I hope you can hear me. There should be a chat box and a Q&A. I think there are a few people still coming in, so we'll leave it for a few more seconds. If anyone has any questions along the way, then please put them into the questions and answers. You'll probably notice that I'm listed here as being Galen Moore. I am not Galen Moore. I'm Nat, so sorry we've had some technical issues our end. We've got Ole on the call as well. Hi there, Ole. How are you?
I'm fine, thank you.
Very good. In order to save time, and this is being recorded and transcribed, we can get straight into it. Really today's webinar, it's a very important day for 2cureX. We have been working a lot behind the scenes, and today we're really positioning ourselves to become a broader functional precision medicine platform. One of the things, and perhaps I'll invite you also, Ole, to comment on this, but one of the things in the journey has really been the discovery of this concept of the primary tumor. Now, forgive me, this is probably very obvious to you, but it wasn't obvious to me at the beginning how the primary tumor or the first tumor is very much related to, not all of them, but the subsequent tumors. Which is why tumor preservation or storing the tumor is such an interesting moment here.
I've described it in very layman terms, but Ole, perhaps you could sort of touch on what your experience is or what your understanding is with primary tumors versus secondaries.
I certainly can. It is correct, as Nat says, what has been found is that the original tumor that may spread into metastasis, in colorectal cancer , particularly there, we actually see exactly the same functional and genetic properties of the metastasis as the primary tumor. Storing at an early time point makes a lot of sense. It will allow us to test later if the patient progress, and then we can find the most effective treatment at that point in time.
Yes. Thanks, Ole. You described it much better than I do. I guess this is really demonstrating that 2cureX AB is developing out the ecosystem to build an end-to-end solution. That brings us on to the direction of the company. I think in broader terms, for our belief that, in treating cancer, there's an early diagnostics piece where it's catching cancer early is a massive benefit to all treatment. Once you know you have cancer, the second is really truly diagnosing what cancer you have. In that vertical, we clearly see cancer tumor storage as a really key step. Genomics is a key step in this and functional testing, which is a lot of where 2cureX has come from originally. It's after that that you would move into treatment.
I think there is a very large strategy here around the direction of the company, and the focus areas, including not just functional precision infrastructure, but it's understanding the patient access pathway, the tumor logistics and preservation, the laboratory partnerships, and decentralizing oncology testing to create a commercial ecosystem around this entire journey. We're very excited about the direction of the company, and we're very happy to be moving this, we're very proud to be taking these steps forward and delivering these things to the market. Which brings us on to building the ecosystem. We've touched upon this already, the clinical testing pathway, the tumor preservation and the logistics, also as we start to look forward to the future, we've got a lot of very exciting things coming up, which will not just consider the patient's journey on this, but the ecosystem as a whole.
There are multiple applications for the concept of isolating a tumor, growing a tumor, because it's got huge application in pharma and biotech collaboration. What we saw last year was 2cureX AB announcing a partnership with PreComb Therapeutics. PreComb Therapeutics has really been pushing this pharma and biotech collaboration. Beyond that, we're looking towards decentralized laboratory infrastructure and understanding really how AI and how the generation of data will feed into the entire ecosystem. Expanding into the U.S. For us as a company, it's impossible to ignore that 50% of every $1 spent in healthcare is in the U.S. The strategic collaboration with StoreMyTumor is intended not only to support patients who are reaching out to us asking for their tumors to be tested, but it also furnishes them with additional options as they move down their treatment pathway. Importantly, this is a U.S.-based company as well.
Working together with a U.S.-based company expands our footprint over to the U.S., where we know $0.50 in every dollar is spent in healthcare. It will embed this tumor preservation infrastructure, it will improve our patient coordination, and expand our operational capabilities. This addition not just strengthens 2cureX as a company, it also expands our footprint to be able to offer more services in more jurisdictions. We're very excited about that. What we've seen recently with the addition of Anthony Letai, who's now the National Cancer Institute Director and a long-term supporter of the work at 2cureX, the Founder of the Society for Functional Precision Medicine, who now holds arguably the most important role in cancer globally as the Director of the National Cancer Institute. Recently, we see that the second priority of the NCI is to advance functional testing using human biology.
Functional precision medicine matters because it is the standard of care in virology, it is the standard of care in bacteria, and it falls so perfectly within inside the objectives of not just large bodies like the National Cancer Institute, but as an example, the NHS. How do we improve patient outcomes? How do we reduce hospital time, and how do we improve the resources? Ultimately, there's a financial aspect to this. A huge part of that is making sure that patients receive the right treatment the first time to ensure that oncologists have got actionable patient insights and to strengthen the link between testing and clinical decision-making. What we've got with the team with Ole and 2cureX A/S is we're going to have the first devices put with inside hospitals later this year that will be providing clinicians with real-time data to make better decisions.
This is not just the first example of this being done with inside a clinical setting with regulatory approval, but more than that, it's a nod to the industry in general that functional precision medicine, not only does it matter, but it has now stood the rigor of the regulatory bodies, and it's moving into mainstream medicine. It still matters. I wonder, Ole, if you have any further comments on why you think functional precision medicine matters?
I think the interesting thing is that actually, all the way back into the 1960s, the idea came up that why don't we test as we do with antibiotics in cancer? There were a lot of testing being done. However, it turned out not to be that successful, and that was simply because we didn't understand that the tumor is almost a new organ. I think that's what have happened over the recent years is that we have come to read the complexity of the cancer, and there, the 3D Functional Precision Medicine is absolutely key. Maybe if I'm allowed, I'd also like to maybe have a word or two to this with StoreMyTumor. Maybe a number of you have heard of biobanks.
Almost all countries have biobanks in place that cancer patients will have to deliver a piece of their tumor to the national biobank. However, that tissue is completely useless in a functional setting because it's been killed, it's stone dead. It's fine for genetics, but it's just not possible if we really want to follow the tumor. Therefore, what we are doing together with StoreMyTumor is that we are actually using a technology where we can keep the tumor alive. When we take it up of the freezer, it functions exactly as in the patient. It is a completely new type of biobank that is being built, and that happens other places than us, but we are now at the forefront also with this collaboration with StoreMyTumor.
Super. Thank you, Ole. We touched on this earlier, is really positioning forward towards an integrated platform. Now, with inside that platform, what you're going to see over the coming months is us building out the infrastructure to enable the patient journey that we've spoken about. What Ole was touching on, which is why cryopreservation and the partnership with StoreMyTumor is such an important first step, is that what storing a tumor or freezing a tumor does is it provides options to patients. It provides options for them to further test in the future. For us, it improves our patient coordination and access pathways, and it further supports future decentralized testing and workflows and gives us a first step into the U.S. market. With 2cureX A/S, there's a functional precision medicine capabilities, existing industry infrastructure, and developing out the clinical and hospital pathway relationships.
As aforementioned earlier in this webinar, PreComb brings this biotech and pharma focus, which allows us to explore the drug development and what's called off-label drugs and potential future commercial collaboration opportunities. Moving forward, we've got a lot on the horizon. We're very excited about the journey that we're going on. This last few months, the last few years, we've been doing a lot of housework in the background to make sure that we have understood the market, to make sure that we have developed out the right pathway, that we've put the right people in place, and that we've truly gone back to try and understand who our customers are and how best we can move forward. I think finishing here, I'd like to throw the floor out to any questions. We promised 15 minutes, I believe. We have now hit 15 minutes exactly.
I think that hopefully you'll see that delivering on our promises is something that we will be doing in the future, and I'm very open here, as with Ole, to field any questions that anyone might have. Please feel free to put them in the Q&A. I see the first question here, and I like the fact that it's on the everyone chat. Super happy for the hard questions to come out as well. Position versus competition. One of the statistics which I follow very closely, which we track and I'm very happy for you to reach out to me independently, is we track clinical trials very closely. Clinical trials are a leading indicator that generally points towards regulation. This year, we're seeing an exponential growth in clinical trials in functional testing.
It is important to note that 2cureX and the team and the work that Ole has done has really got a two to three-year advantage on the rest of the industry. Ole, perhaps you could point towards some of the other competitors in the space and how simply seeing the clinical trials in this area doesn't necessarily mean that we'll have competition tomorrow. Perhaps you could talk in more detail about how you see the competitive landscape at the moment.
We should be happy that competition is there, else we will probably at the wrong time or the wrong place. What I see is that the major competition we see is what we call laboratory-developed tests. A lot of the trials that Nat is alluding to is done in hospitals, where they try to develop some of these technologies themselves. I think this is where we have a huge opportunity now that we will be IVDR certified, being the first company with a functional test that have that. There we can simply go in and offer that to all the hospitals because they can only do that testing in a clinical trial setting. As you mentioned, Nat, obviously, others will push forward, and I would say we are really monitoring the competition worldwide, and we are still comfortable.
When that's said, we will go out this year and place it in hospitals where, very importantly, they can use the technology in a daily clinical work and daily clinical practice. They do not need to run a clinical trial. Competition is there, yes, but we have a clear advantage. Both we have strong IP, and we now also have the regulatory approvals in hand, so that's good.
Yeah, I think competition is an interesting question here because you can almost flip the question on its head, is no one's doing this at the moment. The market tech, the penetration of this technology into people with cancer today is less than 0.0%- something. It's nonexistent. There is, from that perspective, no competition. As Ole alluded to earlier, the more people we get involved, the more competitors we have, the better it will be for us, because it will evangelize in a good way. It will teach not just patients that this is a viable option, but also what's called KOLs, the key opinion leaders with inside this sector. We see the head of the National Cancer Institute is really going out and pushing functional testing.
With inside this industry, there's an entire ecosystem of decision-makers that goes from the patient on one hand, and the oncologists, and then the broader institutions as well. The more competition we can get, the better, we see these people competing or the people bringing this through as in many ways validation that from a macro perspective we're in exactly the right place. I see a question around the proposed nature of the business alliance with StoreMyTumor. I can really talk about Roger, I'd be happy to have a call with you on this directly. StoreMyTumor has got over 4,000 tumors stored frozen.
One of the things that I am acutely aware of as we build this business is that we will be valued in a number of ways, not just on our revenues, but also on our data. Having access to tissue and being able to process tissue and the huge amount of data and insights that that brings towards means that we come back to a parable, a comparable that I've always looked towards, which is Foundation Medicine's acquisition by Roche a number of years ago, which has got a lot of similarities, which is a genomics business that was in genomics, where we saw an exponential rise in clinical trials in genomics. Foundation Medicine was acquired by Roche, but for all intents and purposes, it was acquired on its data set. The more tumors we can process, the more data we can generate, the more valuable we will be.
This option with StoreMyTumor doesn't just give us day one options that we can offer to patients going along this journey. It is also the opportunity for us to generate huge amounts of data and actionable insights, which is valuable to many stakeholders with inside this industry who are looking to develop new compounds or new drugs to find better ways to treat patients moving forward. As for the commercial forecast, which I see here as well, we've got our upcoming AGM, which is in, I believe, 30 days from now, 35 days from now, where we'll be able to go into this in more detail with a number of lines and new areas, which we'll be excited to discuss. As for how will the impact of these breaking news reflect the stock price, it's interesting. Yeah, I'll pass back to you, Ole.
Yeah. It's just you allow to have me take that one because obviously, a number of you have probably had shares for a while in 2cureX, it has been a bumpy ride. You know that with this spin out, the development part now at 2cureX A/S that now have developed the technology are being introduced and commercialized. When will this impact on the share price? I mean, I have tried for years to predict, say, "Oh, this is fantastic news." Then there's not that much of an impact. Then we say, "Well, this press release was not maybe the most fantastic we have made," there was a huge impact. I think it's very difficult to predict. Now we have put forward a clear path, as Nat have explained to you.
I'm sure that the impact will be governed by the data, the revenue, and that is both in the clinical and in pharma world. That was what we had difficulty with last time. Now we are in a completely different situation, with us placing instruments in hospitals later this year. I hope we will see impact soon, obviously. It's hard to predict.
Lastly, is this partnership designed to create a shared diagnostic platform with recurring downstream revenue? The short answer to that is yes. The storing of tissue, as alluded to earlier, really leaves options for patients in the future. Yes, this is designed to be a recurring revenue stream. We look forward to further announcements in the future. If there are no more questions coming through, I think we'll wrap it up there. Really just wanted to say thank you to everyone who's joined and who's joining us for this journey. We are more convinced today than we ever have been that not only are we in the right space, but there's a massive opportunity for all of us moving forward, and we're going to bring better solutions to patients moving forward, and this will have massive impact on millions of lives moving forward.
Ole, I wonder if you have any closing comments, but otherwise I'd like to thank everyone for taking time out of their day, and we look forward to more communication, more updates, and more exciting things on the horizon.
Yeah. No, it cannot be put any better than you had just did. Thank you from me as well.
Thank you everyone, yeah, look forward to hearing from you. Really want to have open lines of communication, you'll always see my email and my mobile number and other things like that on outbound communications. Please don't hesitate to get in touch, looking forward to the future. Thank you everyone for your time.
Thank you.