Good morning, all sammen, welcome to this informationsmøte. My name is Ludvik Sandnes, I have since first of February been interim daily leader i, and finance director in Nordic Nanovector. I am with stolted. I stand here and shall presentere an avtale inngått mellom Nordic Nanovector og Thor Medical. Stolt fordi at jeg står her sammen med to av landets ledende mesterkokker i entrepreneurskap, nemlig Roy Larsen og Alf Bjørseth. De kommer etterpå og vil fortelle mer om denne dealen. De har jo hatt lang kontakt, profesjonelt, kom til rett over årsskiftet tror jeg, at her kunne det være en mulighet for et samarbeid. Uten dem hadde ikke vi hatt noen avtale. Vi er bare kelnere i denne dealen, for ikke å si milen.
Uten Roy's forslag om at Tina gikk inn i styret og ba styret om at jeg kanskje burde bli ansatt som daglig leder, så hadde i hvert fall ikke jeg stått her. Hadde ikke Roy og Alf blitt enige om å søke ut denne muligheten, så kunne forslaget til generalforsamling, som sendes ut i ettermiddag, fort blitt delisting fra Oslo Børs. Avvikling av selskapet og utbytte av kanskje NOK 0.25 per aksje. Veldig glad for at vi slipper det. Når jeg sier dealen eller milen, så må jeg dessverre gå over til engelsk. Jeg tar gjerne spørsmål, og vi tar gjerne spørsmål etterpå på norsk. Good morning all! It's with great pleasure and some pride that I today can present the deal initiated by our founder, Roy Larsen, and another serial entrepreneur in Norway, Alf Bjørseth.
They will both address you after a short introduction of what we have agreed and will propose to you at our AGM to be sent to you today. It will be held on the 28th of June. We have already 30% previous consent. We really hope that we will also have this deal accepted. The deal has been negotiated with great support, also from our major shareholder, North Energy, who has been an insider since 3rd of March, 3 months, and has attended the meetings with Thor Medical. Mind you, we have agreed to acquire Thor Medical's highly promising new technology that enables the development and production of radionuclides for radioimmunoconjugate based approaches to cancer treatment, a rapidly growing global market. We continue to be a cancer fighting company. That's very important for us.
We have also reduced costs over the years. We had only 12 months timeline when we presented our annual report. Now we have financing throughout 2025, and we've done that with great efforts and succeeded without any casualties, if you like, when laying off even more people than we did before. We have four full-time employees now. Following the acquisition, the new board will consist of. We will also look for strategic options for maybe out licensing Nordic Nanovector's existing pipeline of patents to a standalone company, where continued studies of our pipeline can be supported and supervised by Roy Larsen and hopefully attract funding without the costs of being a quoted company.
Those costs are severe. For a company in a development phase, we should never have been on the stock exchange with the way the pipeline looks now. We want to explore the possibilities for that. Roy, maybe you will talk a little bit about why you took this initiative and the market and also the Technical Advisory Board that you will lead.
Thank you, Ludvik, and everybody for the great effort that has been behind this deal. When it comes to the field of alpha particle therapy, there is very many interesting development going on in the field. One of the big problem is the lack of source material for alpha emitters. Today, it's this year, it is 10 years since Xofigo was introduced in the market by Bayer and Algeta. This still there are no other alpha emitters that have been approved since Xofigo. I think there is a big need for a company like Thor Medical, that can supply very vital source material for the industry. That is the basis of this deal, that Thor Energy should supply this type of material.
Of course, alpha particle therapy, to use that in cancer treatment, it is a very complex business. I think it is very important that we have an ecosystem for production of components and also for companies that can make the final products for use in therapy. In this ecosystem, I think that the this new company can be a very important player and can have a significant revenue stream from this sector. Of course, if you look at the Norwegian perspective here, Norway has a quite good ecosystem in the field, actually. We have the Radium Hospital, where we can do research on animals and also do patient studies. We have the University of Oslo, with facilities where we can do development of early-stage product, et cetera.
We have, of course, companies like Oncoinvent, ARTBIO, and Bayer, that are also operating in the Oslo region with doing research and also clinical trials. I think this new entity will fit very well into this ecosystem, and I think that we have also many possibilities that can be explored with this new entity. When it comes to the Technical Advisory Board, we have some members here that all of us has a quite significant experience in the field. If we look at, for instance, myself, I was together with Øyvind Bruland and our student, Gjermund Henriksen, we invented a product that is called Xofigo today, more than 20 years ago.
Of course, Brit Farstad worked at IFE at that time, and she was very important when it came to producing this product for clinical testing in the early stage. You know, when you develop this type of complex products, you need a very good system for production and make it safe for the patients when you inject it. IFE was very important in at that stage. When it comes to Bayer, and Bayer is the industrial player in this field now, with most experience worldwide when it comes to alpha emitters and industrial scale production and sale of product. I think we have people with a broad experience in the field and a very good advice report for this new entity. Thank you.
Thank you. Good. Some transaction details. It's an all-share acquisition. It's been supported, as I said, with major shareholders, and we're all signed up for this. Keeping in mind, being a 50/50 deal, of course, it's been tough negotiations. I started out, I think, with 30%, 20%. We had a possibility of issuing 20%, our opposite partners nearly left the room. We had to negotiate quite a different deal. This one is even much better than the APIM deal, where you had 24% to the normal shareholders. Even so, the profitability here will be much better, and the money will come in much earlier, after 2-4 years, and not 12-15, if you should continue developing the cancer medicine.
We're very pleased that we managed to get this deal done, and with the whole support of everybody around. I think now, Alf, you can explain what it's all about. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Ludvik. It's a pleasure for me to give you some information about Thor Medical, where we are, and the basis for the technology that we are working on. Thor Medical is a company in the Scatec Innovation Group. We are working in two different areas. One is renewable energy, where we have some companies, that's not the topic for the presentation today. We have advanced materials. I would like to mention one company, REEtec, which is working on rare earth elements, where the production technology is the same basis as we have in Thor Medical. While we have synergy between these two companies, and a strong basis for doing further research in this area. We have also taken some companies public. That's not so important now.
The fundamental thing here is that on cancer cells, there is a on the outside, there is a target protein, and this protein can be recognized by some antibodies or targeting molecules, and will connect to the cancer cell. If we can hook up to this targeting molecule, a radioactive component, an isotope, then we can actually kill the cancer cell. Our radioactive isotope is called an alpha emitter, which is very energetic but has a very short reach, which means that it can kill the cancer cell, but very little of the surrounding healthy issue. Then this fresh, healthy tissue will remain uninfected by the radioactivity.
We also select alpha emitters with a fairly short lifetime, in such a way that radiation stops after a given time, and then the effect is over. This is the simple concept for the whole treatment, and then we started this work some time ago, when we also were looking at thorium as a source for energy in nuclear energy, but that has been stopped, but we use the competence we have in thorium also for this purpose. We will work with these alpha emitters that we get from the element thorium. Thorium, we have lots of thorium in Norway, but it's basically an element you find all over the world in connections with mining industry and with the development of other mining products.
Thorium is readily available, but we are looking always for the best and the cheapest source. The market will be significant. It's predicted that the market in 2030 will be something like $20 billion. There is something for us to reach after, and in the present situation, there are not many competitors. We have no indication that we will be alone in 2030 in this area, but we know that it will take a long time to develop a new process for producing alpha emitters, and we are ahead, we think, globally in this area. The financial projections are very good. This is basically the process as we see it.
We have developed proprietary technology to go from thorium, the isotope 232, and to our separation process and produce the element or the isotope thorium- 228. That is a starting point for several other alpha emitters as well. We can work with different medical companies using different alpha emitters. That means that we can serve a lot of all the medical companies that are working in this field today, developing cancer therapy for a lot of different cancers. Unfortunately, there are many cancer diseases. They need separate ways of treating that cancer. What is the most important thing for us is that this process, it requires no nuclear reactors to produce the radioactive isotopes.
We use natural material with a natural decay line. We will get these products produced continuously in very small amounts. It's very important to say that this is basically produced in very small amounts, which means that to produce these in significant amounts for medical purposes, then we need a special technique. We have the expression to look for a needle in a haystack, but what we are doing are actually to start with maybe something like 1 ton of minerals, and we are producing 1 mg of active material. Going from 1 ton to 1 kg, to 1 g, and to 1 mg, that's quite a task, and that is where we have other advantage when it comes to the technology. There is no irradiation and with no artifact radioactivity.
The process is environmentally friendly, and we produce with very little waste, and it's available, and it's reliable, and we will get a cost-efficient supply of radionuclides in this process line. We are currently in a qualification process for a natural thorium with a number of potential suppliers of this material, and we are also in close cooperation with potential customers on the material, which we have produced in very small scale so far, but available for testing for other potential customers. This is a good time to work with radionuclides for radiopharmacy. First of all, there is an additional amount made available on the Norwegian budget.
NOK 200 million was allocated to nuclear science at three institutes in the Oslo region, University of Oslo, at IFE, and the Institute for Energy Technology, and NMBU University for Environment and Bioscience. In addition to that, there is a proposed plan for health industry in Norway. The government of Norway want to focus strategically on developing health industry, and this comes at the same time as we will work in this project. We see that there are opportunities now to work with very competent partners, and we want to exploit that opportunity. Our goals is to refine production technology and product quality, which is very important, and continue with customer certification material. Sorry, one more.
To mature the manufacturing concept, we are already starting to plan, and we are cooperating with the Directorate for Radiation in Norway, DSA. We build a plant which is meeting all the requirements for working with radioactive materials in Norway. We need to have permitting to build this plant, but we are well underway already now. We want to mature the manufacturing concept. We expect that we should have the first decision on the industrial production by the end of next year and be in production maybe in 2025. That is kind of soon in this area. That is our current plans for the activity. Thank you.
Thank you, Alf. Sure. Next steps, the transaction is fully supported by the board of companies, key relevant opinion leaders and major shareholders. We signed, as I said, we have around 30% pre-acceptance. We'll send out the notices for the AGM today, it will be on the 28th, closing is then expected before the 30th of June. That was the presentation, if you have any questions, I guess there's been a few on the web. Maybe I can read them, if you guys come up again, you can answer. They ask, what's the cash position when we have completed the deal? Well, we have funding through 2025, we don't need to find more money before that.
They ask, has Thor Medical a finished product which is already in sale, or is it still under development? Maybe, Alf, you can answer that.
Yeah. The product is still under development. We have developed and demonstrated the separation technology, and we have shared some samples with potential customers, but we don't have any sales for the time being, and it will require more time to develop a complete production line with all the requirements that are put on producing radioactive elements. It will still take some time until we are in the regular sales of products.
They also ask, why will this company succeed when Orano Med have not made it using the same radioisotopes? Do we know?
Well, to say it like this, Orano Med, they have not failed, but they have a different business model, where they also want to have a ownership of the molecules and the final product, and that makes it more difficult for companies to work with them. Also, it has to do with that actually, they want to sell Lead-212, and that's a short half-life radionuclide with only 10 hours half-life. While Thor Energy wants to sell, correct me if I'm wrong, but you want to sell long-lived isotope.
Mm.
That is much more, much easier to distribute a long-lived isotope than a very short-lived isotope. The business model is very different from Orano Med's model. I think Thor Medical has looked into that and have designed a business model that would take into account the problem that Orano Med has faced.
They also ask: Why does Thor Medical need Nordic Nanovector? That's a good question. We never asked that.
Okay. Now, it's always a strength for a company to have got good knowledge about the needs of the customer.
To understand the customer and design the product which is best suited for the operations as the customers are involved in. That is, one of the important things that Nordic Nanovector brings into this equation.
Mm-hmm. Right. Of course, the quoting on the stock exchange and 11,000 happy shareholders.
that can help us finance. It's also a question here, when do we want to do the financing? I guess in a year or two, when the plant is, let's say, being accepted and approved, we will need to go to the market, but it will still take one or two years, I think, and John is nodding, so we agree on that. They also ask about the news flow. Is there any news flow that our shareholders can expect going forward? Is that when we get the acceptance, maybe from.
Yeah, I'm absolutely sure that we've been used in the coming years, and we have a plan, and when we meet the milestones, of course.
Yeah.
Listed company, we are in a different situation than we are being as a privately held company.
Information have been among a very limited number of shareholders so far, and this will be distributed in normal way for a listed company. There will be regular information about the progress that's going on.
There's also a question why North Energy did not sign the lock-up agreement, but they have entered the nomination committee, and we think they are long-term, but they had a principle, being an investment company, not to sign up, and it's not normal for a listed company that the shareholders there sign up. All of us has it done, all other than North Energy, so that was negotiated and accepted. That's why. I think that concludes the question we've received. Anyone from the audience? Okay. In that case, thank you. Thank you all.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.