Okay. Hello everyone. I'm very pleased to share an update of our progress following close of the quarter ended 30 September 2025. Now, for anyone new to Microba, after the quarterly update, I will zoom out as I always do and provide an overview of the Microba business. If you're new, hold on to the end for that. If you have any questions, please use the question submission feature, and I'll address as many as I can live in this session. Any I can't get to, I will answer after in the Investor Hub platform. Okay, let's jump into it. Kicking off FY 2026 with a strong start, we are executing on plan and tracking to target. If you look in the middle there on this slide, FY 2026, what were our plans?
Expanding clinical adoption in Australia and the United Kingdom, delivering strong growth for our core testing products, and tracking to those regional break-even objectives for both Australia and the United Kingdom. All on path to break-even for the whole company in years to come. Let me break down the strong top-line numbers for the quarter that underpin that. The key number, which we've headlined the quarterly release today, is our annualized run rate. We've hit an annualized run rate of 20,000 tests and expect our growth, as we guided last quarter, to continue to step up quarter on quarter. Our guidance aligned to our regional break-even objective was core test volumes over 24,000 for the financial year, and we're already at 20,000. We are well on track. Aligned to this, we delivered another strong quarter of our core tests up 145% year- on- year.
I'll break down all of the growth details across each region and product in the coming slides. Let's kick off with revenue results for the quarter, aligned to our distinct product categories that we've broken down across growth, base, and legacy. We saw for our growth products, which were our core testing products, that that was up 151% year-on-year. Base product revenue at AUD 1.3 million down 15% year-on-year, and legacy product revenue down 73% year-on-year as we close out the discontinuation of those legacy products. We replaced over AUD 1 million of legacy product revenue in the period as we complete the discontinuation of those legacy products, which will fully wind off by the end of this current quarter in Q2. From Q3, we will start to see that raw revenue growth without the counteracting removal of legacy revenues.
Total revenue for the quarter was AUD 3.6 million, which was down 1% year-on-year due to the removal of the last of those legacy product revenues. Importantly, excluding those legacy product revenues, we grew 42% year-on-year. On the cost side of the business, with disciplined cost management, we cut operating expenditure by more than 26%, excluding one-off and restructuring costs. The benefit from our strategic cost reductions will continue to be realized into Q2. As a quick reminder for everyone on those references to growth, base, and legacy, I'll just skim across this in alignment with the sales numbers. Growth products are our core diagnostic tests, opening up this major new AUD 25 billion diagnostic category with accelerating sales, as you can see at the top there.
Base products include the U.K. supplements and strategic international partners, expected to remain relatively stable with potential for future growth, and you can see that in the middle. The legacy products and services are being discontinued and superseded by our core growth tests. We're now at the end of that process, the last of those sales wrapping up in this current quarter. If you have any questions on this transition, we did a deep dive on our diagnostic strategy in March this year, and all of those materials are available publicly. There were a range of milestones and highlights from the quarter, and I will go one by one through them. I'm going to start in following through the conversation around our intimate linkage between advancement of our product, the adoption of clinician customers across the adoption curve, and our growth strategy.
Aligned to that, we are continuing to update the market on our product advancements and new feature releases in every quarter. In the last quarter, we had two key releases. Both of those features aligned to the needs of high-volume target healthcare professionals and clinics. The first of those is called Practitioner Pays. It's a new payment workflow which allows healthcare professionals to order and pay for MetaXplore tests directly on behalf of their patients. What that does is it streamlines the ordering process by enabling the clinician to bundle and manage payment directly with the patient at the end of their consult or at the end of their clinic visit. What that does is that speeds up the time from referral to purchase, and it increases conversion rates. The second one is admin accounts. Clinicians are busy.
They have admin staff to manage the administration burden on their behalf for running their busy practice. This feature enables an admin to be added to the account securely, and for them to be able to have permissions to manage patient records, referrals, and manage reports on behalf of those busy practitioners. All of these features have already driven the conversion of high-volume target healthcare professionals and clinics since release. I also want to highlight a major consolidation of our brands and brand update, which is scheduled for release on the 5th of November. Organically, through time, we've amassed a range of brands for specific reasons: Microba, Co-Biome, Invivo, and then down at the product level, MetaXplore and MetaPanel. All of that for our testing business will be consolidated down to one single brand, which is Microba.
Importantly, this is not about, as we've said internally, a fresh coat of paint on the house. There will be some of that in terms of updates to logos and colors, but they are an artifact of this process, not the purpose of the process. This is all about driving operational efficiency and increased marketing effectiveness. We've rebuilt the entire marketing engine and all of the surfaces to drive more sales, more cost-effectively at scale. We can build content out and deliver once across all regions and all surfaces with one key central brand. More to come on that soon as we release on the 5th of November. Now let's dive into the details on the growth from each region, starting with our growth category of products. It was another strong quarter for MetaXplore in Australia.
We saw continued strong growth with Q1 sales, 3,884 tests, which was up 112% year-on-year, now amounting to an annualized run rate of over 15,500 tests, with ordering clinicians for the quarter 837, which was up 71% year-on-year. Strong growth across the board in Australia. In the United Kingdom, we saw accelerating growth for MetaXplore with the first full quarter of full market access for that product in the region. Sales hit 783 tests, which was up 83% quarter- on- quarter, amounting to an annualized run rate now of over 3,000 tests. Ordering clinician numbers grew in alignment with test sales, reaching 299, which was up 84% QoQ. Next, MetaXplore adoption relatively steady in Australia. Q1 sales, 264 tests, which was up 44% year-on-year, but steady quarter on quarter.
We remain, as we've guided in prior quarters, in an early market development phase for that test. Focus remains with our partners at Sonic on organic development of gastroenterology specialists, and that will drive adoption activity down into the rest of the clinician market. There will be a gradual rate of adoption over FY 2026. It is really from FY 2027 where we see the opportunity for larger volume with our KOL and evidence generation work starting to translate into broader adoption and routine referral behavior. Next, for our base category, this is our supplements and select strategic international partners with opportunity for future growth. Here we have accelerated the transition to a greater focus on our higher-margin Invivo branded and owned supplements versus third-party distributed designs for health branded products.
In total, the U.K. supplement sales were AUD 1 million for the quarter, which was down 20% year-on-year, aligned to that strategic transition to these high-margin Invivo branded and owned supplements. If you focus on the Invivo brand, we saw growth. We had 7% year-on-year growth for the Invivo branded and owned supplement products. Underlying that, we showed the growth profile in some of our leading products, particularly we called out one, which is a prebiotic supplement called PHGG, which was up 84% year-on-year. Finally, an update on our therapeutics. The attractive upside to Microba , leveraging our leading proprietary data bank and years of R&D. We, from our data, have developed, as many of you know, a rich pipeline of therapeutic assets. We have moved from an R&D and investment phase into a partnering focus phase.
No further R&D expenditure. We are focused on deals. The team has been very active in partnering, and we have been very focused on these catalysts upcoming before the end of the year, which we expect can stimulate deal activity for Microba 's assets. The first readout from that set happened in Q1, which was the trial results from Vedanta, which unfortunately did not meet their endpoints in their phase two. I had a deep discussion with their CEO, and he did not view that the result has any impact on the potential of MAP 315 because it is a very different formulation and a very different targeted mechanism of action. Now we watch and we wait for two more scheduled readouts before the end of the year.
The first one from Microbiotica, which I've highlighted before, and then I've added another one, which is from Siolta, which is a phase I- B targeting pediatric allergic disease. I added them to the watch list because although it's a very different indication from inflammatory bowel disease, the recent engagements that myself and the team have had with potential partners who are tracking this space very closely, they're watching this trial from Siolta as a potential validator for the live microbiome therapeutic modality as a whole. They particularly see this also as a catalyst for us and our assets. We remain ready, active in partnering, and in position after many years of work to capture this deal activity off of the back of these trial results. What's the focus and upcoming catalysts?
In diagnostics, we're focused on continued growth in our core test sales and clinician adoption across Australia and the United Kingdom. Continued MetaXplore feature releases supporting that growth, and we've actually got quite a lot coming out in the current quarter. The brand consolidation launch will further support sales growth and drive down costs. On the therapeutic side, we've got those two sector deal catalysts before the end of the year, which we expect can stimulate deal activity for our assets. Aligned to our FY 2026 guidance, we will advance towards our regional break-even milestones in Australia and the United Kingdom, supported by that growth in core test volume where we're targeting over 24,000 tests for the year, and we already have hit an annualized run rate of 20,000. We're well on track. That closes the quarterly update. I will now go to some of the submitted questions.
Any of the ones that I don't get to live, I'll ensure that I answer them after, as always, on Investor Hub. Also, as a reminder, for anyone new to Microba, I'll do a quick recap on the business after addressing the questions. Okay. First question that's come through here. The core test growth is exciting, but the revenue growth keeps getting suppressed by the discontinuation of legacy product revenues. Are we getting to the end of that now? The answer is, as I said, yes. The top-line revenue growth suppression has been a painful and necessary process that we've had to go through as we unwind those legacy products. It's been important to complete and get all of our resources focused on the products that capture that AUD 25 billion new diagnostic market in clinical microbiome testing.
You can see what that focus has already delivered in the growth results for our core products. We're at the end of that transition now. The last of the United Kingdom ecologic sales completed at the end of Q1, at the end of September. We have some of the revenues to wind off still in Q2. We'll have no more legacy revenues and a clean revenue picture from Q3, which will be exciting. We'll see that raw growth profile of the core tests then exposed in top-line revenue. The next one here, what happened with the Vedanta trial not meeting its endpoints? There's very little information that's been published. Why doesn't that impact MAP 315? The key message from the top, and then I'll get into the details on my discussion with their CEO, is MAP 315 is very different. Microba's asset MAP 315 is very different from Vedanta's asset VE202.
The therapeutic approach of VE202 for Vedanta was to essentially wipe out a bad or dysbiotic microbiome with an aggressive antibiotic treatment, which in this case was vancomycin, and then to repopulate the GI tract of that patient with a complex consortia or cocktail of healthy organisms to restore a range of microbiome functions that would improve and impact the state of the inflammatory bowel disease in that patient. MAP 315 is completely different. It is a targeted single-strain therapy addressing a key functional deficiency in the microbiome of inflammatory bowel disease patients, which is critical to healing and remission and not well addressed through any current therapy, which is mucosal healing. We've seen strong activity from MAP 315 in mucosal healing and a particular detail of that in epithelial restitution. MAP 315 specifically stimulates mucosal healing, and there's no pre-antibiotic treatment.
Talking to their CEO at Vedanta, whose name's Bernat Olle , they are still working through the data and committed to share all of the data transparently and for the benefit of the sector and modality. They know they got a baseline level of what they call engraftment or colonization in the GI tract for VE202 organisms, but they did not see sufficient endoscopic response, so they stopped the trial. They're analyzing the data deeply. They'll share with me as soon as they have more, and are committed to publish detailed results next year. The key thing that we discussed was what does he make of VE202 results in the light of and context of MAP 315?
His breakdown of that was how I feel about it as well, which is he believes that the data in fecal microbiome transplant, which is taking the fecal material from a healthy person and populating that into the diseased patient, that now across a range of trials globally, those results are proven. It's unequivocal. Changing the microbiome can significantly change outcomes for inflammatory bowel disease patients and drive remission and maintain remission. It is just a matter of delivering the right microbiome biology to the patient. Moving beyond fecal microbiome transplant and getting that into a rationally developed and manufacturable stable product is the next step. His summary was, "We missed it.
We missed it with VE202." He believes that with the data-driven discovery work, all of the data that we've generated, that the MAP 315 discovery route and the data remains compelling standalone, even in light of their experience with VE202. MAP 315 is a very different targeted approach, very specific therapeutic rationale, which is not tied to wiping out the microbiome and repopulating. We have the inclusion of a biomarker for patient selection, which in the context of inflammatory bowel disease trials is also a significant advantage for MAP 315. One last little bit of information from my discussion with their CEO is that they're very forthcoming with learnings from their trial and how to optimize the design of the phase two trial for MAP 315. That appears it may reduce the cost for the phase two and further support our partnering efforts around that asset. That is positive. Next question here.
You mentioned that the team is active in therapeutic partnering activities. What more can you tell us about that? I can't say anything more about that right now, but I can say that we are active. We're seeing activity. There has been a bit of a dry period of activity, but we saw in Europe, I think best exemplified through the EUR 55 million investment in MRM Health, which was led by Biocodex, which is a French pharma company, and a German-based fund called Athos, which is actually the family office for the Struengmann brothers, which made a huge amount of money out of BioNTech. We're seeing particular activity out of Europe, MRM Health being a good example. Next question here. Would you consider resuming the MAP 315 therapeutics program again after achieving break-even? First, I would say I anticipate that we may have achieved a transaction before then, but that's speculative.
The essence of the question around reinvesting profits to advance and transact on more therapeutic assets from our platform, I can absolutely see that making sense for shareholders at that time, particularly with a validating transaction demonstrating the value of those assets. Yes, that's absolutely an interesting path. Next, regarding the FY 2026 guidance targeting over 24,000 core tests and regional break-even points, how are you feeling at the end of Q1? I think it's very clear from the Q1 update that we are on track. We guided that growth will step up each quarter, aligned to continue product feature releases and continued adoption. Like every year for Microba , the growth will then be weighted to half two as that builds. We've already reached an annualized run rate of 20,000, and we guided that we can unlock our regional break-even objective at over 24,000 in annual test volume.
Well on track, and we feel good about it. Next, the 4C indicates three quarters of cash. How should we think about that? Sales and contribution margin are going up, and costs are coming down. Operating expenditure has been reduced by more than 26% versus the same time last year. The benefit of strategic cost reductions, as I said, that we've implemented in Q1 will continue to be realized into Q2. We're also making good progress on manufacturing costs or cost of goods. Don't forget as well that we have an upcoming R&D tax refund due to come in before the end of the calendar year, which will bring an additional AUD 3 million in. We're comfortable with our cash position and our runway. There's also therapeutic deals and a range of other opportunities that the team are working on, which can significantly impact the cash position. All right.
That's all of the questions. Now I'm going to close the quarterly and the questions there, and I'm going to move on for those that are new to Microba and do a recap on the business so that you can understand the entire business and global opportunity that we're executing against. Okay. Let's start by diving into who we are, why we exist, our traction, and excitement of what lies ahead, starting with a clear summary of the opportunity. First, we'll start with why we exist. Your body is home to trillions of tiny microorganisms, and most of them, about 95%, live in your gut. We call that ecosystem of organisms your gut microbiome. These tiny organisms are essential for your health.
In fact, they are so essential that there are now more than 21,000 studies showing that they are key to how we develop and can treat chronic diseases. There are now over 150 studies demonstrating that if we change these tiny organisms in our gut, we can actually improve and even treat chronic diseases from cancer to depression, diabetes, bowel, heart, and many other diseases. From that, we have a clear global and ambitious vision, which has remained true since the beginning of the organization and actually the first meeting that I ever had with the two co-founders, Phil Hugenholtz and Gene Tyson, to realize what they saw and what we see is set to be a revolution in healthcare, which is a world where there's broad acceptance of the microbiome as critical to health and disease management. Testing your microbiome is commonplace with your doctor.
Microbiome therapeutics are approved and routinely used for both the maintenance and treatment of multiple chronic diseases. That ultimately leads to millions of patients living healthier lives. Taken together, if microbiome diagnostics and therapeutics indeed play a meaningful role in supporting patients, this market opportunity could ultimately be worth well in excess of a trillion dollars. This is not theoretical R&D. We are, as you've seen in the quarterly, suffering from gastrointestinal disease. Why? First, it's a ginormous market. There are 82 million people every year across seven key markets seeing a doctor with GI issues from severe diarrhea to bloating pain, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease. They are really poorly addressed with the current standard of care. I'll show you on the next slide, about 50% of those patients are sitting out there with no resolution. How do we help these patients?
We see that many of the answers lie in their gut microbiome. To address that, we've developed two tests. We have MetaPanel for diagnosing gastrointestinal pathogens, which we launched in Australia with Sonic Healthcare, and MetaXplore for diagnosing gastrointestinal disorders, which is now launched and been in market across Australia and the United Kingdom. Here you can see those numbers I was talking about before. 82 million patients suffering, half not getting a resolution with the standard of care. Our real-world data showing that with our tests, we can get critical new diagnosis and treatment recommendations for over 70% of those patients who have previously had no path to a resolution and get improved outcomes for over 60% of those. That's a huge result, and we're still only really at the beginning of this journey.
There's more evidence coming through thick and fast with the range of studies that we have out there active at the moment. We have over recent months put out a raft of recent quarters, I should say, put out a raft of high-impact clinical data demonstrating that in thousands of patients. We have now multiple studies progressing on the roadmap, which we expect to continue delivering more data demonstrating the clinical utility of our tests and the impact on patient outcomes. We understand this market really intimately. I constantly say that we have not even scratched the surface of it today. For the avoidance of doubt in how big that market is and how we can go after it, here is the data breaking it all down.
This is all from deep primary, secondary, and tertiary research, including a large body of work that we completed with a Boston-based consulting firm called Veranex. We have a clear understanding and breakdown of the addressable market, how we target it slice by slice. Even from the first handful of markets and a focus on one patient population, which is these individuals with unresolved gastrointestinal disorders, we only have to capture a fraction of a percent to hit our internal targets over the next three years. That's the key message to take out of this. We have testimonials from high-impact clinicians and patients that have been suffering for 10, 20, or even 30 years now, now completely resolved after implementing our tests. We'll continue to share more and more of these through time.
Next, it's worth spending a bit of time on our growth model to put this all into perspective. Our growth strategy, as I stated in the quarterly update, is intimately aligned to the customer adoption curve. At Microba, we talk about this internally as the skepticism curve because we're focused on healthcare professionals. It has four dimensions. On the left, on the innovator side, we have, let's say, integrative and functional medicine clinicians with low demands of the testing products in terms of interpretability, actionability, business integration, and workflow integration. All the way on the right at the laggard end, we have someone like a very traditional general practitioner being perhaps the most skeptical and slow to change, who have very high demands on interpretability, actionability, business integration, and workflow integration. The key thing is that the demand across the vast majority of the spectrum is already strong.
The clinical importance of the microbiome is now well accepted and is an essential organ that doctors have essentially missed up until now. We see it now discussed almost at every clinician conference. The product just needs to meet the increasing needs of these clinicians as we go from left to right through the adoption and skepticism curve. The way that we do that is by delivering features one step at a time from left to right, opening up more and more of the clinician market, addressing their unique needs from the product to serve their practice model and their patients. The team have an incredibly clear roadmap that they are executing, as I showed even this quarter and quarter prior, shipping new features every quarter. We've got quite a lot to deliver in this quarter in Q2.
Here you can see little snippets of those features across those four dimensions, and there's whole roadmaps built around them. In parallel, we believe that brute force sales in medtech is outdated, increasingly ineffective, and inefficient. Microba is a bit of a unique business in that we have a laboratory in vitro diagnostic component to our product. The major value unlock is through our medical software stack that sits over the top of it. I like to describe it that we have the clinically trusted medical device component, like a cochlear is to hearing health, Microba is to gut health. We have a sticky clinical software stack that sees us scale like a medical SaaS company, more like a Pro Medicus. Like Pro Medicus is to medical imaging data, Microba is to gut health data. Aligned to that, we are leveraging therefore a combination of SaaS and medical sales best practice.
Don't get me wrong, sales is an important base layer of presence in market. We are executing what's called product-assisted and product-led growth systems that will continually reduce customer acquisition costs, increase resource efficiency, and shorten sales cycles and time to value. What does that mean in practical terms? Rather than a Microba specialist onboarding, training, and supporting a clinician to be successful with the test and embedded into their routine care protocols for these patients, we increasingly have efficient digital systems that enable scalable self-serve onboarding, training, support, always-on AI assisted. We are intensively focused on growth, but in conjunction with underlying unit economics of the business, as we described in the Q1 results. We have a clear formula that we're executing laid out here, customer and market growth metrics going up, together with multiple metrics improving underneath for unit economics and profitability.
This drives us to those regional break-even points in FY 2026. Fast forward just a few more years to break even for the whole company. We also have partnerships with two of the world's largest medical diagnostic companies, which have given us the opportunity to leverage first the laboratory networks of these companies. We don't need to build labs everywhere, and we can scale as a software company, not as a laboratory services company. We announced recently our agreement with Sonic's U.K. business, the Doctors Laboratory, executing exactly that model and leveraging their large customer networks to efficiently acquire customers. Enabling these partners to refer and triage customers to us to be fully serviced with the world's leading clinical microbiome testing products. Finally, there's this attractive additional upside to Microba, leveraging all of the data generated from our diagnostics business and years of R&D and investment.
From our data, we've developed a rich pipeline of live biotherapeutic assets targeting multiple chronic diseases. We've now moved from an R&D and investment phase into a partnering focus phase to deliver a return on investment. No further R&D investment planned from here. We're focused on deals. We have several key catalysts, which I spoke to coming up before the end of the year, which we expect can stimulate deal activity on these assets. We are ready and positioned to capture that activity with deal precedents ranging from AUD 1.5 billion - AUD 11 billion. We have built an incredible platform for drug discovery from the microbiome, leveraging artificial intelligence methods. We have taken those assets through deep preclinical and early clinical validation with our lead asset ready to advance next into phase two, and importantly, do that together with the right partner.
We have two major pathways to value return on these assets. Pathway one is live biotherapeutics, which is the traditional drug route, disrupting and advancing standard of care across multiple chronic diseases with those deal precedent ranges that I mentioned before. Pathway two is actually next-generation probiotics, disrupting what is a AUD 79 billion probiotic market with new healthy human-derived products. We see that trend starting to move now, disrupting that category of products on the shelf. Advancing from the work that we have recently completed with the world's largest probiotic manufacturer in our partnership with a company called International Flavors & Fragrances, IFF, there are deal opportunities for that pathway ranging between AUD 50 million-A UD 100 million. There is a range of relevant deal comps and recent deal activity, which you can look at.
There are major deal catalysts coming up before the end of the year with these peer clinical trial readouts. Two key peer companies are expected to read out on these clinical trials before the end of the year or, at the latest, early in the new year. Everyone here is really waiting to see a strong phase two or, at a minimum, strong 1-B result for this new live biotherapeutic modality in a chronic disease setting. The results from these trials, if positive, would deliver that result and validate the modality for everyone. If that occurs, it is then reasonable to expect that competitive deal activity could commence and deal precedents like the one that I had on the prior slide become a real opportunity for Microba with our assets. We are ready and in position with best-in-class assets to capture those deals.
On that, I will close by saying, as I always do, I am incredibly excited about the opportunity impacting growth ahead for Microba . We have an absolute world-class team, best-in-class technology, and category-defining products. For patients, we are already changing lives, and there are a lot of patients that need our help. Microba represents a category-defining company with the clinical side of a cochlear, but with the medical software and scaling opportunity of a Pro Medicus. We have decades of growth to unlock ahead of us, and I feel it's an incredible time to be a Microba shareholder. Thank you all for listening and to all of our shareholders for your ongoing support. I'll end the webinar there. Thanks, everyone.