Good morning and welcome to this presentation of Thor Medical for the second half of 2023 and the full year. My name is Alf Bjørseth, I'm CEO of Thor Medical, and here together with Brede Ellingsæter, who is the CFO of the company. We also have Sindre Hassfjell here, who is our CTO, in case of questions later in the presentation. I would like to re-emphasize that the goal of Thor Medical is to become a world-leading supplier of alpha-emitters for cancer therapy. We are addressing a high-growth market for cancer therapy, and we have a goal to be an innovative emerging supplier of alpha-emitter-based natural-occurring thorium. That is our main goal, and that is our unique technology. We are in the process of setting up a pilot plant for quality production and processing in 2024.
We are prepared to evaluate an investment decision for an industrial-scale plant in 2025, and for startup production in 2027. That will address a major profitable revenue opportunity. The highlights for the past half year are that we have signed 3 letters of intent with other pharmaceutical companies for future supply of alpha-emitters. That's the most important thing for us, to make sure that we have customers lined up when we successfully have developed the technology for production. We have completed pre-engineering and placed orders for long lead items for the pilot facility. We assigned agreement to transfer the Nordic Nanovector patents to Nuclithera. I'm very happy to announce that we have expanded our team with experienced chemistry professionals. We have also hired a new CEO from September 2024.
We have reduced the burn rate, and we have currently exceeding NOK 40 million available in cash at the end of 2023. Let me introduce the new CEO of the company. It's Mr. Jasper Kurth, and we are very happy that we have been able to attract such a competent person. He has spent his entire career in Bayer Pharmaceuticals, and this year. Let me just quickly remind us what the basis of the technology is. We are developing a radioactive compound that can be hooked to a targeting molecule. This targeting molecule will find cancer cells. All cancer cells have a target protein on the outside. This means that the cell will be hooked up to the targeting molecule, which has the radioactive compound connected to it. The radioactive compound will radiate and kill the cancer cell. We'll talk a little bit more about radiation later.
This is important simply because cancer is a leading cause of death in the world, more than 10 million deaths per year. This radiotherapeutics, based on this principle I just explained, represent the fastest-growing cancer treatment options today. We will use this precision treatment using the alpha-emitters. Will be the next generation technology. The market is predicted to grow significantly in the coming years. It's already in $hundreds of millions. But there are so many radiopharmaceutical companies and so many new therapies being developed for a large number of different cancer diseases that that creates a strong future demand for radioactive compounds. This is targeted alpha therapy, and we are enabling this by developing the alpha-emitting radioisotopes. The most pronounced compound is probably Lead-212, which is made from Thorium-228. That's regarded as at least one of the most promising alpha-emitting radioisotopes.
Just to briefly say a little bit about the radiation, the three kinds of radioactive radiation: alpha, beta, and gamma. We are working with alpha. That is characterized by being a large particle, which again means that it's a lot of energy. At the same time, the range is not very large, so it will kill the cancer cell, but very little of the healthy tissue around the cancer cell. That is the unique properties of the alpha particle. There is a very strong scientific interest for Lead-212 in the scientific community globally. If you look at the number of publications from the scientific literature, you see that there's an almost exponential growth in publications related to Lead-212 and to the alpha-emitting properties of this compound. It attacks a lot of different cancer indications, from prostate cancer to melanoma and so on, all the way to brain cancer.
This means that there are a lot of applications of these compounds. There's a lot of research and development going on, and there's a lot of clinical testing going on in all these areas. That represents our market. Just to mention briefly where we are, we are starting with the natural Thorium-232. We have our own proprietary separation process that we can make Thorium-228. That is the starting material in our marketing. We can produce downstream from Thorium-228, both Radium-224 and Lead-212, which are products that are sought after by the pharmaceutical companies. We think that we have a leading product in this value chain. It's a reliable and efficient process. We are particularly aware of producing in an environmentally friendly way and have full control of the radiation and the radiation safety and security. We have a strong team, and we have good partners in this development.
We are part of a value chain where we are taking natural Thorium-232 into the hospitals. Our proprietary process will be an important part of this value chain. I would like to introduce Brede Ellingsæter, our CFO. We can talk about his topics in the financial side.
Thank you very much, Alf. Good morning, everyone. We are currently building up a pilot facility at Herøya that will be the preparation for industrialization of Thor Medical. It is an ideal place for us to be because it also has the required infrastructure that we need, and it is located in an area that has a very highly competent workforce with a significant amount of industrial experience. The main purpose of the pilot will be to verify the production process and technology, to see that we can actually scale this technology and that we are able to supply customer samples to verify that we meet the customer's requirements. It will also be very important in terms of learnings for when we will scale up the production.
We target that the pilot facility will be operational in the second half of the year, and we can deliver customer samples in that period. The pilot is a first milestone towards a Final Investment Decision for an industrial-scale plant. We will verify the process and technology. We will deliver customer samples. Leveraging that, we intend to convert the Letters of Intent that we have with customers into firm offtake agreements with customers. We will also be working to secure a reliable and good-quality Thorium-232 that is our feedstock for production. We have one established supplier relationship today, and we are working with several more. We will also work to prepare an investment case in terms of site selection and pre-engineering, also known as a FEED study. That is a Front-End Engineering Design.
Once we are through these milestones, we will be ready to take an investment decision for a full-scale plant. This is a recipe that has been successful in the Scatec Innovation portfolio in the past, most recently scaling the rare-earth element company REEtec, that is also using a similar technology and is currently now building up an industrial-scale plant, also in Herøya. As Alf mentioned, we have signed three LOIs with potential customers. The demand is approximately equivalent to the current plant production capacity of the first industrial-scale plant of around 70 GBq Thorium-228. We also have additional indications from other customers that would far exceed the current plant capacity. Hence, we are now talking about a possible demand for 4-5 times of the potential, or at least currently planned, production capacity of the industrial plant.
We believe that our clear milestones, as we have described now, will be de-risking the investment through verifying the technology in the pilot, securing customer qualification and offtake, reliable and good-quality thorium supply, enabling a final investment decision, and finally establishing a full-scale production in a way that we can realize substantial shareholder value and reduce risk in the most efficient way. The overall goals for the first phase of the industrialization: we have the pilot facility now in 2024 to verify technology and deliver customer samples. We have a targeted FID, final investment decision for an industrial-scale plant in 2025 for start of 2027. Currently, estimated CAPEX requirements using the planned volumes of 70 gigabecquerel are around NOK 500 million. But this is a number that is highly dependent on the customer demands.
Looking at revenues, we are talking about revenues above NOK 400 million from such a plant with profitable and attractive margins. We will then, going forward, assess scaling with the market beyond this first phase of industrialization. Then, looking into what it takes and the financial position of the company: we closed the year with more than NOK 40 million cash available. We have reduced the burn to approximately NOK 1.5 million per month. We are also applied for roughly NOK 10 million in soft funding, mainly related to the activities we are doing in the pilot. We see now that there are limited capital requirements prior to an investment decision for a full-scale plant. It is mainly related to the pilot plant investments that we are doing now, and it is cost-related to a feed study or a less-scoped pre-engineering.
That being said, we are also evaluating, based on customer feedback and the request for volumes sooner than what we have described here, a possible expansion of the pilot phase to fast-track commercial volumes. Such a plan would impact the capital requirements for the company. With that, I give the word back to Alf to wrap things up.
Thank you, Brede. Again, I will mention that we have attracted very solid people in the company now. I would like specifically to mention that we have got a new Vice President for Environment, Health, and Safety, which is extremely important in the business that we are going to do, Astrid Liland, who came from the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority and has more than 20 years of experience in that area. That's very important for us.
Of course, we have our CTO, Sindre Hassfjell, who has been working with these topics for now about 10 years. He's still engaged in Thor Medical in a strong way. This is the best team that we could have at the present stage. Then, we get, as I already mentioned, the new CEO in September. For the sake of completeness, I can inform you that I'm in a dialogue. It's possible, at least I have the intention to continue working with Thor Medical, but first of all, focusing on strategy and business development, customer relations, et cetera. To sum up our presentation, we strongly believe that this is a major market opportunity. We have a unique and verified and scalable technology to produce the alpha emitter, which is strongly sought after. We have a clear operational roadmap for the time being, and we have a clear financial roadmap.
Fortunately, and that is the most important thing, we have a strong team and we have supportive owners. Thank you very much. Then, I leave the word to you again, Brede, so you can look at questions.
Thank you, Alf. We have received presubmitted questions from Jon Magne Asmyr on behalf of the auctioneer group that he represents. The first question is related to technology, and here we ask that Sindre support us to give a more detailed description of that, mainly related to Thor Medical's technology and in the context of other technologies. Please, Sindre.
Thank you, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today. I can just, let's say, sum this up with saying that our technology is based on large-scale chromatography. That is, let's say, a basis which has been tried out for many, many years. I've been working with this for also myself for many years. The advantage with this technology is that it's scalable, and it's durable, and it's got a high reproducibility, which is all very important when we are constructing or aiming for a large-scale production in a plant. We have worked with this process for some years, and we have now a quite efficient process. We have a very high load on our separation columns. We are separating with very high efficiency. We are separating radium and thorium. That means that we are separating them with a very high degree of separation.
The separation factor is very high. It's about 1,000. We are also able to separate all other impurities in our system. In that sense, we are quite confident in our technology in this sense. Regarding the other, let's say, some competing company technologies, we have Radtrans. They are based on a different approach. They are going to take out radium from a thorium solution by polyether compounds, microcyclic polyether compounds. That's good. It's also a known technology. There's a company called Orano Med. In their patent, they are based on separating out radium as a coprecipitate with barium sulfate, which is also very well known all the way back to Madame Curie. In our opinion, these technologies, they are okay, but they have some downsides. We are quite confident that our technology is working very well and will be very competitive against these competitors. Might be okay for this.
We can come back to questions later, perhaps.
I think it's also worth mentioning that Radtrans and their patent... Well, first of all, Thor Medical is very well aware of the patent that they have. Thor Medical has also stated in writing to Radtrans that we believe that the intellectual property that lies behind that patent belongs to Thor Medical because it was attained during a period where Dr. Dreyer worked on behalf of Thor Medical. Beyond that, we have done an assessment of freedom to operate towards that patent, and we have clearly concluded that the patent is not infringed in any way by Thor Medical's production process or technology. Based on that and the potential cost of doing a legal process in the U.S., we so far have concluded that we are best suited not to take further actions, but that can be reevaluated. Okay, thank you very much.
I think I would just like to add one more thing. I thought about, or I said about the scalability. We know that our technology is scalable. That means it can go into an industrial process. That's a quite important point. There's a lot of technologies that will work in lab scale, but the moment you are increasing the volumes and scaling it up, there are numerous problems that can come up. In that sense, I would again say that I'm confident our technology will handle this competition, and we have freedom to operate. Thank you.
Very good. Thank you. There was also a question around the investment decision and expected timing for that. I think we have summarized that quite well. A question related to a FEED, but let me just summarize once more. An investment decision is dependent on completing the milestones that we have addressed through the pilot phase, converting LOIs into customer offtakes, and preparing an investment case that could include a FEED, a front-end engineering design study with a certain scope related to engineering, cost estimation, permitting process, and so on. Such a FEED could take, depending on the scope, up to six months. We will evaluate when to start such a process in relation to where we are with the other milestones. But the target remains that we take a final investment decision in 2025. Then, there was a question around the patent transfer to NucliThera.
Well, I think first it's worth mentioning that the Nanovector patents and pipeline were clearly defined as not part of the company's mission statement anymore, as stated in the annual general meeting on the 28th of June. Hence, it is not part of the strategy of Thor Medical to pursue that with resources and capital anymore. Second, I think it's also worth reminding people that Nordic Nanovector has been trying to sell the pipeline and patents since the summer of 2022 without any significant luck in that process. The agreement that was reached with NucliThera gives the shareholders of Thor Medical an upside in terms of profit sharing if NucliThera succeeds in creating value that most likely requires a significant amount of resources and capital to develop these patents further.
The confidentiality of the agreement is, as with most agreements, business-sensitive, and it is not of the interest of NucliThera that these terms are public. Based on that, it is also something that Thor Medical respects, and the actual terms of the agreement are kept confidential. Okay, so that is the presubmitted questions that we have. We cannot see that we have received any new questions. Then, we thank everyone for listening in and hope to see you next time.