Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the 4DMedical Investor Webinar. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please enter it into the Ask a Question box and click Submit. I would now like to hand the conference over to Dr. Andreas Fouras, CEO. Please go ahead.
Hey, everybody. Really, thank you so much for joining this call. I'm incredibly appreciative of your interest. I hope you can bear with me. My voice is pretty hoarse. I've literally had hundreds and hundreds of conversations with doctors over the last three days talking about CT-VQ at the RSNA conference. And it also doesn't help that it's currently below freezing here in Chicago, where the whole place is covered in snow. Let's get into it. Here are, of course, important notices. For those of you who are really new to the business, to 4Dx, we are a structural and functional imaging software company. We take CT scans and add significant value to those so that to help the whole range of doctors: radiologists, lung doctors, surgeons.
We have about 130 folks across our team, with a key focus of our U.S. team being on our market and the rest of the team being in Australia. We're excited. We now have nine FDA-cleared devices as of early September when we got CT: VQ cleared by the FDA. This is our portfolio. One of the key things that we've learned over the last few years, in particular since getting CT- LVAS to market and the acquisition, and this information led to the acquisition of Imbio, that there is really significant value in being a full-service offering. There's significant value that when a hospital signs up to get 4DMedical's products, that they can have the whole spectrum of everything that they need that's covered inside that one CT scan. For example, one CT of the lungs has, of course, the heart in it.
So you could see, for example, a coronary artery calcification. You could see lung density analysis. And, of course, we'd really like folks overwhelmingly lining up now to get to our third-generation pulmonary function product, CT: VQ. They're highlighted there in yellow on the left. Our pulmonary function products are game changers in their space in that they show things to a radiologist or to a doctor that they could not see no matter how long they spent staring at that image. And in particular, CT: VQ shows both the ventilation and perfusion in the lungs. And I'm going to repeat it probably quite a few times over the course of the call, but we're really very proud of the fact that CT: VQ is the only technology in the world that allows you to see blood flow in the lungs without the use of any injected contrast.
And so that gives us this tagline. And this is exactly one of the key slides that we show at RSNA as we're talking to doctors when they come in saying, "Hey, I've just been out there. I spoke to Dr. XYZ. They told me that I had to come and learn all about VQ from you." And our starting point in the conversation is always this: that you get all of the contrast without requiring any of the injections. And that's particularly exciting to radiologists because they are doing non-contrast CTs routinely. They're doing them all day, every day. And so that's really the center of their interaction with lung doctors. And by being able to add additional value on top of that with software, that requires them to go out and buy new hardware or service new hardware or have new technicians to do the scanning operations.
So that is something that they find very exciting. And once again, for those who are new to the story, if you look here at the top of the picture on the right, that colored image. So we take this routine CT scan on the left. We add value to it, that dramatic value inflection to that scan through our software. And that gives you a ventilation image shown there at the top and a perfusion image there on the bottom. And a key thing that this is used for, there's right now today in the market two core technologies that deliver perfusion imaging in the lungs. And they are both CT with contrast or CT angiography.
But for us right now, at the center of our bullseye, at the core of where we're looking to make the biggest impact, is the standard of care really for perfusion imaging, which is a SPECT V/Q in the U.S. Now, I know this might seem like a little bit of a detail, but SPECT is modern technology that delivers a three-dimensional image, a three-dimensional nuclear image. And so how does that work? What it does is the patient, in some way or another, is given, is ingested radioactive material, and then the SPECT system measures or images in 3 dimensions where that nuclear material is. So, for example, well, not for example, specifically for a SPECT V/Q image, the patient goes off to a special room where they're given a canister of radioactive powder or fine aerosol or dust of radioactive materials.
And that radioactive material in that container, you breathe it in from the container, it kicks it up, and it comes in and sticks to the inside of your lungs. You then leave that special room, go into the imaging chamber where the radioactivity that is coming out of your body is imaged, and you see that there in that SPECT image. You're then injected with radioactive material, and that gives you the SPECT image on the right, which is the perfusion image. And then just one final point, sorry for all of this detail, but it's important to understand the market. That is a three-dimensional image done on very sophisticated modern equipment. In the United States, two-thirds of all nuclear V/Q images are delivered with a flat image.
So basically, a flat camera that doesn't create the full three-dimensional image and actually creates an image quality that I would say is substantially less good than this example you see here. But nevertheless, so this is the SPECT ventilation in the middle, perfusion on the right. And at the start of all of this process, when the surgeon sent you off or the doctor sent you off to get that SPECT VQ image, first of all, they took a CT scan. And what 4DMedical is offering here with CT: VQ is the ability for that surgeon, that interventional pulmonologist, interventional cardiologist, to use the CT scan that they'd already taken of you and just simply order our software to be run. And that delivers images that you see right here. And I'll just quickly flick backwards and forwards there for you to see. That's the current standard of care.
In fact, that's the top third of the market. And then here we see our images. Now, the key advantage, I think a lot of folks prefer the look of those images that we have there. I think they look cleaner and crisper. But actually, that's just one of many drivers that are driving doctors to be extremely excited to say things to us, like I've been hearing at the conference over the last few days, like, "I must have this. I need this for my clinical practice." And those key drivers are not just. Has said that it's a really nice, clean, crisp image and that sits on the CT that they're already used to dealing with. They don't need another procedure. But actually, it's that they don't need another procedure.
It's like that they don't have to send the patient off to go to Nuclear Med and get this quite complex procedure. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour to do it, requires the patient to go through a number of steps, requires expensive infrastructure that's only used for this, for example, equipment to generate aerosols or powder forms of the radioactive material. Overall, it's complex. On the other hand, they already got the CT, and they can run our software. They get exactly what they want. That is the core thing that's driving doctors to come across and use our technology. So there is, as I've been saying, a really significant we're excited. And we have identified really at the core, at the center, not the entire market, which is many, many billions of dollars, perhaps $10 billion a year.
But at the center of our bullseye is the one million VQ scans performed annually in the United States with an average billable of $11.50. So that's a $1.15 billion U.S. market and globally a $2.6 billion market. There are, of course, you can think of that as a target with outer rings or an onion with more and more layers. There is replacing the CT angiography business. There are other global opportunities. But for now, we are laser-focused in terms of execution on that central one million scans of currently of VQ. And we firmly believe, we know for a fact that right now that nuclear VQ has some key issues for the folks who actually deliver the nuclear VQ scan. I've been talking about some of the inconvenience, like that you need specialized equipment.
And the fact that there is only a modest number of nuclear setups across the United States. There are 10 x more CT setups in the U.S. than nuclear. And it takes about one quarter of the time or less to do a CT scan. And so you could think there's at least 40 x the infrastructure to do it. But I think also you can't have a conversation like this about habits and decisions without also talking about the economics. So let's have a quick talk about the cost or the reimbursement, the payment that the hospital gets. And these numbers are gross inflows, so gross payments made to the hospital. In fact, these numbers get more appealing or more favorable to 4D when you start looking down and doing a breakdown after costs.
But here we have a nuclear VQ scan reimbursed at $530 per scan, a 60-minute procedure. That's $8.97 a minute. And instead of doing that by shifting it from a space where it takes about an hour to do the test to somewhere where it can be done in just a few minutes, just a five-minute procedure, then you add our reimbursement, which is a little higher, $6.50 versus $5.30. But the key driver is not that 15% increase in the reimbursement. It's that you can do it in a fraction of the time. And so the revenue per minute is dramatically higher. But on top of that, there's a spot now in the nuclear medicine department. And there's a whole range of opportunities.
Those nuclear medicine departments, like everywhere in medical imaging today, ask any of the experts in medical imaging today, and they talk about just the overwhelming demand, just how busy everybody is, how hard it is to get through all of the workload. And instead of doing that test that gives $8.97 per minute, they could do, for example, a myocardial PET stress test that bills at $22.50 or is $30 per minute, significantly more. Or they could do a theranostic scan such as you might have heard of TLX and the procedures, sorry, the theranostic procedures, imaging and treatment that they do that bills at $6,000 per procedure. So we have this really phenomenal opportunity where instead of the scan coming there into the middle, the VQ peels off to the left, and this myocardial PET stress test comes in to the right.
Both of those departments are more profitable and have drawn in more revenue. Additionally, right, so there's more money. It's more convenient for the surgeon because they don't have to send somebody off. They don't have to complicate their scheduling for their procedure room, for their operating theater or their procedure room. Better for the patient. They don't inhale radioactive powder. They don't get injected with radioactive material. The scan quality is beautiful. We just have this. Every single reason for a decision to be made here drives in the same direction. Then, of course, on top of that, if you're in the two-thirds of the U.S. market that is on the old-fashioned 2D imaging, you also get to say that you get to skip from 2D to 3D imaging at the same time.
So, having seen this, having seen these compelling reasons and the massive opportunity that CT: VQ represents, our friends with whom we already have an existing agreement with at Philips have agreed to add CT: VQ to that existing agreement to expand that. And they have made the extraordinary step of adding minimum order commitment over a two-year term. And additionally, to support us and to support that minimum order commitment, they are adding business development, sales, and clinical specialist team members to their team, both specifically dedicated exclusively to VQ and also partially dedicated to VQ across their opportunity. We've already started. Some of you may have seen that we did a breakfast opportunity, so co-marketing, joint marketing activity. There was a breakfast at RSNA.
And you can see here on the screen, those two pictures there are pictures where there were a big audience of leading radiologists, including some that I had the opportunity to talk to. One very senior radiologist there stayed and spoke to me for 50 minutes after that presentation, which is just absolutely extraordinary. So we had this great lineup of speakers that included leaders, leading radiologists in the United States, leading pulmonologists, our Chief Medical Officer, and a senior executive from Philips, in fact, the North America leader for software sales in the U.S. And as I said, that commitment is, or as we said in our announcement yesterday, that commitment includes a mechanism where the commitment is underwritten on a cash basis with really significant growth baked in as well. So we have been working hard, working diligently.
I'm very proud to say we have one of the hardest working teams in healthcare and on the ASX. We have worked to bring to validate our technology. We've got over 100 patents, nine FDA clearances, hundreds of peer-reviewed academic publications. We have proven products, processes, and people, so our full pulmonary imaging suite, CT-VQ, is an unrivaled disruptor, the only technology in the world that allows blood flow without an injection. We have been demonstrated that we are navigating U.S. healthcare, proud of winning Deloitte, being listed in the Deloitte Fast 50 as the seventh fastest growing technology company in Australia. We've been achieving that with our second-generation product and with the great people and our deep understanding of U.S. healthcare, and that's all been delivered by our internal people.
And now that Philips have stepped up formally in writing, backed by cash, backed by resources, have strengthened our team by adding something like more than 25 x the other people power to that same effort. We have a bursting pipeline. And I think it's one of the reasons why I'm so excited is because time after time after time today at RSNA, I had global leaders, U.S. leaders in healthcare walking up to our booth, walking up to me and saying, "I have heard about this VQ thing. Can you tell me about it? It sounds unbelievable." And then by the time they leave, they're saying to me, "I need to have this. This is an incredible technology. This is going to help me get my job done, help me deliver better healthcare to my patients." And we are well funded. So cash in the bank already.
And we have a high expectation of additional sum, or in fact, really all of that additional $30 million from exercise options. And in fact, more than a quarter of those have already been exercised. So if I just pause there just for one split second. So we have all of these things in place. This is the core of our plan. This is where we're putting our resources, and this is where we will deliver. And on top of that, also with Philips, our strong partner, we have a really significant opportunity. And if I just cover this really quickly, this slide here is in numerous slide decks that have been put out on the ASX before. Let's look at the right-hand side of this. There are 4 million veterans who, through PACT Act registration, have registered as being impacted by toxic exposures.
A surgical biopsy would cost $30,000 and require a three-day stay in hospital. Costs $120 billion. The short pitch that we're making to the U.S. government, to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and you can see there in that picture in Congress, second from the left or third from the right, CEO Jeff DiLullo, West Point graduate, Army Ranger, CEO of Philips, friend of 4DMedical, standing up, giving testimony in Congress saying that one of the best ways that the U.S. government can save money by implementing technology in healthcare is by implementing 4DMedical screening technology to screen these veterans, and so we say that's a $4 billion opportunity. We're very excited about that, and that stacks as a very exciting opportunity on top of our core plan, which we are executing and will execute over the next few years, so thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate your interest. From here, we will be going on to questions.
Thank you. Your first question comes from John from Taylor Collison, who asks, "No doubt the RSNA conference is an event that will lead to new leads for 4Dx, but is it also an event where companies execute new agreements with groups they have been engaged with in recent months?"
Yes, absolutely. That's the case. There's a lot of business happening here in the hallways. Whether it's, for example, I had a very full day yesterday. I had to be up at 3:15 A.M. if I was going to get the chance to do a bit of a workout before I got to the breakfast event with Philips.
And of course, well, not of course, but I was excited to say that right there in the gym was a very particular radiologist that I've been meaning to catch up with, and I've been working hard to see. And there we were. We had that meeting, and we made some really great progress towards an arrangement. Also, businesses are doing business with each other side to side. We had a number of meetings with Philips in between tightly packed meetings with radiologists, with doctors. So business of all kinds is happening at RSNA, and it's happening from 3:00 A.M., actually probably 24 hours all the way through, whether you're maybe perhaps the type like me to get up to go to the gym at 3:00 A.M. or the type that's getting home from a big night at 3:00 A.M.
Either way, there's business happening pretty much 24 hours a day over the core three days here of RSNA.
Thank you. Yeah. Next question is from Craig, a private investor who asks, "Is there an opportunity to include the LVAS test when doing the CT: VQ test?"
Look, that's a great question. I think the way, and absolutely yes. And in fact, not just the LVAS test. There's a really significant opportunity. I'm going to bring up our whole portfolio here. There's a significant opportunity when you have a CT of your lungs, of your torso, your chest, as the doctors often call it, then we see that as the hospital has invested buying that CT scanner. The doctor has organized the time. You have organized the time, probably some money, and there's some radiation given to your body as a result of that test.
We at 4DMedical are there working with doctors to make sure that every single bit of value possible that can be extracted out of that CT is extracted. And that's exactly what this portfolio of products is about. From that lung cancer screening CT that you might get, you can also see, do you have coronary artery calcification, or do you have emphysema through lung density analysis? Or when you get the CT: VQ, absolutely, you can get a LVAS, and you can have really detailed readouts of the ventilation as well as those images of ventilation and perfusion. We are there. You've come in. You've made that offer. Some of you may know that Chicago is famous for steakhouses. Beef is at least as big here in the U.S. as it is back home in Australia.
If you come in, you'll tend to pick your Chicago steakhouse based on your CT: VQ. What is the core steak? What is that really best steak? Are they famous for delivering that flagship product? While you're there, if you're in there, of course, you want to have a drink with that. You want to have a salad. You want to have that whole offering, fries, of course. Let's be honest. You want to have that whole offering there side by side. While someone might walk in the door because of the steak, they might leave because after time they think that they want to have the full offering. 4DMedical has the biggest, most complete offering of any company, big or small, on the planet.
So you just can't get that value anywhere else like you do in the same way that you can't get CT-VQ anywhere else. And I'm sorry if I drag this out, but on top of that, in the world of radiology, like if you're in a restaurant, it'd be a pain to get out, go across the road, buy a bottle of wine, come back in, and ask them to cork it. That's annoying. In the same way, in the world of radiology, going and getting all of the IT approvals, getting the connection done, getting the contracting done, having all of those products carried under one contract, one IT approval really makes it easier for the hospital and creates a barrier for entry for our competition for us.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Scott from Shore & Partners, who asks, "Is the FDA approval for CT: VQ a temporary approval or permanent? How does the reimbursement mechanism work? And is it guaranteed reimbursement for each scan or at the discretion of health insurers?" Thank you.
Well, I may, as I said, I haven't had a lot of sleep in the last three days. I may need some of that to be read back to me, but I'll give it a crack and see where I get to. So first of all, the FDA approval is indeed for all time. So we have that permanent coverage. And in terms of the specifics of an FDA approval, we have a very high-quality approval. And what I mean by that is we have a very broad indication.
So we have the right, and doctors have the right. We have the right to market. Doctors always have the right to use a product however they want. That's an important point. But we have the right to market the technology very, very broadly. And we have really significant evidence base that allows us. We've got more than two and a half thousand patients' worth of VQ data that we're able to show people at the conference here at RSNA. And I believe the second part of this was insurance. Now, if we're going to have an honest conversation, then we're going to say that insurers absolutely have the discretion to not pay claims. That's something that is well known. And it's absolutely in hospitals' interest to get their reimbursement as much as possible.
But from time to time, hospitals absolutely won't pay this. And you can go back and you can look at some of our presentations that we've made when we got the reimbursement where this is covered in more detail. But one of the things that we can share, yes, from time to time, insurers won't pay those claims. And we're going to be working with the hospitals to get that claim rate up as high as we can, up towards 100%. But it's also worth noting that the $650, when we talk about this in the simple sense, we give the Medicare number, which is $650. Whereas in imaging, especially in our sector of imaging, the usual is that the private insurer will pay about 180%, so 1.8x to 2 x the Medicare rate.
So we have an opportunity for reimbursement, private payer reimbursement at about the $1,000-$1,300 range. One final point, though, because you have brought up reimbursement, I think a lot of folks see, and I talked about the reimbursement. I might even throw that reimbursement slide back up just to clarify. This is indeed an important driver, the fact that the reimbursement process is absolutely tilted in our favor. But nevertheless, all of that pulls into insignificance to the key value of our technology of streamlining the workflow of surgeons to get patients in their operating rooms. A low and a non-invasive procedure in the U.S. is about $25,000. I know there were several hundred people on a call with Dr. Kyle Hogarth listening in to him talk about that market. A lung volume reduction surgery in LVRS, I think, reimburses at about $55,000.
And a lung transplant operation in the United States, I believe, reimburses at about $600,000. One small scheduling SNAFU because someone had to go down to nuclear imaging and people weren't sure if they were going to be booked in this week or next week that leads to an empty spot in a procedure room, that blows out of the water. Yes, these numbers here, the reimbursement, super valuable, really helps drive the story. But actually, the biggest value proposition is even bigger. It's we make it easier for the hospital to win those $50,000 procedures every single hour, time after time. And one thing we know about hospitals is surgeons, interventionalists have authority. They are the ones who bring in the money. The CEOs, the CFOs of the hospitals listen to them.
When they thump their fist on the table and they say, "VQ is the thing we really need," the rest of the hospital listens.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Wen, a private investor who asks, "Could you please confirm that the Philips CT-VQ arrangement is non-exclusive?" Thank you.
Yeah. So look, it's very much aligned with our previous arrangement, Wen. And so that means that the details, as talked about before, they do have exclusivity in the government. So that is, for example, selling to the VA. And I think at any rate, I just can't imagine anyone, any corporation in the world who are more dedicated to serving veterans and to getting our products in there to the veteran communities.
So I think that is a win-win for everybody, certainly for us, for our shareholders, and for Philips to have that exclusivity in government, which basically means the VA. And we certainly will be out there. We'll be continuing to sell VQ. Our sales team won't be standing down. They will be working to sell product. And of course, they'll be looking and evaluating. And they'll be, I think, quite regularly, they'll be saying, "Oh, this one, see this lead here? I was on the phone to my friends at Philips last night. They said to me, 'They've got great connections in at this hospital where I'm trying to get this deal done. I'm going to pass this over to them. They're going to be able to get it done faster, contracted faster.'" And that's because Philips has the largest install base for PACS of any provider.
So it is our PACS or their software team that's selling this product. And they are across literally thousands of hospitals across the United States. We're not relying on sites that are, for example, have a Philips CT scanner. This is a software product. Yes, we could be included as a bundle on a Philips CT sale, but we are being sold or our team is focused as software salespeople. And they have the largest install base. As an example, I think they have 51% of install base in government. And as I said, the largest base is somewhere about the one-third mark of the rest of the U.S. market. I can see where we're getting reasonably close on time. Perhaps we just have one or two more questions just to respect everyone's time. Sorry, we're over time. I apologize.
So I know this seems like a lot of questions and really keen to get to them, but also want to respect people's schedules. So perhaps we'll just do another couple of questions and then wrap up.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Ahmed, a private investor who asks, "Can you run a CT: VQ scan on an old CT scan that was done in the past and archived, or does it need to happen when the CT scan is originally done?"
Well, you know what?
Thank you so much for this question. This is a really great question. And the short answer is we absolutely can, and we regularly do.
For folks who are wondering, "Hang on, how has 4DMedical been reducing its R&D costs, reducing its clinical trial costs, and have two and a half thousand patients' worth of data here at RSNA?" This is one of the drivers of that and the smarts of our really top globally competitive top-tier clinical trial team. But more importantly than the fact that a doctor can look at it retrospectively, what does that mean? What it means is that a doctor can order, say, "Look, you know what? I want, Andreas, I'm going to have a look at I need to remove, I need to chop this little bit of your lung out over here. I need to do that. I need a VQ scan. So I'm going to order that. But actually, you've been seeing me for a couple of years.
I also want to pull up those CTs that you did with me when you came to see me last year. And I want to run VQ on that as well so I can see how you've changed over the last year." That'll help inform me as to the decision I make. And even better than all of that is the doctor can be paid for that. The reimbursement is specifically written into our reimbursement code that the doctor can claim a reimbursement for doing both of those VQ scans. And of course, I think it goes without saying when an injection into the body is required, there's no way to travel back in time and put an injection into me a year ago. A CT angiogram or a nuclear VQ can't be retrospectively ordered back into the past.
But if you do have that CT, like thousands of people who are seeing doctors for chronic lung disease, millions of people who are seeing doctors for chronic lung disease have, they do have those CTs back on file. And one more time, just in case you didn't hear it, and they can get paid, and we can get paid for both of those.
Thank you. Your next question is from Liam from Northcliffe Capital who asks, "If we were to fast forward 12 months' time, what position would the business be in for you to view it as a success? What achievements would you expect to be celebrating?"
Over the next 12 months, 4DMedical is going to establish an incredible group of reference customers. The top-tier reference customers in the United States. We're very proud of the fact that we already have Stanford University.
And I was saying to you, we're incredibly excited by how over the last three days at RSNA, the most senior doctors from the best hospitals in the United States were in amongst the crowd of all of the rest of folks who were coming in to see us. And it's long been the 4DMedical strategy, a tried-and-true strategy, that our top priority is to win those academic medical centers, those AMCs as our reference customers so that as we turn around from there and to go out to attack the rest of the market, when folks say, "Who else is using it?" we can perhaps say, "Oh, it's not just Stanford. It's Cleveland Clinic. It's Mayo Clinic. It's University of Chicago. It's Duke," and so on. So we're going to be collecting those.
We are also going to be well into our progress of, as I said, turning that around, building that up. We'll also have Philips well established with their pipeline and their progress. And when we come back to RSNA next year, it's really going to be people saying to themselves, "Oh, all of my friends are using this product. All of the people I look up to. I just went and saw a talk about VQ. What else? What else? I need to get on this I need to get on this bandwagon before it gets too late. I'm starting to look like I'm really not on top of the current technology, and I'm getting left behind." So it's going to be a really amazing 12 months for us. I'm incredibly excited about where we're at. As I said a little before, we have the product. We have the processes.
We have the people to deliver. And as you all know, we've got the cash in the bank to get it all done as well.
Thank you. Your last question comes from Flynn from Knight Frank who asks, "As adoption grows, what do you see as the strongest competitive moat for CT-VQ? And how defensible is that as other AI imaging players emerge?"
Look, that's a great question. And the thing about an incredible opportunity, the thing about a million scans a year to us, hundreds of dollars, a $650 reimbursement times a million scans a year is a $650 million opportunity. And 4DMedical has long talked about a $4 cost of delivery each one of those scans. So the thing about a $650 million market at a 99% margin is everybody likes it. Everybody wants it.
We have been thinking for quite some time about how do we build an incredible defensive moat around what we've got. We have over 100 patents. So we've got over 17 patent families, over 100 patents. And we have been here first in this space for quite some time. And in addition to that, we are seen, we are the adopters. Everybody allocates, everybody mentally associates 4DMedical with CT-VQ. Additionally, in the marketplace, a lot of products that are out in our software medical software imaging space are based on AI. And there's a lot of great things about that. And in fact, we have AI products in our wide portfolio. But AI is getting more and more regulated. There's a recent article in Radiology Business Today talking about the challenges of AI with the FDA. The FDA is getting tougher and tougher on AI products.
4DMedical stands somewhat uniquely as a mathematical process right in the middle of that. 110 patents around it. And we're also not going to sit still. We're building those reference customers, those academic medical centers around us, supporting us. We're taking it to market. We're also not going to sit still where we are. So we have several hundred years. We have about 500 years of R&D. So in other words, we've got about 60 people in our R&D team right now. If you add up all of the years that team has spent on VQ, it's several hundred years. If company X tomorrow, multinational company, put 100 engineers on it, it'll take them three years to catch up to us technologically. By the time they do that, get to us, we're not going to be still on the same version of this.
And also how are they going to get around those 100 patents? And also by then, it's going to be more than 100. We also stand uniquely as a company with a full-time patent attorney on staff as deeply embedded in our engineering efforts, our R&D efforts. So moat is something we've been thinking about for a long time. It's a beautiful opportunity, $650 million market opportunity, 99% margin. That's a beautiful, beautiful thing. There's very, very few companies on the planet that have that. So of course, we're going to be here fiercely defending that moat with everything we've got.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll hand back to Andreas for closing remarks.
Look, I really want to say thank you so much for your interest in 4DMedical. We are in an unbelievable position.
Despite how committed and how much of a believer I am in VQ, this conference has amplified my belief even more. Just the caliber of the people walking in and giving us quotes like, "I have to have this. My patients have to have this." I believe that we're going to be able to go faster and better than even we thought just a few weeks ago. We have built all the fundamentals we need. We've left nothing on the table. You don't have to just take it in my words. You can listen to it in my voice as well. We've absolutely left everything on the field, and I'm incredibly proud of what we've done to date to build a company of the foundations that we have and to attract the caliber of customers that we've got knocking on our door begging for this product.
So thank you very much for your interest. Thank you very much for your support. And I look forward to keeping you up to date, even quite confident over the rest of December with some more exciting news. Thanks a lot.