Good morning. Welcome to ArcticZymes Capital Markets Day 2026. It's great to see all of you in Stockholm today. It's a beautiful day in Stockholm. Spring has arrived. I would also like to welcome all of you that have signed in online. Today is really about one thing. That's about creating clarity about ArcticZymes, creating clarity about how we are going to build a scalable enzyme platform going forward. I'd like to start out by trying to frame what we're trying to achieve today. We are going to show you the building blocks of how ArcticZymes creates long-term value.
I'm going to start off by talking about the strategic evolution that ArcticZymes has been through during the past two years, how have we transformed as a company, and how have we positioned ourselves for long-term shareholder value creation. We also have a section about the market opportunity. We're going to be talking about what segments we play in, how we compete, and how we're going to win. We're also going to show you a very clear growth strategy. The most important part of today is not the presentation that you're going to hear from the ArcticZymes team. We have two customers here that are close partners. They're going to show how our technology makes a true impact in their work processes. We are also going to be speaking about how we are building up our commercial capabilities.
We are going to focus on how we are transferring from adoption, converting adoption into long-term growth. We're going to end up with the financial ambitions of the company, and we're going to show you a clear plan of how we're going to execute going through the core priorities of the next two years. Let's get started. This is a more detailed view on the agenda. I'm not going to go through it in each and every section. The important point here is that we have a Q&A session. We're going to open up for questions after the first break, around 10:00 A.M., and then we're also going to open up for questions after we have had the first, the second, customer talk. The focus is how does ArcticZymes as a company create long-term value?
How are we going to scale the company going forward? These are the hosts for today. We have myself, Michael Akoh, CEO of the company. Been with the company for two years now. Have a background within the life science industry. Worked within that industry for the past plus 20 years. I'm really proud to be heading up ArcticZymes as a company. We have a great opportunity ahead of us, and we have a great team that's able to execute. We have Børge Sørvoll. He's been with the company for more than 10 years, and he's our Chief Financial Officer. We have Paul Blackburn. He joined in September 2024, and he's been instrumental in building out our commercial capabilities that we are now seeing the first tangible results of. Paul also has a long track record within the life science industry.
Been working for companies such as Thermo Fisher, 10x Genomics, and Bio-Rad. In Paul's team, we have Steve Dey. Steve Dey also has a long track record within the life science industry, and he is really a master of marketing, as you will see today. Not just marketing, but in strategizing in general. Really happy to have all of you on the team. We have the superstars of today. That's our customers. We have Lee Davies. He's Senior Director of Innovation at OXB. OXB is really a leading, innovation-led CDMO. I met Lee for the first time approximately two years ago in Oxford. I was relatively new to the company. I was relatively new to understanding the impact of our enzymes. I left that meeting convinced and really energized based on the data that Lee showed me.
He's going to also show you the data that they have got out of implementing SAN in their platform, and it's really exciting to see what our enzymes can do in capable hands. Then we have Rafi Ahmad. I know, Rafi, you've been working with the company for many years. It's not something that started yesterday. You're going to share the interesting highlights of metagenomics and the potential that you see within metagenomics. I'm especially excited about this presentation as well because this really shows you the possible impact that our enzymes have and also the diversification that we have lying ahead of us. Great speakers for today's sessions. Why are we here today? Why are we having a Capital Markets Day just now? It's because the company has evolved and so has the market.
There's a need for reframing the strategy. There's a need for strategic clarity, and that's what we aim to provide today. The company has evolved. As mentioned, we have a renewed board, we have a renewed leadership team, and we are focused a lot on a customer-centric transformation during the past 18 months that we are, as mentioned, seeing the first early results of. We've also reorganized the organization to enable scalable growth, as we're going to speak to today. We're also seeing changes in the market. After the pandemic, there was a market research reset, and there's an increased capital discipline across the board, and there's also an increased regulatory scrutiny in regards to our customers' processes and products. That leads to a demand for value-creating, differentiated technology.
There's also a need for long-term stable partners that can provide that impact on workflows. That leads us to our new strategic clarity. We have a clear growth ambition that we're going to execute on. We have a very defined growth strategy with several growth vectors, and we also have a clear innovation product roadmap that we're going to show parts of today. It's also important to say that we're going to also present our strategy in regards to capital allocation going forward. Just a quick overview of who ArcticZymes is as a company. We have more than 30 years of experience within enzyme development, manufacturing and commercialization. We became a pure-play enzyme solution provider five years ago.
We have the backbone, the experience from 30 years of working with developing, manufacturing, and commercializing enzymes. We have approximately 55 full-time employees, and we have deep expertise amongst those employees in the development, innovation process, the manufacturing process, and also in the commercialization process with the latest investments that we have made. We just have shy of NOK 120 million in revenue, and we have positive EBITDA and a set of strong growth drivers. Our technology is making an impact. We're increasing our customer base, especially in the biomanufacturing area, as you can see on the slide, and we're going to continue to do so going forward, strengthening our market position, and more customers are currently seeing the value of our technology, as you're also going to hear examples from today. Our vision is straightforward.
We want to become the trusted partner in enzyme-driven innovation across molecular diagnostics as well as advanced therapies. The key word to focus on here is trusted partner. We work closely with our partners to ensure that they become successful with their workflows. Our mission is also straightforward. We want to enable safer, more effective therapies and diagnostics through high-performance enzymes. That's the starting point. We have a focus on becoming a trusted partner. We have a focus on developing and commercializing high-performance enzymes. What are enzymes? I'm not a scientist, so I've written this down and I'm going to read it up for you guys. Enzymes are precision biological proteins, or think of them as precision tools that control or accelerate specific biochemical reactions. That's what enzymes are. They act as catalysts, enabling reactions to occur efficiently without being consumed.
In our world, enzymes are really used to build, modify or remove DNA or RNA. I think the key point here is that our enzymes sit in critical customer workflows, and they have a significant impact on the outcome of the product, of the process, as you're also going to hear about today. Their performance directly impacts the quality, reliability and efficiency and ultimately also the economics of the solution, as you're also going to hear about today. Having the right enzyme embedded in your platform leads to significant advantages. In our context, we have two different playing fields at the moment, although they are expanding by nature, as you're also going to hear about today. We have the manufacturing of advanced therapies, so that's viral vectors, it's vaccines, it's RNA therapeutics.
On the other hand, we have molecular diagnostics, PCR and sequencing workflows. Here we're going to talk about metagenomics today, which is a new interesting segment for us to grow in. This slide is key in regards to our business model, in regards to our platform and in regards to how we're able to scale the business. We have a small key critical component that makes a big difference in our customers' workflows. We are able to have high growth margins on our products due to that fact. We also have a scalable cost structure. We have, during the past years, invested a lot in our regulatory backbone, our processes, our ability to produce GMP enzymes. We've invested a lot in the commercial infrastructure. We've also invested a lot in the manufacturing capabilities of the company.
Enabling us to scale the business so as revenue grows. The costs do not grow at the same rate. That gives us operating leverage. We also have an enzyme that goes into our customers' workflows, as mentioned, critical workflows. We have enzymes that are being engineered in. We have enzymes that are being validated in. That means that once we are in a process, a product, then there are high switching costs. We are embedded in our customers' platforms. Last but not least, we have room for platform expansion. By that I mean we have the infrastructure in place to launch new enzymes without adding structural cost. A really, really powerful business operating model that is built for operating leverage.
During the past two years, we made three deliberate investments in the company, and the first one was to build out our commercial capabilities, where we've had Paul, our CCO, being instrumental in doing so, and we are seeing the first results of that commercial capability build-out. Secondly, we've also decided to focus even more and invest even more in our marketing capabilities as well as our product management function, enabling us to make strong product roadmaps that fit the needs of our customers going forward. Application and technical support is also a key cornerstone of our strategy. We want to ensure that our customers are successful with implementing our enzymes in their workflows.
Finally, we have also focused on looking at our channel strategy, expanding reach to the market. The first result of that was the signing of a partnership agreement with Brenntag, where they are going to be partly responsible for selling our Salt-Active Nucleases in Europe. Two, product-market fit is extremely important. We have great products. We've had great products for a long time, but it's also important that they have the right regulatory status so that customers can apply them from early research all the way to commercialization. During the past two years, we have launched two GMP Salt-Active Nucleases. We are seeing that those products are really gaining significant traction at the moment. Third element is diversification. We have some core enzymes. Those core enzymes can be applied broader across other applications.
A clear example of that is metagenomics, where we have our Salt-Active Nucleases that can also be applied in a Next-Generation Sequencing workflow. That's giving us diversification, and we've seen the same thing with the RNA workflows that we are working to get into. There we also have some core enzymes that can be applied across the RNA workflow, as Steve is also going to talk about later on. What does this lead to? It leads to a reduction of the concentration risk, and it also expands the total addressable market for ArcticZymes. The result, what we are building is a scalable enzyme platform leading to more predictable growth, higher operating leverage, and a set of multiple growth vectors for us going forward. All in all, ending up in compounding shareholder value over time.
My last slide, just again touches upon the journey that ArcticZymes has been on. We have made deliberate platform investments, as I just talked about, to get the company back on a growth path, and we are there as we speak. Now it's about scaling the company for further growth. We saw 2020 to 2022, we had a pandemic-driven surge. We did extremely well with managing to deliver according to the needs of our customers, which was extraordinary at the time. We really scaled up our production capabilities, outsourced some of the key fermentation parts, so we could scale even further. 2023, 2024, after the pandemic, there was a revenue reset and market normalization. We invested in both our commercial capabilities during that period as well as our product-market fit and also the diversification aspects of our business.
2025 onwards, return to growth and a strong foundation to drive it even further. With that, I'd like to invite Steve Dey to the floor, who's going to talk about the market opportunities we have as well as the strategy.
Okay. Thank you very much. Before we dive into strategy, what I want to do now is have a look at the markets that we currently play in and look at the areas that we've investigated as potential growth opportunities. Take those markets and also look at ArcticZymes' core capabilities and how we are suited to serve those markets, be competitive, and generate value. Okay, we manufacture enzymes, but there are many parts to that. Let's start with innovation. We have a strong internal innovation platform that allows us to identify customer needs, identify potential lead molecules, and take them through the product development to market. We complement this with a strong external network of collaborators, which allow us to add skills and capacities, to enable us to work wider than we can in our team.
This is something we're gonna look to accelerate as we hope to fill our product pipeline over the coming years. External connections and collaborations, adding new skills as and when we need them is something important. This has been mentioned before. We have 30 years' experience manufacturing enzymes. It's really hard to overstate how valuable and impactful this is. 30 years' experience. Making an enzyme isn't as simple as taking a sequence, putting it into an expression platform, putting it into a fermenter, and purifying it. It takes skill, it takes expertise, it takes knowledge. There's a huge degree of craftsmanship that goes alongside this. This is something you only get with the accumulative knowledge of a business that's been doing this for 30 years. This is not easy to replicate.
You can't just pick up our business and put it somewhere else and hope that it works. People are a core part of this expertise and skill. Layered on top of that, driven heavily by our needs from our customers, we have a strong quality component. We have heavily developed quality systems within the organization. We're ISO 13485, and we're capable of manufacturing GMP grade internally. Why is that important? Well, as we've mentioned, we're in highly regulated industries. Where customers move from R&D and want to move into manufacture, there's a big regulatory hurdle for them to cross. Having products which are already at a grade for manufacturing helps to minimize that leap for our customers, which makes us an important partner in that process. What makes ArcticZymes different from other enzyme manufacturers?
Well, a core clue to this is in the name. ArcticZymes is based in the Arctic, and it's based on the coast. As a result, many of our initial organisms were actually sea-based, so marine Arctic organisms, which has two main features. The first one being, if you're a marine organism, you need to have your enzymes working in a salty environment. Why is that important? Well, many of our customers have processes which do not work at a low salt concentration. Bioprocessing is high salt. If you're taking samples from the human body, there's a much higher salt concentration than a lot of the traditional enzymes on the market can manage. Our enzymes allow our customers to actually work in the conditions that they need to. Okay. The next thing is temperature. If you live at 4 degrees, your enzymes need to work at 4 degrees.
The benefit is, as you warm that enzyme up and you work with it at 20 degrees, it becomes more active, which means it's more efficient, which means we can confer efficiencies to our customers. The other benefit is sometimes you don't want your enzyme to work. You need to switch it off in the process as part of your workflow. Enzymes that are adapted to the cold can actually be switched off by increasing heat in many cases. We have a handy off switch, which allows our customers to tell, or allows our customers to manage their workflows more effectively. We've talked about our products, but I wanna put a little bit more of a shape around that. We have three main product families.
In reality, there are some outliers around this, but the main areas we work in is nucleases, and we've talked about this, but what do nucleases do? Nucleases cut up nucleic acid, and they're often used for clearing nucleic acid. We have ligases. They are slightly different. They're the opposite. They're used for reconnecting strands to make longer strands of nucleic acid. We have polymerases, and polymerases use a template to generate more nucleic acid. These are the main 3 areas, but we're predominantly working with modifying or removing or amplifying DNA or RNA. Where do we play today? We have 2 main markets. We have, we call it the molecular tools market and the advanced therapies market. Molecular tools is primary diagnostics and molecular kits and advanced therapies.
Maybe it's good to define what advanced therapies are. Advanced therapies are advanced therapies which are based around mainly biologics. We're looking at antibodies, we're looking at cell therapies and gene therapies. These are typically cutting-edge, high, high-cost, experimental products. Currently the market we serve in this space is the viral vector market, where we're very well entrenched. Where else are we looking? Within the molecular tools space, we're also investigating the Next-Generation Sequencing market for diagnostics. With advanced therapies, we're looking at the RNA Therapeutics market, and we'll talk more about them in detail as we go through. It is important to say this is not where we're stopping. We are aware that there's a potential for other markets.
We are looking for adjacent markets where our products can offer a significant competitive benefit, where there's an unmet customer need, where there's less competition, again, allowing us to diversify and select more markets. Okay. Let's look a little bit closer at the markets that we're currently in. If we look at the PCR diagnostics market, let's start with what is PCR? Post-pandemic, everyone is very familiar with the phrase PCR. If you ever had to send a test off, it would have been sent away for a sample off for testing, it would have been a PCR test. PCR is a very well-used, very well-accepted technology. It's been used in diagnostics for decades. The technology allows you to look for a specific piece, a sequence of DNA or RNA, and to amplify that to give you a signal to measure.
If the product is there, then you amplify it, you get the signal. If the product isn't there, you get no signal. That's how the diagnostic element works. This is a very mature market. It's a big market, absolutely. I mean, we estimate the market size to be around $10 billion for reagents. It is, as you'd expect with a mature market, not growing rapidly. It's a fairly predictable but low growth rate from 5%-6%. This is a mature market. Many of the technologies here were established some time ago, we had a huge acceleration through COVID, which means a lot of companies have done the work, they've built their diagnostic platforms, they're not looking to add new suppliers in.
Which means there's a high barrier to substitution, which is great for us where we're currently in a platform, but it does mean taking additional business share there can be challenging. The core products in this space are Cod UNG, which is one of our nucleases. Cod UNG allows you to prevent cross-contamination risks from previous tests. Of course, polymerases sit in this space as well. If we look at the core drivers for this market, as you'd expect with a mature marketplace where it's a well-established technology, cost reduction is a clear driver for our customers. Alongside this, you have kits that are being made and shipped around the world. As such, you want to maintain and increase your sensitivity, and you need stability. They're of course looking to...
Our customers are always looking to reduce risk because, I mean, there is a high, there is a big challenge if you have false positives in your tests. This is a problem in patient management. If you look at where we currently support this market, we can help with increased sensitivity, that's something that Cod UNG does very well, and we can help reduce risk, which is something that Cod UNG does well. However, in our product mix today, we don't wanna be looking at cost reduction. We don't wanna be selling enzymes cheaper and cheaper, we want to be building value. And we don't directly support stability. That's a snapshot, and we'll come back and summarize these afterwards. Let's compare that to a new emerging market in diagnostics, which is the Next-Generation Sequencing diagnostics. What's the difference? With PCR, you ask a specific question.
Is this here or is it not? In sequencing, you don't. You take all the genetic material, and you look at everything that's there. You ask questions of the information you get back, which means you don't have to ask a specific question at the beginning. Now, sequencing has been around for many years. Next-Generation Sequencing has been around for many years, but mainly as a research tool. It has been too slow to use as some form of, to be used as a frontline diagnostics tool.
However, with the emergence of metagenomics, which we'll hear, you'll hear this a lot today, but metagenomics, the technology and the techniques here have allowed us to speed up how quickly you can get results from Next-Generation Sequencing, which means you can start to move sequencing away from being a research tool or a much later stage diagnostic tool to something that can sit in the front lines. As you'd expect with a newer market, it is smaller. However, it is growing much faster. That's attractive for a small company where, who can offer innovative solutions. It gives us a great space to grow into. Because it's new, there's new techniques coming through, and new techniques give you opportunities, and metagenomics is a great example of that. It's a fast-growing market with some new tech, new techniques becoming applicable with opportunities to grow.
If you look across the workflow, actually all of our main product groups can fit into different stages of this workflow. What's driving this? Or what drives customers in this marketplace? Well, they're after fast results. If you want this to be frontline diagnostics, it needs to be quick. They're also looking for increased insight. PCR gives you a yes/no and how much is there, but it isn't telling you anything more than that, and you have to ask the right question at the beginning. This allows you to have a much more expansive insight. Because you're not amplifying in the same way, or you're not always amplifying a region, you need this test to be sensitive because you want to be able to see everything that's there. If a pathogen is there in one or two copies, you wanna be able to see this.
Sequencing isn't easy. PCR has got to a point where you can buy it almost in a cartridge and plug it into a machine. It is very simple to do in a lab. This is an R&D practice that is moving into the clinic, so it's complex. There's complex sample handling. There is a drive from customers to simplify this process, make this easier, make this something that can translate into a routine lab. It is diagnostics, of course, so anything in diagnostics, there is a pressure to reduce cost. The areas we help, we help make this faster. DNA clearance, again, we'll talk about later. DNA, Host DNA clearance as part of this process speeds this up significantly and increases sensitivity.
We're also looking at other solutions in the workflow to simplify this, and we're working with some of our customers to answer their logistics and handling challenges. The viral vector market. Viral vector is we talk about it a lot. If you've ever been to an investment call, this is mentioned regularly. What is viral vector? Very simply, and Lee can correct me if I'm wrong here, this is an engineered virus that's used for delivering genetic material directly into patient cells, be them internally or externally at a very simple level. The main applications you'll see for this will be gene therapy, vaccines, or cancer therapy. When we say cancer therapy, it's predominantly CAR T. Okay. It's an interesting marketplace. It's significant from a reagents perspective. There aren't a lot of enzymes in this workflow.
However, it is growing quickly. It's growing between 14% and 17%, this is very much an interesting market that we want to be in. It is fast-growing, it is a relatively compact market. There aren't thousands and thousands of companies doing this, which means it can be sensitive. If you have a clinical trial, data come out, that can have a positive or negative effect across the market. Whilst it is fast growth, there are a limited number of companies, and it is sensitive. Our core product here is nucleases. I mean, we don't have a lot of opportunity, but we'll touch that later in the strategy where we can build on this, but we are very, very strong in the nuclease space. What drives our customers? This is super expensive. These workflows cost millions.
There is a huge drive to reduce the cost per dose. This is pharmaceuticals, so product safety and product quality are supreme. Because it's pharmaceuticals, there's a high regulatory barrier that needs to be met. Again, these are new markets with new technologies. This is about IP. This is about getting to market quickly. This is about returning investment, returning value for your investors. There is a big drive for speed to market. Where do we support this? Our current and our future lines in this space support reduction of costs per dose. They help improve product quality, which we'll hear more about later in the following talks. Our GMP grade allows us to reduce the barriers for regulation.
Next to this, we have the RNA therapeutics market, which is this new space we're looking to move into. RNA, if you're not familiar, is another molecule that stores genetic code. RNA therapies use RNA to upregulate, deregulate, switch off, gene expression and protein production. Okay, this is a very new area. It's a big market for us, and the reason it's a big market is it is enzyme heavy. There are a lot of enzymes in the RNA workflow, which makes it very attractive for an enzyme manufacturer. It's growing pretty rapidly. It's a little bit variable across the RNA space. Some are growing faster than 13%, some are growing a little bit less. On average, we're looking around 13%. Because this is a new market, people are still looking for better ways to do things.
There are problems which need solutions. This is perfect for an innovative company coming with new products, new ideas, applying existing technology into this space that solve current problems. The main product areas we're looking at here are nucleases and polymerases. The customer drivers are very similar to the customer drivers that you would have seen in viral vector. Cost per dose or COGS. COGS is the language we hear more from the RNA market. Speed to market. These are people who are often investment-led. They're venture capital companies. They are looking to be the first, get their technology out there. Speed to market is important, but we are in pharmaceuticals, so product quality, product safety is super important, and there is a regulatory requirement. Not the same as viral vector.
They're slightly different at this stage. There is a regulatory burden, we expect that to evolve. We're incredibly well-placed with our current portfolio and our planned portfolio to help lower COGS, to speed up the market, increase the speed to market, help with product quality and safety. In fact, the products we're looking to launch soon is directly in the QC space, we'll talk a little bit more about that in the strategy. To summarize, for molecular tools, we've got the PCR market, which is stable. It's a dependable market. The business we have there is growing nicely, there's a high barrier to substitution, it's not the easiest place for us to grow. We can contrast that with the NGS market, where we're really well-positioned. It's a fast growth market.
There's a very interesting subsect with the metagenomic space, we have a great capabilities fit. Advanced therapies, the viral vector market is fast-growing. It's a little bit sensitive, we have significant current business there, we have a great capabilities fit. We can run that alongside of the RNA Therapeutics market. This is fast growth. It's highly adaptable, which gives us lots of opportunities to bring in new solutions where they add value, there's a high number of enzymes in that workflow, which is incredibly important for an enzyme manufacturer. What I hope I've done there is given you an overview of the market and an insight into the analysis we've done as we've gone through. Now let's talk about the strategies. This you've heard about a lot, diversification.
We need to diversify our portfolio because that gives us more opportunities to grow. It reduces our exposure to market turbulence. This is one of the core drivers of how we move forward. How do we do this? Well, clearly increasing our customer base reduces the turbulence you feel from project phasing. If you have more customers, then your lines become smoother. We can do this by entering new markets. Clearly, we can also do it by expanding our footprint in our current markets, and that is something we're doing, it goes without saying. By entering new markets, then you reduce your dependence on a smaller number of markets. We can also look to add more products per workflow. This gives you more levers to pull. It makes sense from a commercial perspective. It makes it easier for sales.
It allows us to sell at a workflow level. It allows us to defend our business because it's harder to substitute four products than it is to substitute one, and it gives us greater share of wallet per workflow. Finally, we have existing business, so we do need to make sure that we look after that. We need to make sure that we're protecting and we're reinforcing our current market position where we currently have significant market share. Okay. Now we'll start looking at the strategy. We have an umbrella strategy that sits over everything, and Michael's alluded to this and Paul will talk about it later as well. First of all, we want to become customer-centric. It's very easy to sell an enzyme in a tube. What we want to do is become a solution provider for our customers.
We want to be the product that underpins their business needs, that adds value to them as a business. Okay. We do this by not being an enzyme manufacturer, by being a solutions provider. This builds more value into the product. It makes it easier to defend. It increases the proximity with our customers, allows us to understand the market and see opportunities earlier and to see risks earlier. Alongside this, we need to widen our base. Diversification. This runs as a thread through all of the strategies. How can we enter new markets? When we enter those markets, how can we add multiple products into that market? The simple way to say it is existing products into new markets, new products into existing markets, and where we can and we see the opportunity, new products into new markets.
This is underpinned by four strategic pillars. We have three pillars around product, and we have one around our channel strategy, how we go to market. I'm not gonna talk about the channel strategy because, that's gonna be covered in Paul's presentation. I'm gonna talk about the three product pillars. Molecular tools. Now I'm gonna start off with a workflow. There will be a test on this. No. Really what I want to do here is, rather than talking about the complexity of the workflow, is to show our approach to it. Now this is a metagenomics Next-Generation Sequencing workflow. In the past, we may have had one product in a workflow. Now what we're doing is we're looking at a workflow and seeing where is there a problem, where is there a challenge, where can we add value?
Where do we have current product? Where do we have product in our pipeline that is gonna allow us to add value to a customer and add value to this workflow for us to take a greater share of wallet? All the blue boxes you see are areas where we are currently looking at or have ongoing projects or products which we understand can be repositioned but need application data. These are all ongoing. Where we have a green tick, it shows where we currently have a product. We currently have a great product in this workflow for Host DNA clearance, and was touched before. Our SAN products have worked exceptionally well in this area, and we're very lucky that they've been baked into a lot of the early protocols that are coming through.
The groundbreaking work that's happening today is working with our enzymes, which is fantastic. We see lots of other opportunities in this workflow to really build a wider footprint. What's the strategy for molecular tools? Very simply, it's enter the NGS market using our existing portfolio and with some key identified products that answer customer need whilst maintaining our PCR business and protecting that. If we look at the initiatives that follow underneath this, the first one is develop an NGS portfolio, which is something we're in the process of doing today, and identify new opportunities, and there are new opportunities. There are things as new technologies and Next-Generation Sequencing build out, like RNA sequencing, metagenomics, there are opportunities to add new enzymes in and solve customer problems. The second major pillar is metagenomics.
Metagenomics has got a life of its own right now. We've had groundbreaking papers come out over the last two years. It is beginning a relatively steep adoption curve. Our aim is to drive awareness that this is a technique, to work with the authors and the key opinion leaders who are driving this technique to really amplify the message into market, and we've already done that this year. We had a very successful webinar at the beginning of the year. We have a customer who is a key opinion leader in this space to talk to you later. The more we drive this, as of today, the more this pulls our enzymes through, and we're working on solutions in this space to make it easier for customers to work with us. The flip side is we have significant Cod UNG business.
We need to reinforce that in the market and make sure it's defendable. Cod UNG will grow along with the market reproducibly. We want that stable backdrop. Primarily through marketing, reinforce the position there, reinforce that is a risk prevention system. Who better to reduce that risk than the inventors of the product? The final element of this is we have some other products in this space which don't add so much value. We're gonna defocus on those. As of today, we're gonna focus on the core drivers which we see adding value to customers. Viral vectors. Again, we have a viral vector workflow. The first and second boxes are basically the same step. This is a Host DNA clearance step. The final step of quality control is an area where we think there's an opportunity.
You can see viral vector, there isn't many opportunities for us to add in new products. However, we are very strong in the places we currently are. We have existing products in the first and second step. We believe we can repurpose some products into the third step, and we have a concept for some new QC tools to help support the third step. This is a market we wanna stay in, clearly. This is a successful market for us, and it is gonna continue to grow, so we have to make sure that we protect the business we have and stay ahead of our competition. We need to drive and reinforce the SAN sales, whilst looking at other opportunities to drive value in this workflow.
There are some adjacent modalities around viral vector that we need to investigate, so we can look to place SAN into some associated closely related markets and again, to increase our footprint. The different strategic initiatives. One, we need to accelerate SAN market penetration today. We have a great product, it's technically strong, and as Michael said, the process works by getting the product in, getting baked into a platform. It's very hard to remove you once that's happened, so there is a race to get into these platforms early. The second one is to identify other potential spaces in this workflow, and we have some candidate areas that we're working on. The third initiative is to make sure we maintain this business. We are already working on the next version of SAN.
We need to have a product that is technically superior, adds more customer value, that allows us to protect this market share and take more. The final one, as I touched on, is to look at potentially other areas around viral vector in this DNA vector modality that allows us to spread the footprint of SAN a little bit wider. Finally, we have RNA Therapeutics. This is a great workflow from an enzyme manufacturer's perspective. There's many areas in here where we get to add product or potentially can add product. All of these blue areas, we actually either have product in development or close to being available. Areas where we have a green tick, we already have the product. We're simply doing the final application works to place them in this space.
The quality control area, we have a novel enzyme, so new to market, that we'll launch at the end of this year and the beginning of next, which is a great place to be. Not just an existing concept, but a brand new product. This leads to a very simple strategy here. We need to build and launch a range of enzymes, and we'll do that by repurposing current enzymes. We are lucky we have many enzymes in our current portfolio that can directly translate to the RNA market. The other benefit is the RNA market isn't hugely different from a customer perspective to the other advanced therapy market we're in, which is viral vector , which means we are familiar with the buying process here. We're familiar with how to commercially enter this space.
We need to build a brand in this space, and we need to take market share quickly. The three ways we'll do this, one, we have a novel enzyme. It makes it very easy from a marketing perspective to tell a story. It's an exciting time to be able to go out to market and say, "We have something new that solves a problem. We can solve this problem for you." Alongside this, we're gonna build out a range of enzymes to support this, so when sales go to a customer, it's not one product, it's four or five or three, depending on how the pipeline goes. The aim is to have a portfolio of products that allows us to address this.
To drive revenue faster and to take advantage of this quickly moving market, we're also looking to build strong OEM partnerships. With viral vector, we go mainly to market direct, and that works very well for us. We're using distribution to amplify that. In the RNA market initially, we'll also go direct, but we will look to work with OEM suppliers with some of our unique or highly impactful enzymes to get revenue faster, to get embedded quicker, to understand our customers and the market faster. Hopefully what I've been able to show you there is three different strategies or three different approaches to the market, which will help us to increase our customer base. We're entering two new marketplaces. We have an active plan ongoing today to add new products per workflow and the new markets we enter to add multiple products per workflow.
Also how we look to strengthen our current position in viral vector and PCR. This will lead to increased growth opportunities, increased market diversity, and for us, an increased market resilience. Thank you very much. Okay.
Right. Thanks for great presentation. Yeah, on the, in the last, I guess, year, you've seen an acceleration in demand from GMP enzymes, which I believe is partly due to CDMO starting to implement SAN into protocols. More broadly, is it possible to characterize like a typical customer for a GMP product versus a non-GMP product and how that affects, you know, margins as well as, you know, visibility from your point of view, from these customers?
I mean, GMP is tied to a customer's life cycle. What we've found... I mean, that's a very detailed question. I don't have all of that information to hand. What I can tell you is having GMP is critical. I think we've gone past the moment where you can enter a marketplace in the viral vector space without a GMP product because people are looking at the R&D element and going, "This is great, but I wanna be in manufacture in a year and a half. Where's your GMP product?" The impact on margins, honestly, I don't have that information to hand. I mean, as Michael says, from a margin perspective, our business works very well. It's the increased scale you get at GMP which is important.
This is very hard to map out because if you have a therapy that is an ocular therapy, the amount that needs to be produced is very small. Therefore, the production isn't huge. If you have an intramuscular treatment, that's often a very big dose, so it's a much bigger run. Maybe we can talk after this. I can delve into that a little bit deeper.
Yeah, I just wanted to add a point. A lot of the GMP sales that we've seen so far have been really customers that are validating the GMP version versus the non-GMP version. There's still a lot of potential there. You know, we're just getting started with the GMP sales, so.
I mean, that's the journey we would hope for is customers who are using the non-GMP version, if they are successful and move to manufacture, they should take on GMP, and of course, that's where we see an expansion in their usage.
Okay, thank you. You also focus, or highlight that your focus in 2026 will be to, you know.
Mm-hmm
... the application areas of existing portfolios. Maybe if you can, you know, I guess what I want to come to is like how much of growth will come from that part of, you know, your operations versus, you know, launching new products and trying to grow on that side, so to say?
Within the RNA space, we have a modest number associated this year and next year because of course, this is an area where we're starting with R&D customers. As time goes on, we've modeled it, and again, this is maybe something we can show you separately, where we can see RNA becoming actually a very significant portion of our business. If you look at metagenomics, it's really hard for us to gauge at this moment. When we did our initial maths on it, we were looking at lung samples, and we used it for ICU patients. However, what we've seen is the market is growing faster than our calculations, in the sense that we've seen it spread to different sample types very quickly. The people we're working with are telling us they're doubling their samples every six months that they're managing.
We had calculations for metagenomics. I feel they're probably not representative. It's probably larger than we think it is. It is still important to say this is a brand-new technology, so it's going through some kind of adoption phase, and the UK has been very, very strong with this adoption of metagenomics in a clinical setting. They are a little bit of an outlier in this sense. I think it will take longer for this to become established as routine in different places. How long? I don't know exactly how long this adoption, this initial curve of early adopters or entrepreneurs into early adopters will take before we hit the early majority. We can definitely see the opportunity there. Actually quantifying it today is quite difficult because it's expanding.
Hi. Filip Wiberg from Pareto. Got a couple of questions on perhaps more how you're using or targeting to use the enzymes within PCR and NGS specifically. Perhaps starting with PCR.
Mm-hmm
It's used for everything as you know, and mostly no complex enzymes, a lot of polymerases or perhaps reverse transcriptases if you're working with RNA. I guess those are the most expensive ones, in term, in the workflow.
Mm-hmm.
You talked about this $10 billion market, and I suppose most of that is just these generic polymerases, et cetera.
It is, yeah.
I suppose you have Cod UNG, which I suppose is a large part of the current PCR.
It definitely is, yes.
Yeah, like, I suppose you're when you're targeting that specific market, which kind of niches are you mainly targeting? Is it mainly Cod UNG just for these types of workflows, or are you also targeting to go up against giants within Polymerases, for instance?
Honestly, we are not best placed to go against a polymerase giant. We have some polymerases in our, in our portfolio. They are not our flagship products, whereas Cod UNG is technically a very, very strong product. As you saw, the core drivers often in PCR are now about reduction of cost. If you go to a big diagnostics company, they'll have five or six platforms built, and the joy of PCR is often you can just change the primers. And that will allow you to have a different diagnostic test, and you have maybe five or six platforms to pick from. They're not looking to change them unless you can deliver a significant technical benefit or a significant financial benefit.
At this moment in the portfolio and our pipeline, we don't see the things that are going to achieve that. Because it's a conservative, mature market, entering it and making big changes will be a lot of effort, expensive, and we don't see the products today that allow us to be competitive in that space. Whereas Cod UNG is well-positioned, we have a nice market, and we see a future for that product. Again, it's a price-pressured marketplace, which happens when things have become more mature and become a little bit more commoditized. We actually see more opportunities in these faster-growing emerging markets where they're looking for solutions, and then hopefully we get to become the company that's entrenched and no one changes later. Does that answer the question?
Yeah, well, I guess to some degree. So like which types of niches are you targeting specifically when you want to grow within PCR?
I mean, with PCR currently, I think we're looking to defend our business. We're looking for some easier places to grow where, as a business, our capabilities and the product mix we have is better positioned. Next-Generation Sequencing is a place we have a much better footprint. Our polymerase portfolio is robust, but it's also not going to be something that allows us to take significant share because we won't be driving prices down with it. We don't want to be the company that just reduces cost. We wanna be adding technical benefits. As of today, that's not something in the portfolio. It may be if that comes up through the process and through our innovation cycles, then it may change. Of course, all strategies flex and evolve as new opportunities come up.
As of today, it's more about making sure that we maintain the footprint we currently have in PCR.
I totally agree. The only addition I would make to that is, the sales team are being very deliberate about the kind of PCR customers that they're visiting and the kind of conversations they're having. There is a subset of PCR customers who are more risk-averse. You know, they value spending a little bit more on making sure that their test, their diagnostic test, whatever it might be, is secured with Cod UNG. These customers are still popping up, especially since COVID, you know, where the risk of false positives is talked about more. As Steve mentioned, though, what we're not doing is going to the mass PCR market. We're not set up to have many thousands of small academic customers doing a little bit of PCR.
Okay. Good. Thanks. The second part is then on the, on the NGS as well.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously, PCR is used within NGS workflows at all times. Is that mainly how you see your enzymes positioned in that?
PCR is not always used in NGS.
Well, mostly during Library prep, at least.
The library amplification, as of today, the main area we see, if you ask me today, where is our opportunity that we can act on immediately, it's actually in the Host DNA clearance step way before this. The importance of this will be explained in some of the presentations later.
Okay.
It's that nuclease step. Again, the library prep step is an area we're targeting, and we've got some interesting enzymes in there, maybe more in the RNA sequencing space than the DNA sequencing space. However, we see opportunity there. Today, really looking closely at the Host DNA clearance step as the cornerstone that we then build from. We do have some targets in here in the amplification area, which we're looking at maybe some more salt-tolerant enzymes, which are gonna allow you to work with more complex or salty starting materials to improve that workflow in a clinical setting.
Okay. Yeah, good. That really answers my question. It seems to be mainly within the metagenomic space, so not targeting... You know, the big part of that market, I guess, is the reagents and consumables for actual sequencing...
Mm-hmm.
Illumina is the giant in that.
Absolutely.
It's just a small part of that market.
Oh, of course. I mean, we are not in a position right now to do the entire workflow.
Good.
Full library prep is something that we are not ready to take on, and that isn't in scope currently. We're looking at the areas where we know that as a business, we add value and could be competitive, and where we have enzymes that are actually adding or answering a problem. We will look as we build that footprint to add some enzymes around it, which may not be completely unique to increase our offering. The starting point is the nucleases. We are very good at nucleases. It's a great place for us to start in any market. Again, in Next-Generation Sequencing, we're there. We do know there are amplification steps where potentially some of our LAMP enzymes, the Bsl polymerase could potentially be used. These are still proof of concepts that we're working through.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
No worries.
Perfect. Thanks so much. Simon Larsson, with Danske Bank. Maybe following up a bit on Filip's question here on sort of the NGS part. Would it sort of make sense for you to maybe target inclusion in, yeah, let's say, you know, prep kits from the likes of Illumina, Oxford Nanopore, et cetera? Or are you rather focusing maybe now on, let's call it reference labs working with the academic community instead? Or, yeah, how are you going about with the nucleases, perhaps?
It's actually a very interesting question. I think the answer is absolutely. I mean, our core business in the molecular tool space is not serving individuals. We would rather serve a lab. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't make a decision to slightly change our route to market and maybe look to send it to support end users more. I think it's more about where we are in the adoption curve. If you're a kits manufacturer, you're not going to make a kit today, potentially for metagenomics until that's an embedded and it's a more routine application or some point on that journey. I think we're quite early in this process right now. If you're a Next-Generation Sequencing platform today, if you're an Illumina, they have lots of kits, metagenomics is actually quite small.
It may be growing rapidly, but it's still quite small for them relative to everything else they're doing. Our hope is you increase the noise in the market. We increase our service to reference labs and smaller customers. That creates a market demand for solutions. We are looking at potentially solutions in this space as well, but my expectation is that the big kits manufacturers say, actually, we need to work this. We need to be working with a partner, and then we're very well-placed to take that business. I think it's more about the market development. As of today, this is a really interesting market for us. We feel the impact because we're a relatively small company, so we can feel it and we're very well-placed in this workflow. If you were a QIAGEN, this is still relatively small for them.
In a number of years, as this accelerates, this will pop up on everyone's radar, and then the investment from their perspective will be worthwhile. We are currently working with the idea of serving customers directly. Of course, if a kits manufacturer came and talked to us tomorrow, we will absolutely have a conversation with them. It is part of this, there's a more detailed metagenomic strategy where we are specifically looking at how we drive this through lab test providers. There is also, we're keeping an eye out for the potential kits manufacturers. We're, watch this space because there's a number of different ways we can approach this, and it's a very, very fast-moving market. I'm being told I'm at time, any other questions we can do within the break. Thank you.
Okay, my name's Paul Blackburn, and I'm CCO here at ArcticZymes. I'm delighted to talk you through what we've been doing over the last couple of years in terms of building a scalable commercial engine. I think before I begin, I'd like to make a couple of points. One is what we do is difficult. We are not simply providing units of enzymes and chasing revenue spikes, you know? What we're doing is also impactful. We are not selling enzymes to the mass markets. We're selling enzymes to regulated environments, and those environments expect a lot from their supplier. We work really hard to make sure that we're building trust, we're building credibility, we are authentic with our customers, and we've built a team that is designed to do just that. It's not just about putting more salespeople into a team. Absolutely not.
What we've done is we've brought together a sales and marketing organization under one roof, and we've centered everything we do around what you might regard as the customer journey. Marketing isn't just an activity creative, function at ArcticZymes. As you saw from Steve's presentation, what marketing now does is it absolutely defines and drives the strategy. We've put in place product managers who own those portions of the portfolio, and they also own the market strategy that's associated with that. You know, it's not just putting sales, out there and asking them to sell. It's about making sure that we are supporting every part of the customer decision-making process. In terms of enablement, we've worked really hard to make sure that we are positioning both marketing and sales with content that makes sense.
You'll have seen a lot of activity on social media with regards to ArcticZymes and a lot of things that are relevant, not just to scientists, but to other stakeholders in our customer organizations. We don't just think in terms of individual activities. Steve's team thinks in terms of campaigns. We follow customers, and we make sure that we're engaging with them in the right way at the right time. It's not just the commercial team that's been engaged in this transformation. It's a whole company endeavor, and we have internal KPIs that are set up to make sure that everybody has the customer at the heart of what they do. We've also made sure that, you know, we've got good ownership and good accountability for different parts of the commercial journey.
We're really clear on who needs to do what and when. You know, rigor in sales and professional selling is incredibly important to me. You know, sales is absolutely not a hustle. The sales people that we have and the marketing people that we have are absolutely accountable, and we're really clear with them on what is expected. I mention often how important forecasting and funnel is, and I'm really pleased to say that we've made massive strides, and I'm gonna come back to this, in terms of the pipeline that we've built, the business that we're building for the future. The customer life cycle is really long and the time to significant revenue is quite long. We're making sure that we have a pipeline of opportunities at the heart of many of the discussions that we have.
This gives us improved revenue predictability and underlying quality. Of course, you know, Michael alluded to the fact that we've seen evidence from our commercial transformation, you know, some of that is shown here in the revenues for 2025. We're up by 8% year-on-year. Our bioproduction business grew by in the region of 23%, molecular tools did show a decline of -5%. If you've been watching the investor calls, you'll understand some of the structural reasons and why we have a healthier underlying business than those numbers suggest even. If we look beneath those numbers at the quality signals, I'm delighted to remind you that we're actually engaged with, and we took orders from all top 10 CDMOs last year. That's significant.
Not only that, we grew our revenue in the CDMO area by 53%. It all starts small. I'll come back to that in a second. We actually conducted 89 evaluations where we got customer feedback from those evaluations last year. You know, some of this is, frankly, a numbers game. We don't know how many of these customers are gonna be successful. We know that some of them will be. We know that the more validations we do, the more trials we do, may not drive the revenues. It drives the future of ArcticZymes. We put a huge amount of focus on making sure that we're measuring this, we're controlling this. You know, one transformational thing that's happened at ArcticZymes is that we've built a credible opportunity pipeline of business.
This isn't, this isn't revenue today, of course, but it gives us a structure to work to. It gives us something that we can, we can talk about, we can discuss during our commercial calls. We actually increased our opportunity number by around 150% last year, and actually the value of our funnel by about 300%. What we're working on now is making sure we better define and better understand the quality of that funnel. Again, this isn't revenue. This isn't salespeople chasing numbers. This is a commercial team doing the right things for the future of the business because this is what feeds the future revenue. We talk a lot about designing, there is no shortcut in this difficult, regulated marketplace that we work in.
This isn't just for our advanced therapies. You know, this is for our whole business. Customers need to go through various stages when they're making their decision. Of course, it starts in a scientific way. You know, as I've said, we make sure we've got KPIs for the commercial team that encourage behaviors at the left-hand side here, you know, where they work hard with customers to make sure that we are technically excellent, and we are able to make a difference to their workflow. We talked about it earlier. Some customers, most customers want to sort of project ahead and understand, is this a supplier? Is ArcticZymes the supplier that will be able to support us in the future? You know, part of that is in terms of can ArcticZymes scale with us? Yes, we can. Is ArcticZymes gonna have the longevity?
Are they gonna be there in the future? Yes, we are. Has ArcticZymes got the quality that we need to allow us to actually take our kits to market to gain the regulatory approvals, et cetera, et cetera. Again, ArcticZymes has always been a high quality, highly regulated, highly auditable, if that's the right word, enzyme company. What we do very early on is make sure that customers are really clear about that. You know, we make sure that we bring that to life for them as early as possible in a proactive way. You know, the functions that we've put in place have been deliberately assigned to different parts of this customer journey. This designing is absolutely what it's all about.
You know, we talk about winning early, and we talk about you know, these stages taking many, many years. You know, we've a well-known CDMO partner in the US that we've been working with since a Lunch and Learn in 2017, for example. You know, these things do take time. As I mentioned in my earlier slide, the more evaluations that we do and the more we work to help customers understand that we are the company that we are with the sort of what you might call value beyond the product features, the better that will be. This value beyond the product is something that is incredibly important. You know, as Steve mentioned, we don't just sell enzymes.
You know, we allow customers access to our expertise, not just scientific expertise, our regulatory expertise, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, you know, if we do all these things right, if we get everything lined up, the final stage, the commercialization, the lock-in is just a natural step. One caveat to this is of course, you know, this can be disrupted, and we actually look to disrupt this where our competitors are built in naturally. It is difficult, and customers always need a reason to make a change, to make a move. You know, we focus on the left-hand side, and we highlight the value we've got beyond the product. We've got a really nice example of designing in action here.
Liquid biopsies are a potentially transformational way of measuring, detecting cancer, and it allows you to detect nucleic acid or other factors from a blood draw. It's better suited to mass market screening rather than invasive biopsy tests. A company in the U.S. chose our P rotein A, this is a nice molecular tools example, for their Liquid biopsy kit. They chose it, you know, back in 2020, something like that. They started doing some initial experiments. They've just completed their clinical trials. They've audited us. We've been working really closely with them, and they have made some commercial moves recently, one with a major pharma company outside the U.S. and with another commercial partner within the U.S. They're positioning themselves for launch.
There's an FDA pre-market approval, PMA, due in the summer, you know, we're working with them. This is a customer-provided forecast. This isn't a promise. This isn't a guarantee. This is a customer-provided forecast of how we might scale within their kits. This has taken a long time. There's been lots of different parts of our company involved. This is serious, and this is impactful. This is for colon cancer. There are many different liquid biopsy kits that this could potentially be applied to, either via this company or through others. They chose our Protein A's in the beginning because it was heat labile, because they could inactivate it with heat.
They also chose us because of the value that we showed them beyond the product in terms of regulatory and quality. Okay, you might have noticed earlier this year, we published a white paper, and again, this addresses less, potentially less scientific or non-scientific stakeholders in an organization. You know, the challenge a lot of our customers have, and we're gonna hear this from Lee Davies, I'm sure, is that, you know, viral vector manufacturing is challenging.
You know, we've established a model that really demonstrates how we can Address that challenge and how we can help our customers not just have a scientific impact, but a real operational impact, you know, resulting in higher recovery, using less enzyme, which is important not just because they use less and they potentially save money, but because they don't have to worry as much about removing it afterwards, which is critical for these customers. They can process their samples faster. This is very real, but it's about the language that we use beyond enzyme units in reaction conditions. It's about making sure that we're talking about solving genuine problems that customers have and therefore having a significant economic impact on their process and on their future.
You know, you could say we're selling, you know, the sizzle not the sausage. We're selling more than just an enzyme. We're giving customers the ability to speed up their process, to have higher yield, purity, and very importantly, save money, and increase their margins. You know, we've got some very nice customer quotes. This isn't a pure model. This is something that's backed up by customer experience. You know, as was mentioned earlier, we're lucky to have an opinion leader in Metagenomics here today. I'm just gonna take a moment just to talk about how this started, again, partly to give you a feel for the timescale and the efforts involved.
Another key opinion leader, Justin O'Grady, you may have seen the interviews that we've done with him, approached us at a conference back in 2015 and asked, "Can you help me with a nuclease for my blood sample?" We worked with him over those four years to establish a method, which actually evolved into a respiratory detection method. That method was published in a really, really important paper back in 2019. This paper has been cited 645 times, which puts it in the top 1% of papers from that era. This is a significant publication. Guy's, King's, and St Thomas' Hospital Trust have basically published another paper just in 2024, which brings this method to life.
What I mean by that is that they actually use this paper as a basis for a method that is now rolled out into seven NHS sites today. There's another seven that are literally going through the adoption process, and there's gonna be 30, at least 30 NHS sites that have this intensive care respiratory lavage, metagenomics test in the very short term. This is just one disease type. This is one group, and this is U.K.-focused, but, you know, there is a lot of excitement and potential. It's underpinned by three different government-funded programs. This is impactful, and this is serious. You know, we're gonna hear from Rafi about the work he's doing.
We've also got a really nice quote from Catherine Fladby in Oslo, who is using this for severable spinal fluid samples, where, again, it's been a transformational technique, and our enzymes have been pivotal to the success of that. We're really excited about metagenomics. To Steve's point, though, you know, it is early days, and we are well-positioned, and it's still gaining traction. With that, I'm excited to bring to the stage Lee Davies, a senior director for innovation at Oxford Biomedica. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. My name's Lee Davies. I am Senior Director of innovation at Oxford Biomedica, or OXB, based in Oxford in the United Kingdom. Myself, my team at OXB have been working with ArcticZymes over the last six years or so on a number of different projects, but today I'm gonna talk to you about one specific project over the last two years that's gone really well, and that's the introduction of M-SAN nuclease into one of our major manufacturing processes. By means of a bit of background to OXB, we are an innovation, very much focused on innovation-led, CDMO. We specialize very much in the viral vector field across the board. We're actually a very old company in the world of cell and gene therapy. We've been around for 30 years now.
We were founded in 1995 as a spin-out from the University of Oxford as a product company looking to develop Lentiviral vectors specifically for gene therapy for Parkinson's disease and a number of other diseases. Over the years, we've evolved very much into where we are now, which is a pure play CDMO for the manufacture of viral vector s for a range of clients around the world. Over the years, we've set a few big milestones in the viral vector field. We were the first company ever to administer Lentiviral vectors to a patient as part of the Parkinson's therapies. We were the first company in the world to be granted approval by the FDA for the commercial manufacture of Lentiviral vectors.
During the COVID period, we helped develop the manufacturing process for the U.K. COVID vaccine and then went on to produce over 100 billion vaccine doses for the U.K. during that time. We have quite a healthy track record in the field of viral gene therapy. Over the last few years, we have expanded quite significantly in our capabilities. We started in Oxford, in the U.K. We now have facilities in the United States and both in the EU, with sites in Strasbourg and in Lyon. Over those sites, we have a total of 13 GMP manufacturing facilities, extensive experience with a wide range of vectors, and over 1,000 GMP batches of viral vectors to date between us. There's an awful lot of work going on around the world.
We've responsible for over 30 successful IND submissions for clinical trials. We are constantly being examined and audited by regulators from around the world. We have products in place around 40 different countries globally. We're certainly having an impact in that field. We work with over 40 different clients at the moment. They come from all backgrounds. We work with clients all the way from university research facilities right the way up to big pharma. We cover a very broad range of vectors and target diseases with what we work on. The vast majority of our work is focused on two particular viral vectors, as they are the main focus of the current sort of clinical trials that are going on around the world.
These are the Adeno-Associated Virus, or AAV, but more historically, we're associated with the Lentiviral vector field, and that takes up about half of all the work we do globally at the moment. It's a huge part of what we do as a company, and it's on that Lentiviral vector field I'm gonna talk to you today. Now, helps to know a little bit about Lentiviral vectors and how they work. They are gene therapy vectors, typically based on the HIV-1 virus, which we're all familiar of, so Human Immunodeficiency Virus. These are viruses that are modified to take away a lot of the viral genes responsible for the disease, and those genes are replaced by therapeutic genes that we want to introduce into cells throughout the body to try and cure a wide range of diseases.
It's a popular vector at the moment. It has a lot of characteristics that's great for gene therapy, very long-term expression, high levels of expression. There are about 300 trials ongoing today in the world using these type of vectors over a broad range of disease indications. Majority of those are cancer-based, there's a lot of work going on in the cystic fibrosis field, in the hemophilia field. It's a very diverse target always for the virus. It's a relatively new field in some ways, in that viral vectors and gene therapy is still relatively new, there are already six of these products that have been approved for commercial production by the FDA. It's a new field, it's certainly becoming more accustomed to sort of the more normal manufacturing processes associated with therapeutics.
The one area, as Steve alluded to earlier, which has been a huge success over the last decade or so, is in the field of CAR T therapy. These are therapies specifically aimed at the moment at a range of blood-based cancers. They've proven highly efficient and is probably why there is so much call for manufacture around the world at the moment for these vectors. Just a little bit of background on the CAR T therapy. These are therapies where we can modify the white blood cells of the cancer patients themselves to more accurately target cancer cells within the body. Effectively, we can take the white blood cells, the T-cells, out of the patient. They're treated outside of the body with a Lentiviral vector that helps to reprogram those cells so they can identify cancer cells in the patient.
When those cells are re-administered, they hunt down and destroy the cancer cells in the body. It has been extremely effective over the years. First patient was treated 14 years ago now, complete remission 14 years later, still cancer-free and living a very happy life. It's been really successful, and it's quite a dominant area of the field at the moment. Estimated over 40,000 patients have been treated over the last decade using these therapies. It forms a very significant part of our workload and for other CDMOs in the manufacturing field, but it's a very competitive field to try and generate the best process, the highest yields, to deliver as many doses as we can to the patients.
Whilst the lentiviral vector is a really potent vector and there is a large market for it, I can honestly say it is one of the most difficult vectors to work with because of the nature of the virus itself. It's a complex vector. There are lots of working components within there that all need to work effectively for the virus to perform its function. It's coated with a lipid membrane, which makes the virus incredibly sensible to its environment and where you place it, and that's why we find it particularly difficult to manufacture in large amounts. It's definitely one of the more challenging vectors out there, mainly because it's very, very easy to inactivate the vector, to effectively kill the vector so it loses its function. It is very sensitive of the environment. It's unstable. It decays over time once it's manufactured.
In terms of days, you will go from full efficacy to zero efficacy. It's particularly sensitive to the temperature at which you hold it. It decays faster at warmer temperatures. Storing it cold lasts a little bit longer but not perfect. Where it's particularly sensitive is in terms of the pH and the salt concentration of the buffers that the vector's produced in. It has a very narrow pH range in which the vector is comfortable, so about seven to seven and a half. Outside of that range, the vector can become very easily inactivated forever. Similarly, with the salt concentration, it likes being in physiological salt concentration, so very low salt or very high salt for any extended period will completely inactivate the vector.
What that means is when we're looking to manufacture and produce these vectors, it's a complicated process, but it's made even more complicated because we have these added restrictions on the processes we use. We have to stay within those boundaries in terms of pH, temperature, time, to be able to keep the viral vector functional throughout. That makes things pretty difficult. It rules out a lot of processing techniques we could use for the manufacture. What it's kinda meant over time is that everyone has a pretty similar manufacturing process across the industry now. It's kind of evolved into a very similar process using the same techniques, and it's relatively unchanged over the last 10 years. We have a very similar process now to what we used 10 years ago.
There's certainly room to improve and places where we can work on this in particular. Our manufacturing process at OxB is fairly typical for the field. It looks complex. It is actually relatively straightforward and can be broken down into three major phases. We produce our viral vector s inside human cells. They're the factories that help produce the vectors. The first two weeks of our process that we have at OxB is effectively just growing cells so that we have enough of these cells to produce enough virus when we need to. About two weeks of just expanding these human cells in various different sizes bioreactors until we get up to the 200 liter scale at which we typically manufacture. The second phase of the production is the actual viral production phase.
When we have enough cells in the bioreactor, we then program those cells to produce the virus. The way we do that is by introducing small pieces of DNA that basically contain the instructions for the cell on how to make the virus for us. These DNA fragments go into small circular bits of DNA known as plasmids. We administer them to the cells via a process called transfection. They go into the cell, and then the cell starts to build the viruses for us. Over a period of two or three days, the virus that's produced in the cell is slowly released into the media in the bioreactor around the cells. At the end of that two to three -day period, we have a 200 liter bioreactor with all the virus we need to collect.
The final phase is where we harvest that virus, and we separate it from all the cells and all the other components that are in the bioreactor that we don't know. This is the sort of purification and the concentration phase to leave us with a vial of vector that we can use for whatever therapies we have planned. As Steve alluded to earlier, one of the really, really, really critical components of what we're doing is trying to maintain the quality of that vector. Our first priority is probably the yield. Again, as Steve alluded earlier, it is an incredibly expensive process to produce these viruses, incredibly. For any manufacturing process we have, we are trying to optimize the amount of virus we make, so we get more doses, more patient treatments out of an individual production batch.
Of almost equal priority is the quality of that vector. These are gonna go into patients or into patients' cells, so we have to make sure it's as clean as possible. At the end of our production phase, we have virus in the bioreactor. We have an awful lot of other things in there that we don't want in our product. Most obviously, we have the production cells themselves, but we also have a lot of breakdown products from those cells. We have a lot of proteins released from the cells. We have lots of cell debris that we have to remove. Another component that's in there that is of supreme importance for removal is the DNA components in there. There are two real sources of that DNA. There's the DNA we administered to the cells to give the instructions to the virus, the plasmid DNA.
We have to remove that. We also have a component coming from the production cells themselves. As the cells die or degrade, they release their own DNA into the solution as well. We have to remove both of those components. It's really important we do that because DNA administered to a patient can give some quite unpleasant immune responses. There's also a regulatory concern about the transmission of genes from that DNA or from the chromosomal DNA in our cells into the patients you're treating. It's really important it's removed. It's actually one of the most challenging aspects of the manufacturing process we have for these viruses in particular. The reason why it's so challenging is that actually DNA and lentiviral vectors share a lot of physical characteristics with each other.
Typically, when we're doing a purification process or a concentration process, we can separate out some of those components just based on their behavior, their size, their charge. We can use different techniques to remove one and retain the other. That is particularly difficult with DNA in these vector preparations. Both lentivirus and DNA have a strong negative charge on their surface, and both of them are pretty big. Lentivirus is around 120 nanometers in diameter. We can easily get bits of chromosomal DNA in the same order of size. Two of our main purification techniques we use, we tend to find that DNA and lentivirus co-purify. It's very, very difficult to separate them physically.
Us and most of the industry, and for other vectors as well, rely very, very heavily on the use of enzymes, nucleases, to destroy the DNA. As opposed to removing it physically, we add nucleases into the bioreactor phase of the bioreactor. The nucleases degrade the DNA, chop it up into small enough pieces that it can be removed during the downstream purification process. It's fairly universal in viral vector manufacture, not just lentiviruses. All the other viruses as well tend to rely on nucleases. For lentiviruses, it's particularly challenging again. The main reason it's challenging is because the enzymes, the nucleases that are typically used commercially for the manufacture, don't tend to work very well in the conditions that we use for lentiviruses. I said we have these ranges for pH and salt concentration that are critical for lentiviruses.
The commercially available nucleases tend to have their peak activity, their preferred operating range, at much, much higher pHs than we can use for the lentivirus. Similarly for the salt concentration, again, as Steve alluded earlier, they very much generally prefer very, very low salt concentrations. Apart from SAN, from ArcticZymes, which has a much higher salt concentration, again, the other side of the key area we're looking for. What this means is we can use these nucleases, but we tend to use these nucleases under conditions where they have very, very low activity. They're nowhere near their peak performance. They will work, but it's inefficient. What that means, if we want to remove the DNA efficiently with lentiviruses, we have to take some fairly extreme measures.
On a very simple level, we have to use very high concentrations of these nucleases compared to other processes. We have longer processing times. We leave the enzymes on there longer to degrade the DNA. In some instances, we have multiple steps in the process where we repeatedly go back and try and degrade the DNA so we get to a point. It works, but it's far, far from ideal. We've pretty much employed all three of those tactics at OXB over the years for the purification steps. This is a simplified version of our purification and concentration process. We actually operate with two separate nuclease steps in the process.
The first step is in the bioreactor with the cells, and there's a second step after a few filter clarifications and cell clearance steps, where we have to go in with a very high concentration of the nuclease to finally remove those final amounts of DNA that we need to get down to the right quality that we need. This works great. It's evolved over the whole manufacturing process, and we remove about 99% of the DNA that goes into the process comes out by this. That's good enough for the processes that we're using it to generate for. It's not ideal. It's expensive. There's a lot of nuclease used in this process. It's complicated having two separate steps in there.
There's the added risk, because we use such high concentrations of the nuclease, there is a finite risk that some of that nuclease finds itself in the product at the end. It's quite hard to remove because there's high concentrations. That can be quite serious from a regulatory point of view. There are defined limits for all of these things. If we should exceed those limits in any particular batch, we won't be able to release that batch. We lose the cost of the batch, and the client gets a delay on that. It works, but there's a finite risk with doing it this way. That's why a few years ago, when M-SAN nuclease was announced on the market, we became very, very interested in how we could potentially use this nuclease for our manufacturing process in particular.
Why we were interested is because this nuclease from ArcticZymes has very, very interesting operating ranges for specifically the Lentiviral vectors we're working at. Unlike the other commercially available nucleases, M-SAN operates very, very happily in the kind of pH range that we like to work in our process, and also in the salt concentrations, the physiological salt concentrations that our vectors prefer. Instead of operating a process a long, long way away from the nuclease's optimal activity, we're now bringing that optimal activity and targeting our process with it. There's a real potential to improve our offering to the clients. I just wanna step out again briefly to sort of say a little comment here about the supply from ArcticZymes.
We do a lot of work around the world with new and interesting ideas for how we can improve the process. Our main driver is delivering a product or a process to the clients as fast as possible. We are looking for large-scale GMP manufacturing. Those clients are looking for a product that can be produced at large scale in GMP very, very soon. We were very, very impressed to find out that M-SAN was going to be available at the quality that we require for GMP manufacturing, but also at the kind of scale that we can do. These are very large volumes that are being used in these processes. Knowing that that was available gave us a lot of confidence going into the investigations that should something good come out of it, we could proceed with it very quickly, and that's important for us.
We can't spend too much time on things that are never going to be suitable for that GMP manufacture. Another point, we're very impressed to find that ArcticZymes is also at the same time were releasing an assay to measure the MSAN concentration. As a release specification for our vectors, it's important to be able to show that the nuclease has been cleared from the process. Having a good to go assay that we could use within the process saved a long time of developing one all by ourselves. A huge encouragement going up front that we knew that this was a product should it work, we could transfer very quickly. Oh, dear. We began optimization work on this process. The first thing we did was to use our standard two-stage process with two nucleases.
We took each of those steps and we replaced the nuclease with M-SAN, and we did a huge range of optimization studies. Concentrations, co-factor concentrations, timings, all those kind of things. We developed a process where it was very effective with both of those nuclease steps in there using our small scale bioreactors we use for optimization. We went back with this new design process with the M-SAN to look how it compares with the DNA removal we're seeing in our classic process. It's fair to say it was very, very, very impressive. For every batch of virus we produce, we have some very strict assays and specifications for release. We have a number of different assays for DNA because it's such an important parameter.
When we looked at the results from the first batch using the M-SAN, we were incredibly impressed, and I think this is the data that Michael saw when he came to visit us two years ago. In terms of the total amount of DNA in the final process, we had about a 10-fold reduction. The plasmid DNA itself, so the DNA we add in the process, about a three-fold reduction. When we look at different size fragments of DNA, which is quite important for what we're releasing, same impact on large bits of DNA, small bits of DNA. There was a real impact on the DNA, and actually it was using the significantly lower amount of nuclease than we were using before as well.
Really importantly in that final bar graph there, we're able to show there was minimal detection of the nuclease in the final product, which again is really important for what we're doing. While Michael was visiting, I seem to remember saying, "Actually, this looks too good. We don't need it to be this good. This is incredible." It has real benefit or real potential for some future processes we're looking at for the next phase of lentiviral vector discovery. For the CAR T field at the moment, we don't need it to be quite this good. We've gone back, and we've taken a close look at what else we could do with this. To cut a very long story short, what we found is we can completely remove that second nuclease step from the process.
We take it out completely, we focus on that first step at the upfront bioreactor. We get virtually equivalent performance in DNA removal. Some really, really big benefits for the process as a whole. We're using less nuclease, which reduces the cost. We've removed that second step, which has extra benefits. That extra step comes with cost and time commitments in terms of manufacturing. We're, we're saving money on that second step too. We've knocked three hours off our manufacturing time, which doesn't sound like very much. As I said earlier, lentiviruses are quite unstable. 3 hours is quite significant. Also it makes organizing our manufacturing team far easier and fitting it into a decent working day. It's simplified the manufacturing process overall quite significantly. For anyone who works in manufacturing, simple is always best.
Overall it has de-risked massively the potential for batch failure for each of our costs, both in terms of the performance of the manufacturing process itself, but also the DNA reduction and the presence of residual nuclease in the product. As of last year, this new process with a single nuclease step has been adopted by at least two of our clients. We performed our first GMP manufacturing batches last year, several of them, highly consistent results, and as a result, this new process is now our effective platform going forward to offering for new clients. This is our starting point for all new clients who come to talk to us at OXB. In conclusion with M-SAN, it's been great for us. It's worked really well. It's been a lovely project working with ArcticZymes.
It's reduced our costs, it's reduced the complexity, and even reduced the processing time we need for the vector. The new process that we've brought in using M-SAN in conjunction with other factors has significantly increased the yields we're getting from the bioreactor but also improved the quality of the vector we're doing at the same time. Those two things don't always go together. From an OXB point of view, it's been great. We can maintain our profit margins whilst delivering an actual better product to the clients as we go along, and that keeps us at the forefront of these technologies around the world, which is something we're always striving to be. Most importantly at all, to...
We're actually being able to deliver more and more doses to patients around the world for all of these different life-changing therapies that we're helping to support, so it's been a great success story. With that, I'd be happy to answer any questions if anybody has them.
Great. Great presentation. Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, Ludvig Lundgren from Nordea. I just had first a question on, like, when a new customer comes to OXB, you know, trying to get help with producing lentiviral vectors in large scale, I guess they typically have done some previous work, like pre-clinically with their own vectors typically. In general, like, how much of the protocol can you change typically when a customer comes to you? Now for example, when you say you can introduce M-SAN, like, are the customers typically... Are you able to transfer their protocols to a new manufacturing protocol like that?
We can do both options. We can transfer in a client's complete process and perform as a direct tech transfer into us as a company. We can do that. That's relatively unusual. I think we have decades of experience. We have the background and the knowledge of what's required to take a new process, take it all the way through to commercialization, and I think a lot of clients come to us for that background and that knowledge. Typically, clients will work with us and adopt largely our platform process. There's rooms to tweak here and there for different vectors if they have slightly different performance. Most of the time a client will transfer from the process they already have over to our platform process.
It streamlines the GMP delivery timelines and de-risks the regulatory barriers later on because much of this process has already been accepted by the regulatory bodies.
Okay, very clear. Just a bit of a follow-up to that. Like, how late in, like, their, you know, pipeline or development process do they come to you typically? Is it, like, before a phase one trial, or is it even earlier than that typically?
It varies quite significantly. The typical phase where it comes to us is where people are preparing for the clinical trials where they want large volumes of material of a suitable grade to do it. It does change quite significantly. We do have clients that have produced elsewhere and are looking for a new manufacturer, so they can come in quite late stage. Typically we move in quite early. We build up a process with the client to produce material for clinical studies and then hopefully after that for the scale-up and potential commercial afterwards.
Okay, great. Just final one from my side. I think you mentioned there that, yeah, M-SAN is included in the newest platform, which I guess is the TETRA Vekta system.
It can do.
It can do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is more of a manufacturing platform.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
Okay. Like, what would you say is a reasonable, you know, timeline for, you know, this new manufacturing platform being implemented in, you know, customers' processes? Like, when could we see, you know, some volumes from this? Is it, like, 10 years or, like, one year? Or just-
Yeah. Yeah.
a rough number would be nice to have.
I suppose the first client has already adopted it, and those GMP batches started last year. As new clients come into us, depending on the state of development of their process and how quickly they want to proceed to GMP, I would say your typical, and it's just a typical, sort of, it's a sort of 12 to 18-month period before you'll see those transferring into the large-scale GMP productions.
Okay, great. Thanks.
Filip from Pareto. First question just on the cost savings that seems to be quite big for you. You mentioned several factors to that. Sorry. One being the shorter production time, three hours, you're using less nuclease, et cetera. Is it possible to sort of qualitatively say which of those factors have the biggest impact on the overall cost savings?
Again, the two major cost savings are the nuclease cost itself because the amounts have been used, and also the removal of the timing, not so much on the cost saving, but the removal of that step, that step involves a lot of materials and assays, other things around it. Removing that has a cost saving, but actually the nuclease cost is the biggest single impact, and that's largely because the amount of nuclease we were using previously was substantial.
May I add a point to that? Thank you. I think we're looking here at cost saving as being one element, but as I understand it, there's also a huge value to de-risking the process. The more you can reduce the challenges of a failed batch, and these things all compound on that, actually everything is insignificant almost against the cost of a failed run. If a run fails, we're talking millions, and that could be impacted by too long in the process, by too much nuclease being pulled through, contaminants in the final product. This is one of the challenges. You don't want to look at a single metric as you go through this.
There is a straight COGS value that you're talking about, but actually the process value is probably more impactful on getting a better quality, more reproducible product downstream.
Yeah.
Does that sound about right, Lee?
Yeah. Long term, the enhanced process robustness is a very big deal in terms of the long term for us.
Okay, thanks for that. Second question is on the residual nuclease. There was quite a drastic reduction compared to what you had before. Is that, like, only an effect that you're using less nuclease now with M-SAN?
It's a combination of effects. With the old nuclease, again, high concentrations of nuclease, so more of a challenge to remove. If you remember, there are two process steps. That second process step is actually quite close to the end of the process. In terms of purification or removal strategies, there's not a lot in that gap, and so the chances of something remaining are significantly higher. With the M-SAN, we only have one step, and it's right at the beginning of the purification process. All the other steps in between contribute to the removal of the M-SAN. Reduced concentration, but also the focus on the start of the process, not towards the end.
Okay, very good. Thanks. Just a final question from my end now. During this process where you've been validating M-SAN, have you been comparing it against some other new forms of enzymes compared to what you've used before? Is there anything that you see as even coming close to the performance of M-SAN?
I think ourselves and our other part of the company we have in the U.S. have been... We're always looking at nucleases. It's quite a hot topic at the moment. I can say I've not seen anything that can compare with M-SAN at the moment. It's a bit of a standalone product. I'm not sure how long that will last, the way these things people tend to follow up quite quickly, but it certainly has its own little niche in the market at the moment.
Okay, thanks very much.
We have time for one question.
One more.
One more.
Yes. Hi. Simon from Danske Bank again. I suppose I wouldn't be much of a financial analyst if I wouldn't ask, I mean, what do you know, like the dollar value in terms of your nuclease consumption today? Just trying to get a grasp of the potential here long term, if you could share any.
I'd like to step in on that. I'm not gonna have Lee. I think to save Lee from this isn't a conversation we'll have today. We can absolutely talk about how the run rate works, but I don't think it's specific customer spend we wanna share in this forum today. Also it's not really Lee's area, when it looks at actual spend and cost around the nuclease. We can talk about it later. Thank you.
Thank you. Sorry. Okay, thank you very much.
Thank you.
Okay, and now I'm delighted to invite on stage, our next customer key opinion leader speaker, Professor Rafi Ahmad, from the University of Inland Norway. Rafi.
Thank you so much for the kind invitation. It's great to be back in Stockholm. I used to live here several years ago. I used to work for AstraZeneca and Medivir, so it's great to be back. Both my kids actually are born here at the Karolinska, so it's a lot of closeness to Stockholm. I will talk about clinical metagenomics and how do we use it in infection and antimicrobial resistance. My main affiliation is at the University of Inland Norway, but I also have professor two where ArcticZymes is situated in Tromsø, and I am also a visiting professor at University of Southampton in the UK. Because I teach, so I thought, you know, giving some basic primers on what is sequencing.
Sequencing is when you try to find the number of nucleotides or building blocks for DNA and how many of those are present. For example, in a human cell, there are 3 billion of such A, T, G, and Cs, basically. When you're trying to get the precise order of this is what is DNA sequencing. Lot of time the word genomics and metagenomics have been used today, and I just want to make the difference. If, for example, I am sequencing myself, one particular individual, that is genomics. If I take some cells from my skin or from saliva that has both my DNA and all the microbes that are in there, that is called metagenomics. Basically, you're trying to study DNA from a diverse microbial communities. Sequencing is not the main challenge. The main challenge is the analysis.
I gave a talk at the ECCMID, which is a big clinical microbiology conference. Around 25,000 people attend the ECCMID. The biggest challenge that they show up in metagenomics actually is bioinformatics and host depletion that we talk about. The several projects that we're working with, but the first result that I will talk about is from project that's funded by Norges Forskningsråd or the Research Council of Norway and has several partners from Norway, Germany, and I'm originally from India, several of the top institutes from India that are involved.
I'm really, really happy that we also have the key opinion leaders and the key policymakers when it comes to urology, the European Association of Urology, I was really, really proud when the WHO became a partner in the project. It's on urinary tract infections. Urinary tract infections are one of the most common infections worldwide, affecting 400 million cases every year. Out of this, around 20%-30% of cases are recurrent. You mean the patient has it several times, and it leads to around 240,000 deaths every year. There's an increase in resistance, there's an increase in use of antibiotics in these pathogens. The emergency annual emergency care costs for urinary tract infections or complicated UTIs is around $3.5 billion.
This is especially the case in those who are immunocompromised, those who are on catheters, pregnant women, and so on. The standard care, it's culture urine, which was developed maybe 150 years ago. It is still the one that is used today, with a low detection rate of 30%-60%, lot of high false positive. A lot of these tests are inconclusive, that leads to poor patient outcomes and longer days in the hospital. This is a group of people that I've been working with. This is my team, in Hamar, which is close to Oslo. We are really proud. Florian is one of the world's top urologists, at the University Hospital in Giessen, close to Frankfurt.
His team and then Professor Truls Johansen, who got me to meet Florian representing the European Association of Urology. What we did is a two-phase study. Paul showed the first paper that we got out earlier this year. In the first phase, we tested several different methods on 78 patient samples and compared our results. We tested actually eight our methods, three commercial, and compared with what was happening in the clinical routine on 78 patient samples. This was published earlier this year in Nature Communications. Last time I looked at it yesterday, it's already downloaded 10,000 times in a month of its release. It has an Altmetric factor of 81, which is kind of unheard of. It's got a lot of popularity in the Norwegian media and the world media.
We have a second paper that I submitted couple of weeks ago. This number actually is incorrect. It's now 351, so we at least tested it on 351 patient samples when it was submitted. I came to know, last week that it has also gone to review. You submit a paper to Nature, but it's not guaranteed that they actually send it for review. This has also gone for review. Nearly 400 patient samples in total that we have tested, the method. We have been talking about why host depletion is needed, and I just wanted to show the reason why it is needed. If we take the example of urines, urine or most biological fluid has lot more human DNA than bacterial DNA. Right?
If there's one cell of bacteria, there can be thousands of human cells, and you're trying to find those one humans bacterial cells. In addition, urine is pretty complicated because it contains lot of other immune cells, debris crystals, it has urea, and so on, which makes extraction of DNA bit complicated. Urine samples, and especially those that have urinary tract infections, have a lot of immunological cells, really lot of blood sometimes, that makes it really complicated. It is like finding needle in a haystack, but in this case, the haystack can be several different types of hays because there's so many different types of cells that are present. That is where the Host depletion and the SAN enzymes have been really, really useful for us. Yes.
I just wanted to show some science, not to go into the detail and say where we are actually using the host endonucleases. When you get a sample, what you're trying to do is to reduce the number of human cells and increase the relative number of bacterial cells. Let's say you have 1,000 cells, and there are only 10 human cells. Sorry, 10 bacterial cells and 990 human cells. What you try to do is reduce that number of 990 to, let's say, 90, and your bacterial 10 cells remain the same. That's what we are trying to do. We tested both the HL-SAN and the M-SAN enzymes from ArcticZymes. When we had that, we basically did some lysis of the sample and then did some purification with magnetic beads.
I'm really proud to say that this method is completely Norwegian because both the enzymes and the magnetic beads that we're using is all from Norway and developed in Norway. Tested in Germany currently, but it's completely developed in Norway. That's should be very proud of because it's not that much innovation that comes from Norway. What we did basically is we tested 11 different methods, and eight which were in-house and three that are commercially available, kits that are available to detect DNA or extract DNA. The best method that we found was a combination of the M-SAN and some magnetic beads that are produced in Trondheim. Apologies for this complicated slide, but I'll just try to explain it.
What I'm trying to show here is how our method that is, you know, circled in this orange or yellow here and how it is comparing to two other commercial kits that are available in the market. When we are trying to see is that our method is depleting nearly 1,000-fold better than the commercial kits for the host, whereas the bacteria is not getting depleted. That is what we wanted to achieve. You want to reduce the number of bacterial cells and DNA, but you don't want to deplete the number of bacteria.
We achieved an accuracy of actually I'm presenting this next week in London, so I thought I can use the same slides at the European Association of Urology conference, which is like 15,000-20,000 people come, and we are getting an accuracy of 99% when identifying which actual pathogen it is. This is actually the easy part. The difficult part is can we say from the same method which antibiotic has to be used? Because if you go to a clinician, they're only interested to know or mostly interested to know which antibiotic can be given, and that's the complicated part. Even there, we are able to reach 92% accuracy. We're using a lot of machine learning here. We are trying to identify the antibiotic from the metagenomic data.
A lot of machine learning approaches are going into our methods, and in most of the antibiotics we are doing quite well. There are certain classes of antibiotics like this Trimethoprim we are trying to improve. The idea is to bring it as close to 99%, 100%. I don't think it will ever be 100%, but as close to 100% as possible. We are already there with. That's why a lot of interest has been shown even from the people in the U.K. because our antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) predictions are very good. Just to summarize, currently when a patient has urinary tract infections, taking urine and the current methodology, it takes somewhere between three to four days in the best case scenario to tell which antibiotic has to be used.
The method that we have developed actually has reduced it from 48 hours to four hours. That's a huge breakthrough in detection and treatment of complicated urinary tract infections, reducing it because this can save lives, this can save lesser hospital days, lesser use of antibiotics, cheaper antibiotics, lesser days of productivity losses. Cost. One thing that I really fought for the Nature review was to put the cost in the paper because as scientists, we don't like cost, but I wanted the cost to be there. Just to show that these two are commercial kits that this is cost per sample. We had a cheaper cost per sample. The most of the cost that is coming is actually coming from the sequencing.
The cost to extract the DNA with the SAN enzymes and the magnetic beads is actually only $6. It is a sequencing cost that is adding $30 to this. We have some other ways on how we are trying to do as well. I mean, the other question is, do you really need to sequence everything? I did not want it to go into that, but that's in the paper. The conclusion of at least the first work that this is from culture. We're not culturing anything. We're taking the urine sample directly and giving the answer. This can help save millions of lives, reduce healthcare burden, fewer hospital stays, fewer loss of work days, and prudent use of antibiotics can save 1.6 billion doses every year.
We have some other methods that I mentioned, but I've not gone into that, which says, do you actually need to sequence everything. Your DNA isolation can already give you a very good idea whether there is infection or not. We have taken it further. We have a study ongoing at Universitetssykehuset Nord-Norge. We are currently doing from Sykehuset Innlandet, we get samples two times a week, which is just across the street from us. With help from the Karolinska Institutet, we have set up a collaboration with the University of Turku, where we are getting samples from Finland. I'm really, really proud. Only last week, the first M-SAN vials were sent to Delhi and received. They were received in Delhi. We are starting a clinical study at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.
Those who don't know All India Institute of Medical Sciences, it's a premier hospital in India catering to 20,000 OPD patients every day. Every day. If Modi is sick, that's where he goes. University Hospital Southampton, like I said, really proud that WHO is a partner which can help take it further. I also wanted to show a little bit of the work that we are doing on sepsis, which I think is where the biggest market will be because that's where the biggest burden is. Funded by Norges Forskningsråd. It was a bilateral Norway-India project, some of the people who have been working on this. Sepsis is time-critical. 11 million deaths every year.
One in five deaths across the world are because of sepsis. Like I said, time is critical, so with every delayed hour, there is a, every hour of delayed treatment, there's an increase in likelihood of death by 8%. Even in Norway we have sepsis deaths. Diagnostics is one of the most important factor that leads to it. Sepsis is a huge economic burden. It's the number one cost of hospitalization in the US, consuming more than $26 billion each year. Average cost per hospital days is also much longer, and readmission costs are also a lot because of sepsis. If you thought urine was easy, and I was interviewed by both Aftenposten and NRK, and I told them the same thing, if somebody's able to do sequencing from blood, it's a Nobel Prize.
It's as complicated as that. We recently started a study, again, with the University of Oslo, Norge, in Tromsø, which is, like, 100 meters from where the ArcticZymes office is, maybe 200 meters from where the ArcticZymes office is. We got 152 patient samples. Here, one thing that I wanted to say that which SAN enzyme we are using is very much dependent on the biological fluid that we want to use. Here we are not using the M-SAN, we are using the HL-SAN. We have tested both of them, but in blood, HL-SAN seems to work best. This is not yet published. We are still analyzing this work.
I just have some results which shows that we are actually getting 100% accuracy on blood cultures when doing clinical metagenomics compared to what is in the clinical routine. We are getting nearly 94% accuracy when trying to get which antibiotic is working. It's working quite well. Again, this is not yet published. The results are being still analyzed. This work has now gained a lot of attention. I wanted to show a video of the interview that I had with NRK a couple of weeks, few weeks back maybe. I just wanted to show that it has gotten a lot of interest in the Norwegian media, saying that how Norwegian developed method can be really, really useful and spread across the world.
I'm not into economics, but I just wanted to show a little bit about the global metagenomics. What I really wanted to show that, you know, although US is the biggest market, but I think some of the fastest-growing markets are actually in Asia, because that's where the burden to the society and infection really is. There, I think there's more openness to take up new methods. I think in Europe we are still a bit conservative. The key takeaways, I mean, this has already been said, but clinical metagenomics can be applied to several different fields like cancer, but the primary driver currently is infectious diseases, actually. Falling sequencing costs.
I don't know whether any one of you have seen a Oxford Nanopore device, but it is smaller than my mobile phone actually. I can take it to the bedside and sequence a patient if I want to. One of the biggest bottleneck is Bioinformatics and regulatory frameworks, obviously. We don't have current standards, current frameworks, but Bioinformatics is the challenge currently in clinical Metagenomics. That was my last slide. Thank you so much.
Any questions?
Okay. Thanks for a great presentation. Ludvig here from Nordea again. continuing a bit on what Lee said before, I think he mentioned or, like, described very clearly why M-SAN was outperforming other Nucleases in their protocols, which was mainly due to, you know, pH and salt levels and so on. In the Metagenomics field, like, is there a similar reason why M-SAN outperforms in here? Do you also need to have the samples in very specific, you know, types of pH ranges and so on?
Yeah. I mean, for example, in urine, We tested both M-SAN and HL-SAN. M-SAN works slightly better than HL-SAN for urine. For blood, HL-SAN works better. There are different reasons because urine has a large range of the pH, both from alkaline and can go so acidic to alkaline. Blood is a little bit more alkaline. It depends a lot. We are also working on some other body fluids, which we, I cannot mention. There also we see that you cannot say it's only M-SAN. In certain cases, HL-SAN also works. It's very much dependent on the characteristics of the sample that you're working with.
Okay. I guess, yeah, or yeah, just like somewhat of a follow-up, but, yeah, now I forgot what I was gonna say, so I jump to the next one. Just thinking more broadly than on using these types of work protocols or workflows in hospitals, I guess 92% accuracy does not really make it a direct replacement for cell culture, where you kind of probably need a bit higher, I guess, accuracy to ensure that you use the right antibiotics and so on. Like, yeah, how do you view, like how should hospitals use this in the future?
FDA allows for greater than 90% actually. And cell culture, I did not go into the depth, but metagenomics, through metagenomics, we were also able to identify pathogens that cell culture did not identify, and we validated them with a PCR afterwards. Because it is an agnostic method, it can give you whatever there is. It can help you identify those infections with normal cell culture would not be able to identify. I can go into much detail, like the lot of bacteria that go very slowly and that can days, weeks, but in metagenomics because you're not doing any culture, you can identify them much more faster. I think one of the bottlenecks currently is the AST 92%-93% that we are in.
The more data that we will get in metagenomics, the better our machine learning algorithms will become, and that will actually improve also the prediction of which antibiotic will have to be given.
Yeah. in the long term then I guess.
Yes
...replace a what you use today in hospitals.
Yes. I get asked this question quite a lot.
Yeah.
I would say I don't know the timeframe, I would say probably around five years or so. Our next step, we're going to the regional ethics committee for approval now to test them because I get asked this question quite a lot also that, okay, the method works very well in your labs. How will it work in the lab in hospitals? That's our next thing. Another thing I wanted to say that if it works in Delhi, I think it will work anywhere in the world. Yeah.
Okay. Great. Now I remember what I was gonna ask before, just on the first questions. Like, what I guess I was going for was like, why would M-SAN or SAN outperform a nuclease?
Yeah. Okay.
Like a more general nuclease that you could buy from, you know, other players. Is it due to these pH levels?
Salt. Salt is another one I think mentioned that where we tested some other nucleases and other, where it is a salt, you know, a wide salt range because the salt concentration in body fluids is quite high and a lot of the other nuclease cannot tolerate that.
Okay. It's basically a more versatile
Yes
nuclease in that sense. Okay. Great. Great. Thanks.
Hi. Filip from Pareto. First, sorry if I'm getting into too many details here, you mentioned that in the end there that bioinformatics is a major barrier here.
Yes
or bottleneck. I was just wondering, is that like if you could go into some more details around how that is? Is it because you're using Nanopore and you get real-time data, or is it around the complexity of the sample mostly, or yeah?
I mean, there are basically several reasons. One of the first reason is as simple as that, most people in healthcare, like nurses or doctors, they aren't, when it comes to using technology, it's not that easy. There's more effort needs to be done in easy-to-use bioinformatics tools. First thing, as simple as that, you know, a graphic user interface kind of things. The other thing obviously is because there are still errors in your sequencing, right? And because of that, some of the reasons why we are not able to get 100% AST is because one single nucleotide change can cause a different antibiotic to be used. That is thing. But Nanopore has worked quite a lot, now the accuracy is still quite high.
But this will improve. The other thing is we don't currently have standards to report, right? Do we report everything that we find? Because metagenomics, like I said, will find everything, but not every bacteria is pathogenic, right? These set of standards are still not established. That is the other thing. On the biggest challenge is another one is good, reliable, easy-to-use bioinformatics pipelines are not yet there. In our group, we work a lot also on developing bioinformatics pipelines. That is, I think, is one of the biggest challenge currently.
Okay. Would you say that's one of the biggest barriers into-?
Yes
actual clinical adoption then?
Absolutely.
Just get that. Okay.
Absolutely. This is not only me saying, this is in these reports, and I presented at ECCMID in Barcelona. ECCMID has 25,000 people attending it, and I had a question to the audience on metagenomics that do they think metagenomics will be in clinical use, and 90% people said yes. My second question was what they thought was the biggest bottleneck, and I thought people will say that it was resistance to uptake of new technology, two thirds of the people say bioinformatics. This is
Very interesting. Perhaps second question is then on the cost savings here. You said goes from 96 hours to 4 hours. Just that fact seems to like have the potential for massive cost savings for the hospital. You mentioned that it costs $36 for a test, but that seems to be nothing in comparison to like the overall cost savings that could be achieved. If you could just give some comment around this.
Yeah, I mean, to us, it looks like a no-brainer, right? That you're bringing down your cost, because 96 hours, you save a lot of other things, lesser hospital days, right? lesser people involved. One of our challenge now is talking to the communal health system in Norway, right? trying to convince them because when they think about the cost, they only compare the cost of the diagnostic method to the current diagnostic method. For us, the next challenge is to overcome that hurdle and tell them it is not only that cost, it is a lot of the other costs that are associated. That is, I think, more of a personal communication challenge than anything else.
We are in dialogue both with in Innlandet fylkeskommune and Hamar kommune to test it within our fylke. Okay. Thank you.
May I add something to that, please? I think to add into that, we talked about it earlier, is that there's definitely an element of surveillance. There's this clinical application where clearly you're looking to manage an individual patient's pathway. If you look at the UK, two of the strategies are specifically designed around pandemic surveillance and around antibiotic resistance surveillance. This is where that conceptual leap has been made. They've moved past this, they're looking at the wider societal costs, which is why it's being funded. It isn't simply being driven by hospital economics, where there is a very strong argument, it's actually a wider community element where you're looking at how you manage antibiotics across your country, how you manage your surveillance. It is bigger than that.
Absolutely. Yes.
Okay. I think we're at time. Thank you very much, Rafi. It's appreciated. I'm now gonna hand over to Børge.
That was some inspiring presentations. My name is Børge Sørvoll. I'm the CFO of ArcticZymes Technologies. I'm gonna talk a little about our financial profile and the capital allocation that we see in the coming years. Over the last few years, the company has grown significantly. We have managed to get to have a financial healthy position. We have more than NOK 265 million in cash as a combination of both cash and mutual funds. We don't have any debt. We have a 94% equity ratio.
The majority of the cash that we have on our hand today is coming from the operating performance that we had, especially over the last few years, but also based after we divested the former sub-subsidiary, Biotec BetaGlucans, back at the end of 2020, where we generated close to NOK 80 million in free cash. This financial position gives us the resilience across cycles when markets are maybe going against us. It gives us now the flexibility to operate and do what is right when times are a little bit tougher. It is strategic as well for us. Also, looking at the sales side of the business now, and as Michael alluded to in the beginning of this presentation, we've seen a good growth in our sales, and this you can see sales where we also kind of excluded the COVID-related effects.
We've seen a strong ramp-up until 2022, then we saw kind of a decline in the market. Now in 2025 or last year, we saw a momentum. We were gaining momentum again, we saw sales growth. Also, at the same time, our operating expenses have grown in the last few years, especially during the COVID years. You can see this has also been deliberate and also this one, the expansion we see in our OpEx now gives us the opportunity because now we have invested the majority of investments that we need to do. Now we are set for margin expansion in the coming years, we'll generate better margins in the underlying business. Overall, you can see we have a strong platform now for long-term value creation.
This slide is telling you a little bit about what I talked about now. It is saying why our revenues are expected to outpace the cost growth of the company. Personnel expenses remains the core cost of the business here. 2/3 of all of our expenses are primarily personnel expenses. This reflects also the knowledge and IP-driven nature of our business. It's also, over the last few years, we have changed the organization somewhat. As we talked about, we have a much more customer-centric focus now, and we have almost doubled the number of people that are in customer-facing roles now. More R&D people, R&D people are also in customer dialogue, much more than before. On the right-hand side, you can also see how our expenses have grown over the last five years.
Now we have plateaued in some way. We have, if you exclude the personnel expenses, our operating expenses have, over the last four years, been in the area of between NOK 30 million to NOK 35 million. We do not expect that this number is gonna increase significantly in the coming at least in the next couple of years now. If there will be expenses, these will be kind of commercial driven expenses and marketing investments like we've done over the last year where we have kind of increased our presence in the market. We are spending a lot more time and money at conferences and also in that social media platform, and we've also hired more people to do the marketing for us now. What does this actually mean?
It means that we have now, during the kind of the COVID related years, we have transitioned from the reactive expansion that we were forced into by that, and now we have a commercially driven and a scalable growth year. This is now in the future supported by a disciplined and leverage ready cost structure. On this slide, I'm going to talk a little bit how we potentially see the margin expansion in the business that we have. This should not be interpreted as guidance on how we believe the numbers are going to be, but it's more kind of how we see it if the business develops as we hope it will. On this chart, you can also see that from 2025 we had a revenue of around NOK 120 million.
EBITDA margins are still on the modest range, with 10%-15%. As the revenue scales up to NOK 150 million, we also see that the EBITDA margin is becoming a little bit better and moving up to the 20%-27% range is how we believe it. If we jump up to NOK 200 million in revenues, we expect that our EBITDA margin is going to be somewhere in the ballpark of 30%-35%. Gross margins are expected to remain at this kind of same level at no matter what kind of revenues we have, they are expected to be in that 95%-98% level.
We also see that, also that once the cost base we have in this company, once the cost base is covered, basically every NOK of revenues will flow efficiently down to the EBITDA margin because of the high margins that we have. First of all, we need to cover the fixed cost base that we have. We also see from the bottom here that our EBITDA is expected to grow from that NOK 12 million-NOK 18 million range, at NOK 120 million, up to NOK 60 million-NOK 70 million once we get to that NOK 200 million mark. This is kind of the operating leverage that we have in our business, and we expect it to grow as the revenue grows as well to improve.
What about capital allocation moving forward now? Our first priority is organic growth. It is about that commercial execution. It's about innovating new products. It's about ensuring that we have the capacity to produce the products that are needed for our customers. To have a strong cash position also underpins the long-term stability and it signals that we are a dependable supplier for our customers as well. As I think both as OXB alluded to, it is important to have that capacity to ensure that you have security supply once they move into kind of the next level and once they are reaching those commercial stages. It's not just about producing products, it's also about having to ensure that we will be there in the long run.
It's also about financial stability that we can create, give that to our customers. On the other hand, to have this free capital of around NOK 260 million, it gives us optionality. We are also prepared to act on opportunities that might arise in the market, but it needs to also be strategically aligned. It needs to be value accretive for us as well. I think at the end, we have talked about it in the past as well, but it needs to be for the right reasons and we're not going to do anything just because it sounds like good. It needs to be definitely for the right reasons.
You can say in summary, our cash position and the financial stability that we have, it gives us strength to grow organically today while also preserving the flexibility to grow with inorganic expansion tomorrow. I think with those words, I will also hand it over to Michael who will talk a little bit about the last part of the Capital Markets Day.
Thank you, Børge, and thank you to all the speakers that have been here today. It's been great to sit back and watch, especially from our partners, the customers that have presented how our technology makes a real impact in their workflows. One thing I just paused with that was, I think that you normally maybe do not think that much about during a CMD, but it was what you said, Rafi, in regards to saving lives, and that's really a key point. Our technology plays a small part in the capable hands of our partners to save lives, both within Metagenomics as well as in regards to providing advanced therapies, making them more accessible. One of the major challenges with advanced therapies today is the manufacturing cost.
We play a small part, a small important part I would like to say, in ensuring that manufacturing costs are reduced. Just a short reflection from my side. I'm going to try and round things up. I'm going to be talking about our financial ambition, and I'm also going to share the key execution priorities and then end up with tying everything together in the investment case that ArcticZymes is currently. If we start by looking at our ambition, we have a clear ambition, and our ambition is to sustainable grow double-digit, and over time, we are targeting to outperform the markets that we serve. As revenue grow, EBITDA is going to provide margin expansion through the operating leverage that I talked about in our platform early on.
We are going to be able to generate a stronger cash position as well as have the financial flexibility to invest in growth going forward. There's no doubt about the fact that we have NOK 265 million in the bank that Børge is guarding carefully. That of course signals to our partners that we are a company that is here to stay. I think that was also what Lee alluded to. It is a critical component in their workflow, so they have to be ensure that the partners that they decide to go for are here tomorrow as well. The NOK 265 million, that's a strong signal for a company of our size that we have staying power.
I also have received the question, do you actually need to send a NOK 265 million signal in order to to say to your partners that you're here to stay? Maybe not. That's why, of course, I am 100% sure that the road to executing on the strategy that you have seen today also goes through a number of selective value accretive investments. What we're looking at is to strengthen our innovation engine. Also to buy in assets that can strengthen and leapfrog our R&E portfolio, for example. We've spent a lot of time, resources on building a strong set of commercial capabilities in the form of the team we have, the processes, and so on.
Where I see that we need to invest further, that's really more in the front end, the discovery part of our business, in order to innovate faster and also leapfrog with maybe entering into very close collaborations with companies that have unique assets that can complement our portfolio. Ambition is nothing without execution. Our key execution priorities that we have touched upon today over the next couple of years, that is clearly to continue to fuel the commercial engine, both over time in regards to adding a couple of extra resources, but importantly, and you're going to be happy to hear this, Steve, we are also going to invest more in marketing in terms of our lead generation activities. Paul, you showed how our business works. It's important that we have a lot of opportunities up front that we can work with.
Investment in lead generation activities is part of generating that opportunity, pipeline. I talked about further innovation in R&D. It also goes in regards to developing new ways of doing high throughput screening, so there's also an element of CapEx investment into the R&D, side. A key growth driver for ArcticZymes now and in coming years, that's going to be platform integration at CDMOs. You heard from Lee today. We are also in dialogue with other, platform, potential platform partners, CDMOs, and we're going to continue to push to be onboarded into more platforms. We are already doing business with 10 of the top CDMOs within advanced therapies, as Paul talked about. The door is open. Now it's about entering the house.
We are also going to, of course, continue our work as we have done so far over the past years to build a position within next generation sequencing, particularly with the Metagenomics. We are a front runner. We are talking with all the right key opinion leaders. It's being rolled out in the U.K. at the NHS as we speak. It is happening now. It's not tomorrow, it's happening today. Finally, we talked about concentration risk. We have had a concentration risk in regards to viral vector s and SAN. We now have a clear plan, a clear way forward in regards to reducing the concentration risk and being further exposed to really interesting growth pillars. We have some of the products already.
It's more about developing the right application support. Looking at how we're going to build a scalable, differentiated enzyme platform, I hope that you found many of the answers during today's presentation. If we focus on four elements of it, you have heard about the exposure to structural markets across the board that provide for high growth. You've heard about viral vector s, you've heard about RNA, you've heard about Next-Generation Sequencing in the form of Metagenomics. All of those segments are segments where we are present today and where we're going to grow the business going forward. I think the most important part for me today was to hear about how customers have adopted our technology with success.
The case from OXB, seeing the impact that our enzymes have, the metagenomics part from Rafi as well, the impact that our technology actually provides. Our technology is validated in a lot of different customer-critical workflows. Another interesting part of our business model is, as you say, Paul, we are designed in. Once we are designed in, we are embedded in the customer's process or product, and we scale as the customer scales. We have a clear ambition. We're targeting double-digit growth and over time outperforming the segments where we compete. We have a clear strategy, but I think most of all, we have an experienced team.
You've seen part of the team here today, but we have also seen during the past two years that we have been able to work through adverse conditions, put a new growth strategy in place, and focus on executing on three deliberate focus areas, building out our commercial capabilities, ensuring that we had a product market fit with the GMP launches, the DMF launch, and then also working towards further diversification, less concentration risk, more growth pillars going forward. On the right-hand side of the slide, you see our platform, and it is a highly attractive platform, recurring sticky enzyme consumption, high growth margin solutions, critical components that make an impact in our customers' workflows, a scalable cost structure, as Birgit talked about. Finally, the ability to expand the platform, launch more enzymes on the same platform.
We've taken a lot of heavy investments, both in regards to building our quality management system, our commercial capabilities, our production capabilities during the pandemic. We are set for expansion and we are building a compounding high margin enzyme platform positioned for durable earnings growth. With that, I would like to thank you, especially for coming and especially to our guest speakers, Lee and Rafi, it was great to have you. I think we have five minutes left as well if there are any questions either amongst the people here in Stockholm or online.
Yeah. Thanks. Ludvig here again from Nordea. Just a final question from my side, I guess, is more on the capital allocation side. Paul mentioned earlier that, one, I guess you're competing against against quite large players in this field and, it's a kind of a disadvantage or it's an advantage having the scale that they have typically. Like, yeah, first I'll like do you the point where that becomes less of a problem for you when you have grown now, you know, grown the number of customers, et cetera. Maybe starting with that.
Yeah. I think what I've seen during the past two years is that, yes, being a large player in the industry is has its advantages. I think being agile, having cutting-edge technology that solves some of the key challenges for our customers is second to none. That's why we're growing our customer base at the moment. I feel we are in a good position the size we are currently, and we're positioned to grow well within the coming years. I don't see that scale currently is an issue for us.
Okay. Just, yeah, related to that, like would you say that, like would it make sense for you to make a larger acquisition just to gain scale, or are you more focused, you know, on getting the right technology in thinking about capital allocation there and acquisitions you talked about? Like what stage of assets are you looking at?
Yeah
... revenue generating assets or-
Yeah
more early stage assets?
Currently, we're looking to invest in organic growth, as Birgit told, talked about. There's no doubt about it, as I also alluded to, that we see that, especially on the asset innovation side, in order to build out, for example, our RNA portfolio or build out our innovation capabilities. An investment in a company could help us leapfrog. We are and have been within the past two years in dialogue with a lot of different interesting partners, not only from an acquisition standpoint, but also from a collaboration standpoint. The goal is to ensure that it's the right company at the right time. The goal is not to go too big either. We wanna make our first acquisition become successful, integrate, harvest the synergies, move on to something bigger.
Okay, great. Yeah, final from my side. Just thinking about strategy, you signed the Brenntag partnership for a distribution partnership. Paul also highlight that you also work very closely with some customers. Like, so that's kind of two opposite sides of like... Just thinking from that, like, how do you plan to, you know, continue investing or like, yeah, the commercialization, like...
I think I'm going to hand that to you, Paul.
looking on those two sides, like, which one is most important for you?
Absolutely both are really important to us. Brenntag have brought scale at speed. What we don't think is that there's gonna be sort of immediate revenues. There are some revenues, of course, they face the same design-in conversations that we do. You know, the agreement with Brenntag is really to allow us to move quickly, that is a European-wide agreement. We've also just from the 1st of January, put in a dedicated channel manager who looks after Brenntag but is also charged with making sure that our Asia and other similar markets are better served by distributors. We already have some great distributors, we're making sure that it's well thought out, it's well considered, and it's optimized.
As Rafi mentioned, you know, the Indian market, for example, very exciting, and we do have a great distributor there. We've got good relationships there, and we've got great traction there, but we could do more. There's enough to go at, and there's this kind of time period where we've got to take advantage now. This sense of urgency can't come by adding more salespeople, you know? It has to come from working with partners who can help us get there quickly. You know, Brenntag, we believe, is the right partner for Europe for our SAN enzymes, but we are having other conversations with other relevant distributors and partners.
Thank you, Paul.
I think it's really important when you talk about distributors and customers, it's not an either/or. I mean, at the end of the day, distributors are a customer in that process, but they're serving an end customer. We will never move away from the customer. I think presenting it as an either/or as two different approaches, it's really about route to market. At the end of the day, we've got to be solving customer needs in the bench, in the boardroom with the people who are finally using our product. Distributors are a way of adding value and adding scale and gaining access. Yeah, they're complementary strategies that work together. The customer's always got to remain central.