Good afternoon, and welcome to the ViroGates Q1 2025 Earnings Call. Today's call will be presented by the CEO and the CFO of ViroGates. We will begin with a presentation, followed by a Q&A session. During the Q&A, the CEO and CFO will address both pre-submitted questions and those received live during the call. If you would like to submit a question, the Q&A function remains open throughout the presentation. With that, I will now hand over the call to ViroGates to begin the presentation. Your line is now open.
Hello, my name is Jacob Knudsen, and I'm the CEO of ViroGates. We have been looking forward, Josephine and I, to present our Q1 results this early afternoon. We will shortly dig into it. The way we chose to conduct this is that I will give a general overview of the company and a little bit about our strategy into the longevity field, a little bit about our reminiscence, if we like, in the hospital field. Josephine will take us through products and also the latest financials and news flow that we have released. Without further ado, I will start the presentation. We have released our Q1 report on Thursday of last week. Forward-looking statements, it is what is in the report that prevails. Our company was founded back in 2001, and we are on Nasdaq First North Growth Market.
We have been there since 2018, where our stock has been traded. We are currently nine employees. We downscaled a little bit late at the end of last year, which affected our results. Basically, it also can be seen in our Q1 results as savings in our operational costs. We work by empowering healthcare and enhanced longevity. It is predominantly the longevity that is of interest currently. We are generally addressing a market where we are developing our biomarkers, which is based on this suPAR protein, into an affordable solution that addresses huge issues in the healthcare sector, which are related to both the staff and the flow of patients and associated costs of the healthcare system. I hope we are still live. Mine shows okay, we are. What is suPAR? suPAR is basically a protein that is present in our bloodstream, and it rises with increasing inflammation.
We measure these suPAR by ways of our antibodies that we've developed over the years, and we've turned them into product solutions by now. Generally, inflammation is a strong indicator of whether the individual in question has a healthy lifestyle or is on the path to something that hopefully should be prevented. That is the way we use suPAR as an early indicator of chronic inflammation that can be reversed with the right interventions. We have a lot of publications. We passed 1,100 during Q1. The way suPAR works is nicely illustrated in the next slide, where we basically see that the red curve is associated with a very poor outcome survival rate, as indicated on the Y-axis. On the time scale, you see a time scale up to 90 days, where the individuals with very high suPAR have an unfavorable outcome.
These are hospital patients that were looked at in this study, but it applies generally across that the higher the suPAR, the worse the outcome. Fortunately, a lot more of us as individuals are in the 0-4 nanograms per ml, which is sort of the normal range for the population. I will revert a little bit back to that. Many more patients, if they're in a hospital, but also individuals being measured, will fall into that category, fortunately. I will just need to find, yeah.
The first indication that we're pursuing nowadays is the general health and longevity, where we work in. The reason why we've chosen to actively pursue this market segment as opposed to our acute care is illustrated on the present slide, where you can see on the right-hand side that acute care is interesting in terms of the size of the accounts, because an acute care ward demands a lot of tests being run. The problem is that there are a lot of political stakeholders involved, and hence it's typically a troublesome way. Therefore, we do have customers, but it has taken us years to generate customers in this segment.
Therefore, we've shifted our focus to the left-hand side of the slide, where you can see the longevity, where we basically, I say basically, but it is a question of convincing some of the players in the healthcare field, physicians that are running healthcare clinics, that this is a viable business unit or business proposition where they can sell additional tests to their patients and, fortunately, also help them by ways of predicting their long-term outcome. The way we've chosen to do this is by a lot of revamping of our marketing materials. We work by creating a pull effect by information about the value of the suPARnostic tests, its ability to predict a long-term outcome as opposed to some of the other measures that are in this market that are more static by nature.
suPAR is reversible, and that's one of the huge benefits of measuring suPAR during the course of a lifetime that you can see which direction your life is basically taking you. We work by servicing labs and health clinics. We are not directly into the direct-to-consumer market, but we obviously have to help the health clinics to create a pull effect for their clients out in the market. We recently started our collaboration in the U.S. with suPAR Health, which is an entity that has been set up to promote suPAR for longevity in the US. Generally, suPAR is associated with a poor outcome, as I say, and the higher the suPAR, the worse or the higher the risk.
Some of the remedies that can be taken is obviously the usual things of stopping to smoke, be more active, and lead a healthier life in terms of diet and so on. Those are some of the remedies. It can also be interesting to monitor if patients are more in the biohacker segment to see if some of the interventions taken actually have an effect on the chronic inflammation within the individual. We've shown in also a previous study that by working to come from the highest portal in a particular age into the lowest portal of suPAR, if we measure generally, is associated with a prolonged lifespan of about 15 years. That goes actually for some of the chronic inflammatory diseases as well, such as cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, etc. It is a very strong predictor of the outcome and the chronic inflammation.
We've developed a biological age that can be accessed by ways of our website. This is based also on several thousand individuals where we put that in as normal values for the particular age and gender. There you can see how the individual in question stacks up against this cohort. That's some of the results that the physicians can lead with their clients. We believe this is a very good tool to aid in the individuals in how to lead better lives. We have revamped, as I said, our marketing materials. We tend to take a more longevity-oriented, less of a lab-oriented profile now. You can see that by ways of accessing our website. We obviously also use that in the conferences that we attend, most of them now being or actually all of them being longevity-oriented.
This is a new segment that we're targeting. Fortunately, we have already seen some results of our efforts. As I mentioned, we also have revenues in the hospital care sector. I would just shortly restate, because this is obviously our previous focus area, how we stack up in the emergency department. The emergency department can work by discharging patients with low suPARs early because they are safe to send home, as opposed to the higher suPARs that need to go into the actual care system within the hospitals. This is also nicely illustrated by one of my favorite slides.
Again, this triage slide where suPAR was measured on existing patients coming in and where we saw the lower bars being the ability of suPAR to better put patients into the green category or the red category, as opposed to these ambiguous patients in the green yellow category. That plays still, that's still a play that we have in selected markets. We typically have clients here in Greece, in Italy, and some in Spain. That we obviously happily remain with because also of the size of clients. I mentioned this also, how we look at suPAR with severe disease. One of the indications is sepsis, where there's been a very pivotal study last year that showed the ability of being able to use suPAR for earlier intervention with antibiotics and the favorable outcome of that, as opposed to just leaving the patients for observation.
That can be looked at more in our website. It is still an important message to the physicians in the hospital sector. I will leave the presentation to you, Josephine. Perfect.
Thank you, Jakob. I will start by speaking a bit to our products, business model, and team, and then I'll turn to the quarterly report. ViroGates has a broad product suite, all products that measure suPAR, goes under the name suPARnostic, with a variety of products, as you see here to the right on the slide. The first product that was launched was the ELISA plate. That is the right lower corner.
What makes the ELISA plate special is that it's typically for large volume use, meaning that you would have large volumes of blood samples at one point in time, since in order to efficiently use this plate that has many small wells, you would need to do many tests at once. That is typically, or at least historically, been used for research. It's still used for research, but we also see an uptake of the ELISA product among the central laboratories that do tests for several smaller health clinics. Now it's both a research but also a routine product within longevity. The next product that was launched was the Quick Triage. It is what looks like a small COVID test in the lower left corner. It's a near-patient use test, meaning that you can conduct the test in close proximity to the patient or to the client.
You need a centrifuge to separate the plasma of the blood in order to measure suPAR using the QT. We have our TurbiLatex product, which is, I would say, the real high-volume product. It is what is placed typically on hospitals that have these larger platforms supplied by Beckman, Roche, Siemens, and Abbott. It allows for the suPAR measurements to be part of the regular test that you would have done at a hospital where you ship blood to the central lab at the hospital, and you quickly get the results back. The TurbiLatex is usable for high volume. In the upper right corner, we have our POC+, which is, as the QT, a near-patient test, meaning that you can conduct the suPAR test in close proximity to the patient.
The difference between the QT and the POC+ is that the POC+ allows for measuring suPAR in fingerprick blood. So whereas with the QT, you need to centrifuge the blood to separate the plasma, the POC+ allows you to do it directly from a fingerprick, as you might know other tests do that. The reason why it's not entirely clear as the other products is that when we launched the product, we placed it initially at a few customers, and we got feedback saying that it didn't perform as we desired. We are currently developing further on the product with our manufacturer, GENSPEED. We hope to see results during the first half year of 2025. We have a wide commercial presence both through direct sales representatives and established distributors.
We also have research use-only sales to a large part of the world, primarily North America. This is our management team and our board. The management team has extensive experience within healthcare and life science, and so do all the members of our board, Patrick, Lars, and Valerie. To the point that today is all about, the quarterly report for Q1 2025. In the first quarter, we released the news of a strengthened or expanded collaboration with Sobi, meaning that originally we entered into agreement with Sobi on placing or making our TurbiLatex product available on the U.S. market. With this announcement that we made in the first quarter of 2025, this agreement has now been expanded to also cater to living up to the IVDR in Europe for our TurbiLatex product.
Now we have an expanded agreement with Sobi covering both the US and European efforts, which we are, of course, very happy about. Sobi is funding this work while we are responsible, or ViroGates is responsible, for the analytical work that is needed to live up to the FDA requirement in the U.S., but also to the EU IVDR in Europe. Looking to the numbers, the performance of the first quarter shows revenue of approximately DKK 1.2 million. It is almost equal to the revenue of the same period last year. While you might say that flat revenue is not necessarily something that we are really happy about, we would rather have seen it grown. We are very happy that we are able to, or have been able to, keep a stable level from last year while reducing our operating expenses by 33%.
This is, of course, also something that you can then see in the overall results for the period where we had a net loss of approximately DKK 2.8 million compared to DKK 3.6 million in the same period last year, which is a reduction of 23% of the net loss. Our cash and our cash equivalents amounted to approximately DKK 11.2 million as compared to DKK 12.2 million in the same period last year. Digging a bit further into revenue on this slide, you see the revenue by product category. There are no big news here, you would say. The product mix is relatively stable, but you will see that our Quick Triage product has taken up more space in the first quarter of 2025 than it did in the first quarter of 2024.
Our Quick Triage product is something that's both used within research but also within clinical routine. The overall development, looking at the product mix in the previous years, has been in favor of ELISA. That's the bright green in the bottom. This is something that we would typically have looked at as being equal to us having more research interest. The fact is that now ELISA is not only a research product, it's also a product that you use at central laboratories servicing this new segment to ViroGates of longevity and health clinics. If we look at revenue by geographic area, the development from the first quarter of this year as compared to last year is in favor of Europe rather than North America and the rest of the world. It's, of course, a matter of ebbs and flows and various customers.
Overall, I would say that revenue by geographic area is relatively stable, as you can see from these two columns. Looking at recurring customers by segment, recurring customers is something that we at ViroGates have defined as customers that have placed at least two purchasing orders over the last year. These two purchasing orders should have an accumulated value of more than EUR 10,000. As you see from the columns or from the diagram, we have grown this amount of recurring customers from the same period last year by five. In the first quarter of 2024, we ended the period on 15 recurring customers. This year, we have ended the quarter with 20 recurring customers, growing both what we call clinical routine customers and research customers. Clinical routine customers here both covers hospital customers, which Jakob spoke to earlier.
That's primarily in Greece and Spain and some in France. It also covers our new longevity segment. We are, of course, happy to see that since last year, we've been able to add several new of these central laboratories servicing longevity clinics to this recurring customer segment. I think that was it for us for now. Thank you.
Thank you, Jakob and Josephine. Let's jump into the questions where we have received one question for today. The question is, is the Sobi collaboration looking at COVID still an interesting opportunity? When do you expect to be in the market with this?
Yeah, I can address this. The short answer is yes. The reason being that the way to go with an FDA application is basically to be relatively narrow and relatively precise in the initial application.
Despite the fact that most of the world do not care to talk about COVID, it is still an infectious disease and a relevant target for in vitro diagnostic development. Since there is also what is known as an emergency use authorization for the Sobi product, they actually have a commitment to live up to both to the FDA and also to EMA in Europe. That is why we support this. We see value on, as Josephine also mentioned, both sides of the Atlantic because we will need to upgrade a lot of our analytical data anyway for marketing in Europe under the IVDR, which is successfully implemented over the next years, and also to get an approval in the US.
The strategy from there is basically also to have a foot in the door, so to speak, with the initial indication, and then we'll be able to broaden it. We look very much forward to that continued collaboration. We've not released any specific information on when we can expect to be finished. That will have to be coming out of a more formalized release. It is something that we've been on to for a while now. We've also, as disclosed last year, had our preliminary meeting with the FDA. Right now, we're not hampered by all these changes within the FDA. We have what we need to know for right now. We'll have to see when we file an actual application, what the situation is with the FDA, and so on and so forth.
We will be back on that, and we will be sure to let everyone know as we progress with that particular opportunity. There is no question that the U.S. is, if not the Holy Grail, then at least a market that uses a lot more tests and thereby has a larger value than traditional Europe. We would really appreciate getting suPAR to the U.S. for use both in the hospital sector and subsequently also in the longevity field where we already have one product out. Maybe just, sorry to elaborate too much on this, but as you know, we do have an ongoing collaboration. That works in a slightly different way because it works as a lab-developed test, as it is known.
Basically, the labs in the U.S. can take in a product without a formalized FDA approval and internally validate it and then run it for clinical samples. That is the strategy that we have for the longevity market with the current ELISA product. In the meantime, we do have marketing opportunities. Other than that, also for the more traditional hospital field, we are plowing away on the track with the suPARnostic and Sobi.
That was the question that we have received for today. That finalizes the Q&A. Before we end the webcast, I will just hand over the word for you for your final remarks.
Yeah. Thank you very much, Anas, also for hosting another session.
We appreciate that we're still in a world and situation of transition where we are adapting to this new target segment of longevity and health clinics. We have a lot of ambition in the field. We are attending another conference this week. It does seem like the message resonates. Obviously, before this actually takes its effect into the revenue line, there's a bit of time, obviously. I would like to point to that, as Josephine mentioned, we do have more recurring customers. We've increased that. We hope to see this as an early adapter of something that would later translate to revenue. By that, we are looking very much forward to Q2 and continuing our work in that new segment.