenge clinical trial opportunities that are in our pipeline. One of our areas for future growth is to continue to work across the different business units, including CRS, Venn , and hVIVO to run larger multi-site projects. I am confident that come 2026, we will return to growth and hopefully a break-even. We do want the human challenge clinical trials to come back, and the strength of the proposals we have seen is evidence of that. In 2027, we expect to return to profitability and be more cash-generative. Thank you for your time today.
Perfect. Mo, if I may just jump back in there, and thank you very much indeed for your presentation this evening. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. While the team take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can all be accessed via your investor dashboards. Mo, as you can see there, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation. Thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions.
At this point, if I may just hand back to you to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so. If I pick up from you at the end, that'd be great. Thank you.
Thank you. Okay, I'll try to go through as many questions as we can within the time allotted. How many new contracts over GBP 5 million have hVIVO won this calendar year? Obviously, I can't give you any information that's not in the public domain already. If we did before, we will announce a significant contract that will have an impact on revenue or other financials. That also applies to cancellations, as we announced earlier this year. As and when we sign these contracts and they have a positive impact on the revenue or profitability, we will, of course, announce them to all our investors and the market. Maybe Stephen, you can answer this one. Has the Whooping Cough stage three contract been defunded or is it still in the pipeline?
It's still very much in the pipeline, and we've been working closely with the client on setting up our bacteria lab. We have now set up the bacteria lab. They paid for that setup. We're just about to sign a small deal with them to complete their protocol and get ready for that. It is very much dependent on them completing their funding program. Mo speaks to the CEO on a regular basis, on a monthly basis, to see how that is going. All things told, they say they are on track to delivering it, but obviously a contract needs to be signed. We are mildly optimistic that this will come through at some point because effectively this Whooping Cough study is the old one in place. The old vaccine in place is nearing its tenure and its life, and there's no other phase III replacement available in the market.
We also think that there's a good marketplace for this vaccine to be funded and to progress forward. There are some good positives that this could happen.
Thank you. What specifics are you doing to reverse the shopping level share price decline? I think the key goal for us really is to get back to increasing our revenue and generating good EBITDA and profits and cash. They're the real drivers for us as we move forward. You can see some of the initiatives we have pointed out already. The diversification, the addition of new service lines is a key driver to all of that. This is not just only diversifying and adding more services, but also covering new therapeutic areas. We also have to manage the rapid changes in the regulations with regards to vaccines on an ongoing basis. We also have an excellent relationship with most of the vaccine manufacturers across the world, and we are working with them very closely to highlight the benefits of human challenge clinical trials.
We are, in fact, trying to lobby some regulatory authorities to persuade them to utilize human challenge clinical trials, especially with regards to the current pricing pressures we have seen and I mentioned earlier in the presentation. Will the share price ever go up? I definitely hope so. I do believe the share price will go up once we start signing some contracts, once we get increase in the diversified service revenue that we are beginning to see already. The proposals do support that. Why are we only hearing about these headwinds recently? We've only been impacted by them recently. Most of these headwinds that we are seeing have really come into fruition this year. Things change very fast, very rapidly, and especially driven by the United States.
The only kind of headwind that has been, I guess, in existence for a bit longer is the depression in the biotech funding, and I have mentioned that previously. Are you still on track for GBP 100 million revenue in 2028? We are still on track for GBP 1 00 million in revenue, although we are stopped putting a timeline on that, mainly driven by the volatility in the human challenge clinical trial business and generally in vaccine production and vaccine development. The company, as it stands currently, can cater for and drive GBP 100 million worth of revenue of work without any significant CapEx spend. We have the capabilities, the facilities, the resources, the equipment to generate GBP 100 million of revenue if we had the order book in place.
The key driver for us really is to drive new sales, whether it is in human challenge trials and pushing our clients to make decisions faster or promoting our newly diversified services. Notwithstanding the difficult U.S. environment for, and this is a very long question, when would you expect revenues and margins to get back towards the previous levels with EPS up towards? I think the major driver for those really is the human challenge trial business. I want to reiterate that our core business remains human challenge trials. We believe the current downturn is a dip, it's temporary. Long term, the utility of human challenge trials is there, but it's still robust. Not a single client or regulatory authority has said that human challenge trials are irrelevant. People understand that the concept provides good data really fast and fairly at a low price.
We believe this concept will definitely come back. In fact, when it does come back, we should see a boost. One, because there will be a clog of drugs that are basically on hold at the moment that will come into the human challenge trial concept. Secondly, with our push towards promoting human challenge trials and expediting the research of vaccines, making them cheaper for patients, should also hopefully have an impact. This question also, what makes you confident HCT will make it come back? Hopefully, I have answered that. There are two key, very large opportunities that we're currently working on. Typically, our human challenge trial contracts are around GBP 5 million- GBP 7 million. These are significantly higher. Both are what I would call in late-stage opportunities. One is effectively a verbal award.
We're just waiting for the client to get the funding and then sign on the dotted line. The second opportunity is with a large global pharma who now have internal financial approval to go ahead with this study, and we expect them to make a decision in 2026. There is talk that large studies and large field trials have been in the pipeline. Are they still there? Those two large challenge studies are in the pipeline. The large study, field study, we're actually just starting that up. That is part of our Q4 revenue this year. We will be recruiting patients on a large phase 3 vaccine trial this year. Your strategy has been to diversify the revenue base via acquisition. Do you have more potential targets in the pipeline? If so, which areas? We're always looking for targets.
Of course, right now we want to focus on returning the current company as it is back to growth. If there are any opportunistic assets out there that fit well to our kind of service provision, we will look at them seriously and execute on the M&A strategy. Stephen, this one is for you. What proportion of your revenue is recurring?
Okay, it depends on how you define recurring. If you're defining recurring as a contractual obligation to continue working with you all the time, that is fairly limited. We do have a consultancy business that delivers about GBP 6 million, just over GBP 6 million annually. It's consistently with the same clients, and it's very sticky. We call it a type of recurring revenue. It's very sticky revenue. Cryostore would be another example of a recurring type of revenue. Cryostore, scientists love to hold on to their samples. They find it very difficult to ditch the samples. When we bought Cryostore, we looked at its revenue base and its customer base, and it had been there, you know, 95% on average of that customer base and revenue base rolls over every single year. In terms of our total, we have quite sticky revenue, would be around about GBP 7 million.
That doesn't take into account some of the long-term relationships we have. We do have some MSAs in CRS. We acquired three or four MSAs. Although they're not obliged to give you work, you do have that relationship. You have that volume discount that they earn or win with the additional work that's coming through. We do have some, I would say, some sticky relationships across the group, both in hVIVO as well as CRS, because hVIVO, we do work with the big pharma. They come back to you all the time, particularly as we're the only world client. Contractually, it's not recurring, but in behavior terms, there's an element of recurring relationships.. Yeah.
Okay. China and India are the largest producers of vaccines. Why isn't hVIVO looking for business there? We are looking for business there, but not typically the producers. Just to be clear, the majority of the vaccines, the innovators are biotechs and big pharma based in Europe or the United States. Once they've completed the development for those vaccines and got the marketing authorization, they then go to India and China to manufacture those vaccines at a mass scale. Those manufacturers typically don't have to do any research. They're just manufacturing on behalf of the big pharma, typically based in Europe or the U.S. Did the client who paid for the Canary Wharf move sign a contract for a challenge trial? Yes, they have done that. How is the new facility in Canary Wharf working? Is there a way to reduce this space given new market access?
The Canary Wharf facility is working really well. One of the key components really is the lab. We did expand significantly the lab space when we moved out from Whitechapel into Canary Wharf. We're seeing that investment now give a really good return with an increased proportion of standalone laboratory work that we are conducting. We are looking at different ways to utilize the space we have, as well as performing the human challenge trials there. Are hVIVO evaluating biotechs? Not right now, but in the future, this is something we may consider depending on our cash position. I think that's it. That's all we have time for. It's [22:07 P.M.] I think I'll wrap it up there.
Absolutely. If I may just jump back in there, thank you very much indeed for addressing those questions that came in for investors. Of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended. Mo, perhaps before really now, just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that'd be great.
Thank you, of course. Look, 2025 has been a challenging year for hVIVO, together with many other CROs in our sector. We are the world leader in human challenge clinical trials, and we believe vaccines have a future. If you believe that the science behind vaccines is true and vaccines do work, then the human challenge clinical trials are here to stay. The current dip in vaccine development and maybe vaccine uptake will inevitably lead to increase in infectivity rates and thereby proving that the vaccines do work. I hope that doesn't happen, but vaccines are essential for treating these infectious diseases and keeping them in control and developing the herd immunity that we need to keep these viruses away. We've also, on top of that, diversified to new areas. Our laboratory services line is performing strongly.
I'm very pleased with CRS and the first in human phase I trials and also with regards to the cardiometabolic disease franchise that they're developing. We look to expand on that, and they already developed repeat business from a number of mid-sized pharma companies in Germany. 2025 is a challenging year. 2026 will be a year of growth. We're confident of that. 2027 is where we will bounce back. Of course, all of this can expedite if we do see a normalization of the human challenge clinical trials earlier. Thank you for your loyalty to hVIVO, and I'm with you on this journey. I have invested myself, as has Stephen, into the company. We do believe this is a great enterprise with a very bright future. Thank you.
That's great. Mo, Stephen, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order for the management team to better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of hVIVO PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good evening to you all.