RBC Capital Markets Fireside chat

Aug 25, 2026

Summary

The strategy prioritizes 15–20 high-value applications, with biopharma QC and clinical LDTs offering nearer-term paths while infectious-disease IVD ramps over 3–5 years. Core revenue is targeted above £700m by 2030, with margins above 15% and royalties excluded.

Hello everyone. Thank you very much for joining. It is my privilege to introduce Francis Van Parys, CEO of Oxford Nanopore, alongside Nick Keher, CFO. For those of you who do not know me, my name is Charles Weston, and I cover European Life Sciences at RBC. If you have any questions through this session, please use the button that should be on your screen. That will send me an email. I will try to weave that into the discussion, and if I am not able to, then I will come back to you directly on that. I am not going to use this opportunity to recap the investor presentation. Hopefully, you have all had a chance to look at that. Instead, what I am going to try and pick up some of the key individual drivers of the business in the near and medium term. First, let us take a higher level step through. You described four aspects to the strategy, Francis. Customer-centric growth, which I paraphrase as a focus on key applications. Focused innovation, which sounds like effectively using R&D to support those applications and keep some blue sky investments. Disciplined execution, which sounds like simplify and standardize, and high-level or high-performance culture. We will come back to the applications in a moment. On the H1 call, you described that high-performance culture and highlighted some key hires that you made. First question, please, and pertinent perhaps given your announcement this morning, what are the personnel gaps at the top that remain? I see you have quite a few senior hires on your website in business development and biopharma specifically, so is this an area where you are also looking to flesh out capabilities? Mm-hmm. Well, thanks for the question. First and foremost, the way you describe those four pillars, indeed, what they sound like is indeed what we intend to communicate with those pillars. In terms of the leadership gaps, we have made an announcement earlier today with a chief marketing and communications officer joining us, as well as a chief development and product officer who is going to be responsible for our product development and product management capabilities. Those were two important positions to fill, given that as we went through the high-value applications that we want to pursue, we did a gap analysis of our current capabilities versus the customer needs in each of those applications. We have identified a number of opportunities to close the gap, in terms of reasserting our value proposition, our evidence generation, our product development capabilities, as well as opportunity to simplify the portfolio. Those positions will really help us with that. BD and biopharma is an important area given that, as part of our strategy update, we described also the various participation models that we are considering, depending on market segments. In order to execute on that is perhaps one area we still want to strengthen a little bit more. I do expect, fingers crossed, that in the Q4 time frame, we have a full management team that we will go into operationalizing the strategy with in 2027. Are there any more announcements that we should expect about the top of the house senior hires over the next few weeks to get you into that shape for Q4? There is a couple. Okay. But not more than that. Okay. We went through the four different pillars just then, and you sort of teased us about the middle two, innovation and execution, saying that you are going to come back to those and provide more detail before the 2026 full year results. So what can we expect and when? It was really important for us to lay out where and how we will play, because it determines everything else. By determining those markets we want to go after where we have a true belief we can win, we can differentiate, it informs the decisions we can make afterwards. Some of those decisions are actually underway. Some of those decisions have not been finalized. What you can expect by full year results is a true operational plan which contains future product roadmap, go-to markets refinements, governance structure, organizational developments if appropriate. A fully operationalized plan that follows on from the strategic choices that we have made. We expect to work on that in the next 2, 3 months and communicate about that by full year results time. Okay. I guess that moves us on to some of those applications. You presented a chart, which I can bring up if it's helpful for you, of ease of realization versus effectively the differentiation for Oxford Nanopore Technologies, and also the GBP 14 billion-GBP 16 billion serviceable market opportunity. How many individual target applications are within that GBP 14 billion-GBP 16 billion? Will we get to learn a little bit more about how you're splitting those out later in the year or the full year results? We will go down more detailed view of what the schematic overview we presented represents. There is a much greater granularity that we have gone through, obviously, to select those high-value applications. We have come to anywhere between 15 and 20 that we want to focus on, and maybe not all at the same time. We have identified them as being significant contributors to our growth in the next 4 to 5 years. As we do deep dives in the coming year, you may well expect to see some of the examples of those applications. More to come on that front. There's obviously some commercial sensitivity associated with the greater amount of detail, which is why we haven't presented the full analysis here. You can rest assured that we have gone through a significant prioritization exercise and a series of characterizations of those segments that enable us to really nail down the entitlements we have in each of those applications. That has then led to our guidance on the medium and longer term. Okay, let's start heading into those applications or those bigger markets, and we will take them in order of growth contribution over the next few years. Firstly, biopharma. I think, Nick, you said that there were 20 or so pharma companies evaluating the technology in QC. Can you give us a sense of the range of companies in terms of their size or specialism, or anything else that gives us a bit of color around those? Of course. Yes. The global biopharma essentially make up over half. Other names that are well known, so maybe not in the top 20, but are well known to people around the world for their specialism, in terms of their focus areas. Those are the sorts of companies we are talking about. Maybe we will come back to what those specialisms might look like. I think it might be fair to say that some of these evaluations have taken a little bit longer than hoped in the past. Nick, I think you have admitted that some of the delay was due to ONT execution issues. What have been the holdups there, and how confident are you that those have been addressed? Yes, good question, and absolutely right. This has been something that we have been taught as a company. We have seen these things happening in the background for a couple of years now, at least, and it has been going on a little bit longer than that in terms of the evaluation phases. From a customer perspective, we cannot control their timelines. If you miss, for those global companies, if you miss that yearly meeting, you genuinely miss that yearly assessment, and it kind of comes round again. The other point is for the companies that we have worked with, they have had delays on their own assets, because for the majority of these instances, we are working on new assets, not established assets, the majority. Besides sterility, whether that is across established assets. On our side, what has kind of not gone in a straight line, I think where we know that, the GridION Q. So we released the GridION Q, which is now the version one, and that was released nearly 2 years ago now. The version two was released last week. Wow. It's now on market and available if you want to buy one. Essentially with that, it has incremental features from an audit perspective in particular, that the customer required for them to be this to be part of BLA filings and similar. So it has incremental features. Now on some of the product lines, so we've got two assays available that are essentially key ones in this space, which is the mRNA QC Test Pack and also the Plasmid QC Test Pack. On both of those, the critical attributes to the product have been improved along the way as well and now cover off the vast majority of what the customers want. There is actually some things we could do further on down the line, which actually means that particularly on the mRNA piece, we might be able to look at greater value capture over time as well. But for what's required today from customers, it's now met it. So very confident on those things pushing forward from where we are. We've still got three more workflows. They are the sterility testing and AAV and things like that we want to work through and release, and that'll be key to delivering and unlocking the value within the biopharma space as well. But we have worked through those kind of headline issues that we've had on our side. We can't control the issues that may happen on the other side. Does version two mean that they have to go through the testing, again that whole evaluation process again? Or does that tick some final boxes that allow people to then sort of make a final decision? It's more the latter. It's not a revalidation as such. These are updates to the software that are features that they perhaps would have expected first time around. You've called out mRNA, and companies like Lonza and Moderna have talked about using sequencing as part of their processes. What about other modalities, gene therapy, antibodies, anything else? We focused on mRNA first because we are quite unique in how we sequence direct RNA. We have a number of others in the pipeline. AAV, AVA were already mentioned. We will continue to expand the applications to which sequencing is relevant. Those are parts of the target markets for biopharma QC. But the immediate focus is on mRNA, AAV, and AVA vectors. We have a number of applications also in cell therapy and could, down the line, also see where cell line characterization is relevant in the development process. But from a QC perspective, those are the target areas. Can I just add as well, and absolutely right. I think it's important that we've always talked about QC and because of our capability that we're going in there, but in the R&D side of it, that we shouldn't all. The target ID side of what we do there. Absolutely. But to your point there, Charles, like antibody characterization and genomic characterization full stop for cell therapy is a big part of what we're doing as well. But those aren't QC workflows, those are in the R&D side. That's why biopharma has actually come out quite significant because we have this more research and development-focused applications. But we've got these QC applications which are a test consolidation place ultimately to replace other modalities that are out there. So that, to some extent, brings me onto the next point, which is around this $4.1 billion to $5.5 billion addressable market that you have highlighted in biopharma. Is that calculated on a kind of a bottom-up basis, number of instruments and usage, or is it more of a kind of top-down, this is what is already going in as a spend on some of that QC that can be consolidated into Oxford Nanopore? How should we think about how you have come up with those numbers? Both. So both bottom-up and top-down. So the QC aspect, we have got the companies, and so what we have done is this bottom-up perspective essentially on we know what the contract values are, and we know what the assets are, and we have risk-adjusted the numbers because we do not know what the probability of success would be for these drugs in reality. So we have just used industry averages and things like that. So, the QC side, absolutely. And then we have used external advisors to help do the top-down perspective as well. In the R&D side, that is where it has been more the top-down perspective because it is harder for us to get more reliable information for the bottom-up. But for QC, given the insight we have got, we could do the bottom-up part there. Yeah. Okay. So let us stick on mRNA, because we all saw the big move in Moderna last week on the melanoma vaccine. All the sequencing companies moved a lot on that since you have to sequence an individual patient's tumor. Can Oxford Nanopore participate in that side of the equation for a vaccine like this, or are you more focused on that QC product release side? Our immediate opportunity, given the resolution of our technology, is on the QC side of mRNA. We use that to replace a number of existing tests in the quality control process of an mRNA molecule. And so, the characterization of the tumor, while that is an opportunity, is perhaps not where we as differentiated. Okay. Thinking about Moderna then on that QC side, or mRNA in general perhaps. We know that they have attended some of your conferences, Moderna specifically. I assume that they specifically have been looking at Nanopore sequencing as part of the QC. Is there a way we can think about value per patient, in terms of the current spend on the existing QC pipeline? Yeah. To help here, the test pack itself is what, GBP 2,000. And it is a test per patient. But you can clearly imagine that for high volume commitments, we will discount commercially against that as well. Please do not work on GBP 2,000 per patient or anything like that for any of those situations. But for multiyear high volume commitments, clearly, we will look at a discounting to that. It is also worth noting that we are getting a lot of interest for the test pack to be utilized in the R&D setting now as well. So by companies that are not necessarily far along in their journey just yet, but want to make sure this is part of their analytical capability. And we are discounting more meaningfully there, again, to ensure that they kind of, for lack of a better word, get hooked on it. Essentially are using it as part of their process early on. Yeah, hopefully that answers your question. It does. That is helpful. So GBP 2,000 is what you are ostensibly listing that pack for. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Taking a step back away from mRNA specifically, how do you envisage the mix of direct-to-pharma sales versus sales through partners evolving. You have announced partner companies like Lonza in direct RNA, ViruSure in pathogen testing, PathoQuest, which obviously recently been acquired. How should we be thinking about what the plan is in terms of direct versus partners? Yeah. There is a mix of partnership models here, but in order to simplify, when it comes to adoption of the technology in a quality control setting, the customer need is to have a start-to-finish workflow, one that works every time and that reliably drives a result at the end and a report that is consistent every time. There, it is important that we deliver the full solution from the sample that goes in to the test report that comes out through the bioinformatics and then you have all the steps in between. For biopharma R&D, there is different partnership models depending on what the research is that the company is performing. Sometimes they do need test kits from some of our partners that are complementary to our workflow. There is a bit more variation in what people are doing with the technology. We would naturally focus on perhaps more of the kits to base calling capability, which is the essential part of our technologies, and then what the platform does really well and what we fully own. Where we have partnerships, it is primarily to help with things like automation, sample preparation or customized reporting and bioinformatics. But for a specific workflow, once again, typically, we want to own the full solution. Okay. Just one last question on biopharma then. People on this call will want to model biopharma on a more bottom-up basis. Obviously, you have given us some potential shape of where biopharma or applied markets, that may contribute to our 2030 sales. But from a bottom-up perspective, can we be thinking about number of mRNA patients multiplied by 2,000 or let us say 1,000 post-discounting? Or is it just so much more complicated in terms of all the various different other applications and the partners? Is there a way that we can think about modeling this? I think, the mRNA piece, that is how I would think about it. Patient volumes times by price per test. I think that's not a bad place to start at, that USD 1,000 mark that you've got. Then, the difficulty here is when we go into things like sterility testing, that's going to be different again, because that's per batch. Actually saying this, the mRNA piece is per batch ultimately, because every patient's a batch, but you get my point here. We're talking like a batch when you're talking about sterility testing. You'd have to think about the number of batches a biologics manufacturer may make. That could be very difficult, I think, for somebody without real intimate knowledge of the other company, to kind of model that through in reality. But it's the same for other companies. We all have, similar issues. Then per plasmid, we've been surprised about how much companies actually spend on plasmid internally on Sanger. Every company could be quite a few million dollars actually of just plasmid sequencing in-house that they do besides the stuff they send externally to people like Plasmidsaurus. But again, we get paid per plasmid, and plasmid kit, et cetera. But you're not going to get that sort of visibility for you guys, I'm afraid, and we shouldn't really be giving that to you either. I think what we will look at is potentially a deeper level of KPIs that we can kind of report externally on this. Coming to that, when we come to the operationalization of strategy and talk through that, have more things we can talk to you then. Okay. That's really interesting. I was on Business of Alpha earlier today, and I saw that, unrisk adjusted, the Moderna vaccine is expected to be in 100,000 patients per year by 2034. So we'll multiply that by 1,000. We'll probably go into a bit more detail on this in our virtual life sciences conference on the 21st and 22nd of September, with you guys. Thank you for attending that too. I hope some of the participants on this call will be able to make that. In the meantime, let's move on to diagnostics. Clinical grew 35% in the first half, making it the fastest-growing division. Can you disaggregate the growth driver here between infectious disease testing, and surveillance versus oncology and rare disease applications? Yeah. So we can, but it's a bit more subjective than I'd like it to be. The reason for that is, as we've gone through this exercise actually as well, as you know, we've got like end market and end organization. There's about five different tagging layers we've got with the data below it. We've gone obsessively to the lowest level and retagged all of the data for the last three years or tagged it. To the extent where we've done about 70% revenue visibility for all of these applications, essentially, what is the customer doing with the product? Because there's not really much point in trying to figure out what every MinION customer is doing, because there's just too many of them, and they're all spending, in reality, too little. That meant that we can see where that growth essentially is coming from. Rare disease on a relative basis, on an an absolute basis, infectious disease has been a big growth driver for us. We are seeing oncology, particularly in Europe, and parts in the U.S. So in order, the relative growth, you have rare disease, infectious disease, oncology is what I'd say. I think goes down to the point we were talking before, within certain oncology indications, we're getting used now. But if you take like ALL and things like that, where these are rare tumors, they're small volume numbers, but they need an instant quick result, we're the technology they'll lean into. But for infectious disease, we're the first technology they reach to because of the speed and the accuracy we've got. In rare diseases, as you know, there's more of a competitive situation. But we have got data to show that it's like a 30% uplift in diagnostic yield versus short read technologies. People are beginning to see that as a switch. That's why the MyOme contract, and that's also a positive thing we put into the update. A Natera company, they're obviously quite large and big in the space. But for their rare disease, are essentially are looking, utilizing Nanopore because they think that's the best technology. Yeah. Natera's also attending our life sciences conference at the end of this month, so I'm sure we'll be asking them about that directly. It's actually getting quite tough to figure out what's happening across your various different partnerships, for me anyway. You've got Danaher, Cepheid, you've got bioMérieux, Bio-Techne, Natera now with MyOme, and then you've got a number of smaller partners. So before we even get onto the new licensing agreements, can you help us understand how all these fit together? Perhaps, which has the greatest commercial potential in the long term and perhaps the near term? Yeah, absolutely. There's a few different categories of partnerships, if I can help breaking it down. One is around infectious disease, with Cepheid and bioMérieux, where the need in that market segment is likely to be IVD certified. That is a capability that we chose and choose not to develop entirely by ourselves, and where we feel we have an approach where either OEM type or co-development type of activities will need to happen to bring a solution to market. For that reason, because IVD certification takes a significant amount of time, including clinical trials, et cetera, we expect that return not to be significant before 3 to 5 years from now. That's the first set of category, ramping up, in the meantime, with a number of manual workflows that will precede some of those developments of those activities. Then there is primarily on oncology, rare disease, an enablement strategy that we have of LDTs, and that's where partnerships like Natera come in, who are service providers and specialized in the development of laboratory-developed tests, and where we are the components and technology provider. But the assay is developed by those service providers, and so they are helpful access to markets, particularly in the U.S., but not exclusively in the U.S., also in Europe. Then there's a third category, which is more around our compatibility program. People who develop assays on our platform, who develop certain kits that help develop a certain sample type for a particular test, and have done validated that on our platform, which we then enable as a member or a partner in our compatibility program. They are typically more of an add-on capability, and are smaller in nature, but could be quite significant over time as they enable new LDTs to be developed. Right? That's how I would characterize. Anything you want to add, Nick, on that? No, perfect. I mean, there is a slide actually as well that we have in the deck, which on the presentation today that I think is quite. We get that question a lot, Charles. I think on the whole partnership piece, and that's exactly why we've put this in here as well, just to kind of this is we've mapped every single partnership to this and then also to the end market analysis that we've done for the target applications, et cetera. Yeah. That's how we're going to do all of these going forward. Then if you think about, say, technology fit to automation. Instead of developing our own automated platform on the Amici, we're now going to partner with all of the automation providers so that it's easier for the customer. It's just thinking about, so you're going to see more, not less. And yes, it could be difficult, but it is because we are following this framework and actually it is a good thing to sign more. The right type, that is. Francis, I know you talked about quite long time frames for clinical. What do you think is a nearer term lever, the biggest nearer term lever out of all those partnerships you signed on the diagnostic side? The longer term time frame I refer to relates to an IVD solution for infectious disease in particular. I think in clinical there are actually some nearer term opportunities as well, through the enablement of service providers and the LDTs that they specify. Similarly to biopharma, there is a number of those companies who are currently validating our technology in particular tests, typically for oncology and rare disease applications. As those come online and get rolled out as a part of their service offering to hospitals, we expect actually near-term take-up of those tests and actually drive a nearer term opportunity. Because it is not IVD, it can be adopted more quickly. We need just to effectively enable those LDTs by offering the right solution and the workflow that is associated with it. Is there a way we can think about the value here? You have helped us with the mRNA side on the GBP 2,000 sort of pre-discounting. Is there a way that we can think about per patient per test value, in, let us say, rare disease or oncology? Yeah. The pricing is quite varied, essentially. Not today, but let us come back to you to see if we can be more helpful in the future. Because clearly we have a price per sample that is kind of negotiated with the LDT provider, so I do not think we would be commercially, not very good of us to detail that much more. On the IVD setting, what I would think about here is you can go find list prices for price for reimbursement for these tests themselves. You can maybe think about what is a realistic value share that Oxford Nanopore should generate from that end market. Then multiply that by the number of patients per market, et cetera. Yeah. Okay. A bit of excelling to do there. Let us move on to your new cross licensing agreement. Well, I say new, you have described this as new, and you have not mentioned anything about partnerships. Can we infer that this is not with an existing partner like Danaher or bioMérieux? It's not a partnership. It is a cross-licensing agreement. It does not concern Danaher or bioMérieux. Okay. You said that it involves certain patents. We think about Oxford Nanopore being a nanopore sequencing company and having a lot of nanopore-related patents and base calling and the associated technologies. Given that's your focus and where all your IP presumably lies, what can we infer from that from somebody who would want to therefore license that nanopore IP? We have a broad IP portfolio that has taken a number of years to develop and covers a wide range of patents. We are committed to asserting the value of those patents, and this is one of those participation models that exists to do so. Okay. I thought it would be quite tricky to get more out of you on that. In terms of the product sales, you have been clear, you said that there were $15 million of product sales to be booked in 2027 and 2028. You did not mention anything beyond that. Should we assume that everything, all the value and revenue beyond that is from royalties and not from product sales? Or should we be adding in product sales to our thinking too? That's what's been agreed. Yes, that's what you should assume. Could further product sales be part of it at some point? That's not been agreed. Could well be, and it could evolve into something broader, but that's not the case at the moment. Okay. I wonder, Nick Keher, whether you couldn't help me with my math homework here. You've said that there was 20 million upfront and 15 million of product sales at a company average gross margin. Those together represented 10% of the economic value of the deal. If I do a bit of back of the envelope maths on this, taking some assumptions around discount rates and patent life assumptions, it implies to me that peak sales, peak royalties to you would be perhaps in excess of $40 million a year, and therefore peak end market sales could be approaching $1.5 billion, for your licensee. I know you're not going to give us the numbers specifically, but can you mark my maths again. Yeah, I think on this one, clearly we can't get into the specifics around the royalty rate as well. But we've said low to mid-single digits, essentially on that piece. We shouldn't really be talking about peak sales, for other people's products. But what we have taken when we gave that guidance, we used market expectations for the counterparty, the products that are covered under the IP. We used those market expectations. We implied what we clearly know is the royalty rate, and we can see that from an NPV perspective, 10% of the value is only within the $35 million upfront. So $20 million upfront and $15 million product sales. The value, yes. That's because of the duration of the patents and the royalty stream that should come from them. Okay. That's helpful. I'll go back and tweak that Excel, I think. Last one then perhaps here. Is there a potential or a likelihood, perhaps, of you signing other deals like this, licensing patents with this kind of sizable value creation? There may be. It's not built into our guidance and that should be considered upside towards the minimum of $700 million opportunity by 2030. And where appropriate, we will assert the value of our IP portfolio. But it's not something that should be assumed as a regular cadence itself. Okay. I've had a question come in that's quite big picture. So I was wondering if we could just take a step back and talk about that. AI is enabling us to understand a lot more biology, and therefore theoretically may enable us to cure a lot more disease. What do you think the role is of decentralized diagnostics, in this case, and therefore the potential role for Oxford Nanopore or an equivalent technology? And given that AI is such an enabler potentially for that biological understanding, again, what role does Nanopore have in the sort of data generation or AI analysis? Yeah. We've been reflecting on this as well. Obviously, it's a great question. We've talked about this in a conceptual way around biological intelligence. We believe that Oxford Nanopore, as a technology, as a sensing technology, generates one of the richest data sets from a sequencing perspective. Not only the sequencing itself, but methylation, structural variants, et cetera. With the potential that AI technologies are going to give us to treat those larger data sets and gain biological insights from it's certainly going to drive opportunity for us. We're certainly at the early stage here, and I personally believe the decentralized nature also has some time before it actually is going to get very near to patients or to clinic or even to doctor's offices. But we are the only technology that is as scalable and could monetize that opportunity in the future. Where appropriate, some market segments will be faster than others. I could think about infectious disease to move it to a decentralized setting sooner, for instance. That's really an opportunity. Is that going to drive significant value between 2028 and 2030? Remains to be seen. Beyond 2030, no doubt. Okay, that's probably one we could carry on talking about for another hour. Let's move on to the research market, if we can, now we've touched on biopharma diagnostics. Tough market it seems at the moment. By region, you described Europe as healthy, U.S. as challenged, particularly in the government-funded side, and China being also challenging for you, perhaps holding back the Asia territory. Can you tell us what you think the market growth rates are for research in those sorts of three segments? Yeah. In China, we actually believe it's been down for everybody actually. Outside of China, healthy, but in China, it's down. We've seen that I think because it's the fifth year of the five-year plan, essentially. There's just less going on. In the U.S., we've definitely outperformed the end market because of what's going on with the NIH funding. Europe, healthy. Again, we've outperformed the market, but it's a healthier market overall. We're not the bellwether here, clearly, but when we've looked at what everybody else is saying, we can kind of triangulate where it is, and that's where our triangulation is that we're essentially performing better than end markets, but not being able to separate away from them in the manner we'd like to be able to today. When I think about putting a number around the word healthy, is that a kind of high single-digit type of health? For Europe? Yes. For Europe. And the U.S., is there a- Down low single down. No, no. It is actually Across all of Americas rather. Across all funding groups rather than just government. For research as a whole, still like flat to down, actually. It is not, for Americas, for the end markets, it is not healthy because I think the NIH piece has actually been even though we have lapped it now a year, actually what we have seen is that the funding just is not flowing. So it has not got massively worse, but it has not got better, and it is actually just still quite challenged as a market overall. So yeah, it has not been easy. And if you look at the peers, essentially what they are reporting as well. Yeah. And Asia ex China? Healthy. High single digit. Okay, that's great. Just going back to the NIH piece, you said it's not flowing. I mean, sometimes we see some more positive headlines about some of that funding being, or some of those grants actually moving out. Are you just not seeing that yet? We're seeing some things happen, but not as much as we'd like. In terms of the grand scheme of things, it's not quite to how it needs to be. This is more of a, people may see the headlines that things are starting to flow, but the process still needs to happen. Unless they've got people to actually action the process, it still doesn't happen. We've got lots of opportunities that we've been looking at that have not been funded. If the funding comes back, we should spring out the gates essentially. But we're not seeing it yet. Okay. Thinking about the market within those sort of market growth rates, you've been growing, as you said, above the market and for a number of years with a differentiated technology, obviously off a smaller base. What can you do to further penetrate to sort of accelerate your growth, I.E. what's the self-help angle here to be able to drive growth in research as opposed to just being sort of exposed to whatever happens to the market? Yeah. In our targets, high value applications, it's not just clinical and biopharma. There's a couple also that are in research that are actually quite sizable. It's those areas where research informs this, the research towards disease mechanisms and where things like methylation make a significant difference in terms of the biological insight that they drive. So that's where we can grow significantly faster than the broader base of applications within academic or biopharma research. We feel that's where we need to do a better job at asserting our value proposition and demonstrating the evidence that's there and on what value we create by driving or generating those insights. I feel like we can. In that light, you should see the appointment of a Chief Marketing and Communications Officer to ensure we're really clear about what value we generate and how others should adopt that, and then on a broader basis. That would be to your point around marketing and I guess sales, but in particular marketing. Then, again, no meaningful requirement to innovate specifically. Obviously, you already do your methylation. A lot of these data actually exist. Yeah. They need to exist in a format that is communicatable, that a salesperson can pick up and present to customers in a compliance and easy-to-present fashion. We just haven't proactively done some of that work historically. We've counted on our customers to develop the applications on what's scientifically possible. I think it's time to rebalance that a bit and say, "These are the five or seven things we do really well in research. Yeah. Okay. You talked about technically differentiated, but there is a price component as well. On a cost per genome basis, clearly we've seen that number fall substantially, very substantially in short read, according to some of the marketed numbers. But even in the long read side, those numbers have come down. What do you think is the premium to short read that Oxford Nanopore can command on a sustainable basis? I think that's exactly what we've got to kind of underpin now, because we see that premium today for sure. We were on a call yesterday where a customer said they will pay a healthy premium, NX multiple, essentially for our technology, but they won't pay where it is today. Essentially, we've got to meet them somewhere. This is exactly why we've got to do this work now. The focus is really important because if you imagine, Charles, the number of applications that we're focusing on is out of a large number. The strategy historically was to kind of go for everything, anyone, anywhere, and they would tell us where to do it, essentially. Now we're going to focus on a smaller number because how could you develop all of the required marketing materials for all of these target applications? Because it's not just the marketing materials, it's the bioinformatics, it's the workflow, it's the kit, it's the sample prep, the binders, it's all of it, essentially, to be able to satisfy all of this. You end up not satisfying anybody. By reducing the number, we kind of really focus down on the complete product set and then develop the marketing materials for a focused number of applications where we can show clear utility. Then, I think, then we can answer that question much better than we can today. Because we've done that in biopharma, and we know that actually there's a lot more value capture still to go against where our current pricing is, if we can do some new things as well. Okay. Parallel to that, we are also working on technology advancements around the Nanopore, the technology, the software, the kits, the chemistry, that will continue to enable us to also be competitive where we need to be for those applications that we think it is necessary to generate volume. Yeah, this is where I was going to go to. So that cost can be brought down further through innovation. You talked about more genomes per flow cell in the past. So that work is ongoing but will be deployed as and where it is needed. Correct. Okay. Can we move on to guidance now? You talked about mid-teens underlying growth in 2026, accelerating through to 2030 excluding royalties. A simple linear acceleration there to get to GBP 700 million from the number you intend to exceed would imply an exit rate of over 20%. Does that acceleration come from a simple mix shift towards higher, faster growth applied markets from lower growth research? Or are you also expecting a change in growth rates within clinical and biopharma? Yeah. Good question. So first of all, as we talked to previously, across all of these target applications, including research, what we can see is that about 40%-45% of our revenue is within those target applications today. That means 55%, 60% are in applications which we are still going to support, but we are not going to put our resources behind in the same manner. What we had to do was on those target applications, we have got 10 haircuts essentially to get to a figure about what we think is the baseline, for where we can get to. For the other side, we had to apply more of a growth factor that is more potentially in line with the market or pull down depending on the halo effect from technology developments as well. If you have got over half the business growing a lot slower, then there are target applications that are growing much quicker. When we actually look historically over the last three years, essentially it has mapped out that way as well. When we have looked at our pipeline going forward and split the opportunities by these target applications and really importantly, by product type as well, they have all aligned the way they should do. That is confirmatory to essentially what we are doing is the right step. That is, thank God. Then essentially now it is about that shift. Those target applications, not just in research, but in clinical and biopharma in particular, those target applications should start to grow in size and that is why we will see a mid-teens that start to accelerate from that point. We will have, without a doubt, busier periods in biopharma from year to year. There will be certain things that happen that mean there will be kind of really high growth rates in year. Potentially, hopefully, when certain drugs are approved, and they go into kind of mass market, and that will be a big moment. Perhaps when more clinical trials happen within other indications, like for lung and things like that, then we will see a boost because we will be used in the clinical trials as well. There will be a bit of an ebb and a flow to it. I would not expect them to be completely linear. But acceleration because of that underlying base essentially just getting bigger and bigger. Okay. Can I come back to that GBP 700 million, greater than GBP 700 million? Now, I know you were talking illustratively, Nick Keher, when you talked about GBP 800 million or GBP 1 billion and how that relates to the margins, which we will come back to in a second. But there was certainly no consideration of any number under GBP 700 million when you were sort of speculating forwards. How should we think about the philosophy of how you set that guidance, that GBP 700 million number? You probably mulled out all sorts of various different scenarios. Some of them may have gone up to GBP 1 billion or more. How did the board think about putting the marker? Is it kind of middle of the pack? Is it bottom quartile? How should we think about the philosophy there? Yeah. Francis Van Parys will want to add to this as well. But we deliberately put out a number that we can execute against and that is credible because there is a difficult moment with all these things, Charles Weston, of making sure that you are setting an ambitious target to the street and also making sure that you set something that you know you are going to deliver. We believe we have got that place because at greater than GBP 700 million, we leave on the table the opportunity for us to meaningfully beat that number. But if we were to set a range or anything like that, then we probably limit the upside from beating the number. So actually, we've set something here where we've captured a lot of risk elements, and if I talk you through how we got the board, how we all got comfortable with this as well, but there is a series of 10, if you like, haircuts, essentially, from the total value of where the market is, all the way down to what we believe we can get. Actually there's 10 cuts for the market value, and then we had to cut it for market shares. So there are assumptions along the way. One of them, I think the big one could actually be on market share, where we could actually do better from a market share perspective within some of these target applications, because we've been quite generous. We've been skewed by healthy competition in some of these markets as well. So maybe we could do better there. The reason why we've excluded things like BD, the royalty agreement, the upfront, et cetera, is because we think these things will be additive. We shouldn't necessarily be forecasting other people's product sales. These things will happen, but we wanted to really focus on the core, if you like, business about what we can deliver today. Hopefully, that answers your question. Do you want to add, Francis? Yeah. You explained it really well. The philosophy we've adopted is we have full confidence we can deliver GBP 700 million or more. Is it the internal plan we will work towards? Maybe we can be a little bit more ambitious and drive the teams towards higher ambition. At the same time, between now and then, there's a lot that can happen. Some drugs may be approved and may be very successful, others maybe not so much. We've tried to be cautious, realistic in our expectations, and not overly bullish to ensure that we give a realistic outlook. Then if we do better, I think everybody will welcome that, and it's certainly our ambition to get to the $1 billion sooner rather than later. Understood. Can I ask the same question for margin, please? You talked about over 15%. You were talking about these higher numbers giving you perhaps more drop through and a higher margin. Again, how much wiggle room have you given yourself to spend and to increase your OpEx within that 15%, even at $700 million, i.e., the low end of your guide? Is there enough wiggle room there to choose to spend? How could you manage around that 15%, especially given that gross margin's potentially going to carry on going up? Yeah, absolutely. We have assumed the baseline, essentially, for those assumptions, we've got headroom against it. But from a cost perspective, in any of the scenarios that we've modeled out, from worst case to best case, essentially the spend profile is near enough the same. It's like within a fraction of each other. Because we need to make sure that because we still need to spend the money to do the things. It may be just the revenue takes longer. Essentially, we had to have the same operational from a spend perspective kind of underpinning all of it, and then it's what happens if X, Y, and Z doesn't happen, et cetera. But even against that, greater than 15% we feel comfortable with. To your point, there could be things we can do to the gross margin to maybe be able to move it higher as well. Yeah. We got asked this question a lot by investors about how we think about gross margin. We gave that incremental color on one of the slides about the mix, the consumable, because I think the last time that was seen was probably around the IPO time. People could now see the progress that we've made. But we're not finished. There's actually really encouraging things that we can do to improve gross margins over time. One of the things affecting the GBP 700 and the 15% which you excluded was business development. Yeah. What do you mean? What does that mean? Like when there is something business development versus sale to a customer or a partner? Yeah. Sorry. The example here, really, the global diagnostics company piece. Because clearly, that is transformational for our P&L, if you think about it. If those numbers were correct that you talked to before, Charles, then that is straight down to EBITDA. That is quite meaningful to the margin profile. And we would not want people going, "You have only got there because of the royalty agreement," essentially. So we needed to kind of give this baseline core business view, and people can add that on top. And hopefully, we do more things like this. Not necessarily like that deal, but maybe there are other deals that we can do that really help the out years. Okay. We are at the top of the hour, but Sorry to Can I just ask one more? Again, a question from an investor that has come in. I know you do not like talking about your direct competitors, or at least not to investors as much, but you have clearly outgrown your direct long-read competitor. Can you point to one or two key things that you think stand you apart in terms of that market adoption? I think where we have won and where we have driven adoption is where the rich data, the near term, real-time nature of the sequencing really drives different biological answers. That then, of course, has informed us as well on what our future high-value applications need to be. I think that is the work we have been building on. We are lucky enough that there is another component to that, which is the scalability of our platform that will drive more future opportunity and adds to the other two that I think are the clearest differentiators of the platform. That is great. I do not want to take you too many minutes over the allotted time. I think we will leave it there. I wanted to thank you very much. We have gone through a heck of a lot of color and detail. To everyone who has asked questions, thank you very much. To everyone who has milked on, thank you. Let me know what you think. Let me know if there is anything that you would like to discuss on this or for me to fire over to the company on your behalf. With that, Francis and Nick, thank you very much for your time. Really appreciate that. Are there any closing remarks that you would like to make? Thank you for the opportunity. I would say we believe and I believe the technology is ready to mature and scale. It is about now delivering to the potential that it has shown and execute on that. We look forward to providing you an update on our journey towards a minimum of $700 million by 2030. Thank you very much. With that, I'll close the call.