Good morning, and a warm welcome from my side. Couldn't be more excited standing in front of you today to share what Thor Medical has done over the last six months, and to present with to you in the next one hour or so, including Q&A, the progress Thor Medical has been made. For me, it's a very special day since I'm a very new joiner to the team. It's my fourth week. I joined first of August as the new CEO. If I may introduce myself in a few words, my name is Jasper. I'm a German citizen, but for the last four and a half years, I've been living with my family in Stockholm.
I before joining Thor Medical, I was working for Bayer Pharmaceuticals, and my last role in Bayer was the general manager of the Nordics for one of Bayer's healthcare divisions. And I'm very grateful to Bayer, who have provided me with a rich career over the last 17 years. Basically, ever since graduating from university, Bayer has been my company, and it's a great company. I was able to work in the headquarters in strategy, more operational topics for the pharma organization. I was very proud of building businesses in small markets, low-income markets in Latin America and Asia before joining as the general manager for the healthcare divisions in the Nordics. For me, it's a very special day to be here.
Bayer, of course, had laid out plans for me and my career with international destinations, and I was very intrigued. At the same time, I was approached earlier this year by the board of Thor Medical, and I got into discussions also with my predecessor, Alf Bjørseth, and I felt joining Thor Medical would give me the opportunity to be part of something great, even more meaningful than being part of a big pharma company that is well on track, so for me, that was the opportunity that I wanted to take, and yeah, that's why I'm here today. I'm a dad of two young kids, nine and eleven, and we just moved from Stockholm to Oslo, as I said, but that's enough about me.
I want to walk you through what Thor Medical is and why it's exciting to be part of this. So let's look a bit at the facts of Thor Medical. We are a small and nimble company, but we have a big ambition. We wanna go for the emerging market of radiopharmaceuticals and the isotope part of that, and we believe there is a revenue potential of more than $1 billion for us. That's the long-term plan, that's the horizon we're aiming at. But as a prudent company, we need to take the steps towards that, and we need to deal with the obstacles that are on the way, and for that, we are laser-focused on the next steps, and the next step is that we open a pilot plant in a few weeks' time in Herøya, two hours here from Oslo.
And building on this pilot plant, we need to scale up to become a relevant partner for our customers in the field. So we're working on a concept that we call Fast Track, that allows us to get commercial volumes in the market as soon as possible. We are listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange, and we are, of course, subject to all the rules and regulations that come with it. But let's take a step back and speak about cancer, and unfortunately, all of you here, and also all of you listening online, would have a personal affiliation with cancer. So cancer is a leading killer still. While there's a lot of research and billions of billions of U.S. dollars are going into research, there is, of course, still no cure, as we all know. But we are making...
In this game of inches, we're making progress, and one of the most promising areas of progress is radiopharmaceuticals. And I try to explain in layman terms how it works. So you see maybe on the schematic pictures here, the cancer cell on the right, and luckily, most, if not all, cancer cells have a specific surface that we can address, like a lock-keyhole situation. So maybe you know this concept from vaccines and all the pandemic discussions that were going on, but basically, we're talking about peptides and antibodies that can fit to one another. So if you inject a substance in the bloodstream, it will find the cancer cells. And you can use this to apply drugs directly to the cancer. That's another technology that is up and coming.
But in our case, we can have a little warhead on it, so a little isotope that kills the cancer where it actually grows and kills the cancer there, and the idea is to leave the rest of the healthy body intact, and have a low toxicity and a low quality of life for the patient. So for me, this technology alone is absolutely exciting, and Bayer, my former company, has been a pioneer in this field, and I was already intrigued when Bayer purchased Algeta here in Oslo, that this is part of a portfolio and that we can actually make progress here. But coming from, radiopharmaceuticals to our company, internal view, we are progressing with our pilot site in Herøya. I've been there already a couple of times.
For me, that's also a very emotional feeling, seeing all these pipes and columns being connected and see the first test runs being placed. So we believe that we can open this pilot site to produce customer samples already in a few weeks' time. We have received NOK 6 million as a grant from Innovation Norway, which, of course, helps us to progress with this exciting adventure. And we will be able to produce these customer samples by the end of the year, and then allow, of course, more intensified discussions with our customers. We are also very proud that we have obtained our license to operate by the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authorities. We have been applying for licenses to handle import and export radionuclides.
Thanks to our dear colleague here in the picture, Astrid Liland, who has an experience in working in senior positions at DSA, we have been able to pull this off because she knows exactly what's required. For me, another testament that at Thor Medical, be it a small company, we are not in the business of making shortcuts. We do it the right way. We entered into a cooperation with a South African mine. We are very mindful that we need to supply our feedstock, and we need to secure our feedstock, not just focusing on one supplier, just to manage and mitigate potential supply risks, being a reliable future partner of our customers, and we want to take it to the next level.
In terms of our Fast Track, we have worked on a feasibility study, which has proved that we have scalability of our technology, and now we have a concept study in place that verifies timeline, so how long it takes to ramp up production in the commercial space, and also to verify the capital requirements. We estimate right now 250 million NOK. But I would like to take this opportunity here to speak a bit more about the market that Thor Medical can address, and I hope you can bear with me that I start from a very broad scope, and then we've tried to zoom into the products that Thor Medical can bring, because I think it's important to understand the ins and outs of this. Let's start with the obvious.
Radiopharmaceuticals is really, really hot. We see the area booming. We see projections of this market to reach $30 billion in just eight to 10 years, which is a massive growth. Just look at the CAGR of this. And we already see today that there are hundreds of millions of EUR or USD spent on radiopharmaceutical drugs, mostly in the space of non-targeted drugs. So just by their chemical properties, these molecules would bind to the organs. For instance, radium binds to the bone marrow, as calcium does, or an iodine isotope would bind to the thyroid gland to treat cancer there. But we also see first targeted therapies.
So basically, the schematic that I have shown a couple of slides ago, where we have a warhead and an antibody, a molecule that connects to the cancer and finds the cancer. But those products on the market are exclusively beta emitters, so we haven't seen alpha emitters. That's the product that Thor Medical does, and alpha emitters are very attractive in the field of efficacious cancer therapies, as we could see with Bayer, again, pioneering alpha-emitting radiopharmaceuticals here in Norway. Just to prove my point from before, why the market is very hot, we see an all-time high of oncology trials in the field, never seen before.
We see more than $12 billion being invested by big companies like Novartis, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, to purchase and scoop up promising candidates from the market to actually build their own radiopharmaceutical pipeline and to be a player in the field, which is a very attractive proposition. And also, smaller companies were very much able to raise capital in a very nervous market, but despite that, they were able to raise more than $1 billion. Now, let's zoom a bit in. I already addressed beta and alpha emission. So in layman terms, beta is emitting a proton or an electron, and of course, there's some energy involved.
Alpha emission, the particle is basically a helium nucleus, and with that, much heavier, and basic physics tells us a heavier particle can create higher impact in terms of kinetic energy transfer. And that is actually true in this case, that the alpha radiation can kill the double strand of a DNA, and it's a very effective way of killing cancer on the tumor, on the metastasis, but also in the blood. So that's a big issue in oncology, that you have these single cells floating around the bloodstream, and they are basically on their way to regrow and to create metastasis. So addressing those single cells is a very effective way of dealing with cancer.
And this is understood by the market, as you can see, on the chart here, that the clinical candidates on the alpha side have more than doubled between 2019 and 2024. So in these five years, there's a lot of momentum toward the alpha side of radioisotopes. And when we just zoom in into the alpha emitters here, we are talking about two isotopes. One is actinium- 225 , and one is lead- 212 . And if we just look in isolation at the characteristics of these isotopes, you would actually conclude that lead is the better one for clinical practice and for treating cancer.
But in the past, there was a supply issue, for lead, so it was not clear how to actually get lead-212 into, the clinical studies and if there's ample resources to support clinical development and then a ramp-up, to the market. But we believe that, for different players, and we believe also including us, this situation is to be resolved. There is a way to address it, and that's why we see, also like we have seen between beta and alpha, we see a strong growth, with the factor of four between, lead-212 in 2019 and lead-212 development in 2024. And, there is a lot of advantages on, lead-212 versus actinium-225 . So first of all-...
Actinium-225 cannot be produced with naturally occurring resources like we are doing with our process and lead-212 in the end. So from thorium-228 to lead-212, that's kind of our business, and we will speak about this in a second. But we also see that the shorter half-life of lead-212 has a lot of advantages for patients and clinicians. So if you, for instance, understand that, recipients, patients that are being treated with these products, they are in the late stage of their life, so they wanna make most of it.
If they have limitations like being radioactive themselves, not being able to hug their grandkids, or that their human waste is treated as radioactive waste and has to be stored for ten times the half-life, which is more than a hundred days, I think it's clear that we also need to be mindful what it means for the patient in the end. Plus, of course, a much better toxicity profile due to the shorter half-life and not to have too many alpha-emitting particles flying around the body. So that's clearly an advantage of the product that we can produce. This slide, I think, is important to understand two things. First of all, that there is a lot of progress, late-stage progress in clinical development for candidates using Lead-212 or Radium-224.
And the second thing to understand is that, our risk is diversified. So we are a biotech company, but we are not dependent on a single product in a development pipeline where we're investing hundreds of millions of dollars, but we are distributing our risk to these candidates and more. It's a non-exhaustive list. And while we hope that all of these products actually get to the market and are an efficacious treatment to cancer, my experience from Bayer tells me that this is not always the case.
So there is a lot of risk involved, but in order to create a cash positive situation for our company, Thor Medical, one of those would be enough to give us enough revenue to pay our own bills and to continue with the progress we have and the innovative progress we want to bring to the market. But a more promising picture where we believe that a lot of these candidates would actually hit the market because what we have seen from early data is actually very promising. We see the market developing in three stages. So we are happy to supply the market in clinical development, and we expect the first drug to be FDA or EMA or any local authorities to rubber-stamp it by 2028.
And then we enter into a phase where the markets are growing heavily since it's a commercially available product, and we see thousands, if not millions, of patients, and once this is part of common practice in oncology, it will move up the lines of treatment, and then we create a market that is in the size of many billions of USD. I'm very excited that we can share how we do it and how our operational plans will be laid out for the next six months and beyond, and for that, I'm very happy that my dear colleague, Brede Ellingsæter, our CFO of Thor Medical, is with me today, and he'll walk you through about our operational plans and our financial view of the company, so Brede, thank you.
Thank you very much, Jasper, and good morning, everyone. I will start giving an update on the current development status, and then our plans in terms of operations and scale-up going forward. So let me start talking a little bit about the technology. The proprietary technology of Thor Medical offers radionuclides from the natural decay of thorium, where we are able to extract first radium-228 from natural thorium-232, and then we purify into the core product of Thor Medical, that is the thorium-228. And this is the parent isotope for the medical isotopes, that is radium-224 and the mentioned lead-212, which is perhaps the most promising radioisotopes today.
Our technology doesn't require any irradiation, and that brings benefits in terms of quality, as we do not have many of the radioactive contaminants that you will have in, for example, a process that includes a nuclear reactor. It is a proven and scalable technology that we have seen scale in different applications before. And we are currently now a patent pending process. We filed patent applications during the first half of the year. Let me move on. We are now building a value chain for the next-generation cancer therapies, which we believe Thor Medical will be an important part of. So we are working on the one side to secure the minerals required for this process. So we are working with multiple suppliers of feedstock, including the mentioned Steenkampskraal project in South Africa.
And we are working with a European supplier, that is our current supplier, that also brings, thorium for the pilot facility. And then we are processing that in our facility at Herøya and providing the customers with Thorium-228, which then they again, who is the radiopharmaceutical companies, use to generate Radium-224 and Lead-212 when they, manufacture their therapies. We can also, to selected partners, provide them with Radium-224 directly, but due to the half-life of these isotopes, which for Radium-224 is, three and a half days, this has to be done to partners with short proximity from Thor Medical's facility. It means in practice then, local partners, typically in Norway or in Scandinavia. So our current pilot facility is on track for completion in, September of this year.
We have all the relevant authorizations in place to start that production, which is targeted for fourth quarter this year. The target is to deliver the first product samples to customer before the end of the year. This is approximately 10 million NOK CapEx facility, which has received a grant of 6 million NOK from Innovation Norway, and it holds a complete production line from thorium-232, all the way down to thorium-228. We also have in proximity to the facility a state-of-the-art quality assurance function to make sure that we deliver products according to specifications and the requirements of the customer.
But the main purpose of the pilot is to verify the technology in industrial scale, and to supply products in a way that we qualify at the customer, and to be the basis for scaling up the production. So it will have a fairly limited capacity. We are talking about roughly 100 patient doses per year of production capacity. And this picture here that you can see on the right is the facility that we are in at the Herøya Industrial Park.
But considering the rapid growth in the radiopharmaceutical market and the requests from potential customers for radioisotopes already today, we are looking for how to scale up this facility as quickly as possible in a way that we can deliver products that is meaningful in terms of volumes during the clinical development of the customer, and that is what we refer to as the Fast Track project. It is to scale up the production in the pilot facility, and we have completed a feasibility study to do that, which has shown an estimated capital requirement of 250 million NOK and an expected timeline of 12 months from an investment decision.
What we are doing now is that we are conducting a concept study to verify the capital requirements, to verify the timeline of such a project, and also to assess the regulatory aspects in a way that when we make an investment decision, it is an informed decision. The Fast Track plant will have a capacity of 12,500 doses per year. It is still fairly small, but it's meaningful volume compared to where the customers are today, which is clinical development, and it will bring cash positive operations for the company, representing revenues of around 200 million NOK. While we are waiting for the pilot facility to become operational, we will seek to supply the customers with products from the pilot facility.
It will be marginal scale, but it will still be well-received, but Fast Track is just the next step, so we see that based on the requirements that the customers will have as they progress through clinical development and eventually reaching commercial stage, the demand for radioisotopes will be growing significantly, and we have to be prepared to scale accordingly to be a relevant partner for these customers, so we are envisioning a quite ambitious ramp-up that goes beyond the mentioned Fast Track plant into what we call full industrial scale, with 250,000 doses approximately per year, and eventually reaching global scale with more than 1 million doses per year.
Then it's also important to keep in mind that, that one patient treatment usually will need 4 to 6 doses, which means that this translates into some two hundred and fifty thousand patients being treated at the end of this ramp. This ramp here is translates to the $1 billion revenue potential that Jasper alluded to in the beginning of the presentation. Okay, let me summarize the financials for the period. We see limited capital requirements before an investment decision for commercial production. We had a loss of NOK 13.1 million in the first half of the year. Cash flow was negative NOK 12.2 million, and we closed the period with NOK 29.6 million cash available.
We secured additional funding of 6 million NOK in the period, of which 1.8 was paid in the first half. The rest will be paid in the second half of the year as we complete the pilot facility. We expensed 5 million NOK for the pilot facility in the first half, and the rest will be spent now during the second half. Like I said, the pilot phase of the company is fully funded. We see runway through first half of next year, and with limited capital requirements until we make an investment decision to scale up production.
When it comes to the financing of the Fast Track project, which has an estimated cost of 250 million NOK, based on the feasibility study that we have concluded, it is a fairly small investment in biotech context, but it will generate cash positive operation for the customer, for the company. And we are expecting an investment decision for such a plant by the end of Q1 next year. That is our target, and we are looking for financing from debt, from new investors, and from existing shareholders in Thor Medical.
We are looking at quite a broad aspect of capital sources, being infrastructure funds, specialized radiopharmaceutical funds, and different kinds of public support schemes that could potentially be, for example, loans with a certain guarantee provided by the state. So with that, let me give the word back to Jasper to summarize and wrap things up.
Thank you, Brede. So I hope we've been able to progress and to share the information as to why we are so excited about this, that you could actually feel the enthusiasm that the team has about this. So I strongly believe that we are at the right point in time, in the right market to actually have a meaningful impact on oncology, on progressing Norway as a ecosystem for radiopharmaceuticals. So I couldn't be more thrilled about this opportunity here. But while we of course have high ambitions and a big target, we need to look at the pathway directly ahead of us in order not to miss anything and take one challenge at a time.
And we are progressing with our pilot facilities, but of course we need to do the final steps to get it up and running, to make sure that we produce our product in the right quality to the right customer specifications and deliver those samples by the end of the year, so that our customers can verify that these products meet their expectations, and that they can actually work with them in their labs. And then this helps us to progress our offtake discussions with our customers, that we have firm supply agreements, that help us to grow as a company. We need to also look at our vendors and suppliers. So, Brede talked about our feedstock suppliers coming from the mines and from other areas where we get the thorium, and that's another cool part.
We take a rock from the earth, we process it, and we inject it into a patient to kill cancer. For me, that's a fascinating fact in itself. But of course, we cannot rely on a single source. That would not be prudent, and we need to play in the big league in terms of being a reliable partner to our customers. So they need a company that can scale up with their needs. They traverse through their clinical development steps, and then they hit the market, and they need, they need a partner they can rely on. That's us. But at the same time, we need to be reliable in terms of our supply to the customers, and for that, we need to have a diversified and robust partnership down the line of our suppliers.
So we work on that to convert business relationships into true partnerships. And in the end, looking ahead beyond the pilot site, we are working on the concept study to finalize timeline, to finalize all the nitty-gritties of engineering, piping, and everything that goes with building a high-quality industrial plant in Herøya to get this right. And once the concept study is ready, provided we have the right financing, and then we can raise capital and take the investment decision in the end. That's our goal for Q1 next year, and until then, we remain working hard on it and remain committed to our vision as a company to become the leading supplier of alpha emitters into the market. And with that, I would like to thank you for your attention and open the round for Q&A.
So Brede, I don't know if we have anything coming from the web. No questions from the room? Okay.
We have a question from Joachim Berner. He's asking: "When and how big is your next capital increase planned?
I think that's a wonderful question for you, Brede.
Yeah. So, this is what we tried to explain, that the next capital requirement is the Fast Track, and it has a capital requirement of 250 million NOK. We are evaluating how to finance that, and we are looking for debt, we are looking for new investors, and we're looking for capital from existing shareholders, and the timeline of that will be, as mentioned, targeted by the end of Q1 next year. That is our ambition, and that provides that we have offtake agreements in place and that we are able to finance the project. Okay, I hope that answers the questions. Then we have another question from Joachim: "What is the expected revenue from the fourth quarter production?" If I may?
Of course. Go ahead.
The fourth quarter production, being mainly customer samples, we are not projecting much revenue from this. This is a development work together with the customers in a way that we provide them with product at spec and verify our product, basically. So we don't see any revenues coming in the fourth quarter. There was another question from Joachim: "Thorium is available also in Norway. Why don't you use thorium from Norway?
Yeah, that's a good question. Maybe I can-
Please
... just comment, and you chime in if there's anything else. So of course, we see rich deposits of thorium, and with that, also rare earth elements in Norway and in Scandinavia, and it would be very nice to tap into these pools of resources rather quickly. As a matter of fact, these have been only recently discovered, and until they can be sourced, there will be a long time down the line into the future. Too much time, actually, to serve the market and the growing demand of the pharmaceutical industries and dying cancer patients, to be honest. So we need to find other sources of thorium. So we're working with a large European supplier, and we are developing this partnership with our mine in South Africa.
And of course, once there are mining operations done in Norway, or Sweden for that matter, we keep these contacts open to be part of this. Because the beautiful part when you talk to mining companies is that it's a perfect definition of a symbiosis. They are in the business of mining rare earth elements. They want to take them off the ground, from the ground and purify them, and thorium-232 is, I would call, a major headache for them because it's a radioactive by-product. And we are not interested in the rare earth elements, we are interested in the thorium. So separating this out and us taking off their radioactive, quote-unquote, "waste," is in their interest. So that's why we always have very easy entries to these discussions with mining companies.
I'm very hopeful, once mining is operational, that we will be successful concluding contracts and be part of also thorium in the ground in Norway and in Sweden.
If I may just be specific, because a lot of people are talking about the Fensfeltet, which we are also involved in the development there. This is a development project. It will take time. We cannot wait for that project to be online, but eventually we would aim to see thorium from that field also in our facility in Herøya. Okay, we have another one from Arne: "What are the main logistical challenges associated with alpha-emitting isotopes, and how is Thor Medical addressing them?
Yeah, maybe I can take this. I think it's looking very scary if you look at a half-life of a few hours of Lead-212, and how to actually get this from a pharmaceutical production, which is very much controlled. You have a lot of regulations how you can produce a pharmaceutical into the veins of a patient. That's clearly a challenge. Our part is actually that we look at the half-life of the products and provide the right isotope, the right product to our customers, depending on their needs. Our key product is Thorium-228. That has a half-life of a bit short of two years.
So the idea is that, our customers can stockpile this, they can put it in their own generators, which is a fancy word for a device that gets a source on top, and then, lead is produced inside the generator with natural decay and, purification. So in the end, the two-year half-life of Thorium-228 helps customers to overcome this logistical challenge. But that said, and the good thing is, this is nothing new in the field, right? In diagnostics, radioactivity has been a stable item. They have hot cells in the hospitals in some cases. Denmark, for instance, has one of the highest densities of PET CT systems in the world. So we see this actually happening and, customers being able to control it.
But our partners, the pharmaceutical companies, need to get closer to the centers and to the hospitals, and to have their own network of hubs. And we are here to support and to co-locate and to whatever is necessary, to support our customers to be logistically able to supply patients with the most efficacious point in time in terms of half-life of the isotope. So I hope that addresses the question.
Good. Then we have another one from Arne: "What key milestones needs to be in place and when, in order for you to deliver commercial production beginning of 2026?" May I take that?
Yeah, please.
So we have conducted a feasibility study, and what we have found, which is a very early phase engineering study, really, is that we will need 12 months from an investment decision until we can have the plant, the Fast Track plant, operational. That means if we are able to make an investment decision in the first quarter next year, we can have that plant operational first quarter of 2026. That said, what we are doing now in the concept study is to verify the capital requirements and cost estimate for the plant, the timeline that we need, which for now we assume is 12 months, and also to investigate the regulatory aspects of this. And for us to reach that investment decision, we have to have offtake in place, and we have to be able to finance the project.
So these are the main milestones that we see going forward.
Yeah. I mean, bottom line is we're not building a castle in the clouds. We want to do this the prudent way, the right way, and with that, we need to secure all these aspects that we can give the right information to the market that is reliable and trustworthy.
Okay. That's all.
That's all? Good. Then again, thank you for your interest and, I appreciate you being part of our journey, and we will, of course, keep you posted with our progress. Thank you very much.