Reactive collaborations, both with diagnostic companies, with companies active in the cell therapy field, and also with companies active in the flow cytometry field. It may sound much with all these three different fields, but they have a common nominator, and that is a lack of innovation in sample preparation, which is something that we can help them with solving. If you look at the diagnostic and the therapeutic field, in the last 30 years, there has been more or less a revolution in what you can diagnose in a drop of blood or what you can treat by new advanced therapies. This has enabled more diagnostics, earlier diagnostics of severe diseases, and better treatments.
There is a limit to how far you can bring that without doing something about the starting materials or the products that you need to use to bring out these diagnostics and treatments to the patient. That is the sample preparation. It still remains the same as 30 years ago. It's still bound to centrifuges, big labs, and manual handling, making a limitation in what you can diagnose close to the patient or making a limitation on how accessible these fantastic new therapies are to the actual patient because they are really, really, really expensive, and they are also really time-consuming to produce. This is where AcouSort comes into the picture.
AcouSort has developed a technology that can solve this manual handling and centrifugation obstacle that we have in current laboratory work by providing our acoustofluidic technology that enables building in and integrating these big and complex processes into small devices that you can actually put and place into our partner systems. Instead of having a second device and a person in the lab, you can just add your sample to a complete system and have all the processing done internally. AcouSort provides our technology as OEM separation modules, so small, easy-to-integrate modules that can be built into other manufacturers' devices. What is AcouSort's technology all about? AcouSort's technology is a combination of microfluidics, so small channels, and ultrasound.
When you combine this, you create a force in the microfluidic channel that you can use to push particles from different positions in the channel towards the pressure node in the center of the channel. Depending on how you set up your technology or your systems, you can enable a lot of different types of separations in our devices. This is one of the reasons why we are able to supply quite similar units to many different industries. The technology is very versatile. I will show you an example of how it looks when you do a blood plasma separation in one of our devices. The standard device looks like the small chip down to the left. What you see in the video is the right-hand side of the chip with the two outlets.
You have one outlet in the center of the channel, and you have one outlet at the side of the channel. When you turn the sound off, the sample is flowing through the system without focusing. As soon as you turn the sound on, you push all your cells to the center of the channel, and you can pull them out in the center outlet while you can pull out a very clean plasma fraction at the side of the channel. As you can see in the video, the separation is instant. As soon as the sound is on, all the cells are focused to the center of the channel. When the sound is off, you have your sample spread all over the channel. By adjusting how you set up the system, you can do blood plasma separation.
You can isolate different cell types from the whole blood sample, or you can also set it up in ways you can handle nanoparticles like exosomes or bacteria. AcouSort has implemented our technology in three different types of products. We have our AcouPlasma OEM modules. We have our AcouWash or acoustic separation OEM modules, and we have our acoustic trapping technology and acoustic trapping separation modules. These are the modules that can be built into third-party manufacturers' devices. Except for that, we also have our research instruments, the AcouWash and the AcouTrap. In the AcouWash, we have our acoustic separation modules built in, and in the AcouTrap system, we have our acoustic trapping modules built in. The research instrument is not AcouSort's core business, but they are really, really valuable to us in several different ways.
One way is that they make it very easy for our potential OEM collaboration partners to evaluate the technology. It gives them easy access to customers to get a grip on what this acoustofluidics and AcouSort are all about. We also use them in academic collaborations to publish new and new articles about how you can use the technology and the benefits of using the technology in different applications. This is a way for us to spread knowledge about the technology to make it more recognized. The main purpose of them is to use them to build and bridge the way between interest in our technology to actually starting collaborating with AcouSort about integrating our technology into a third-party instrument. The key markets that AcouSort is addressing are the cell therapy market, the diagnostic market, and the flow cytometry market.
Three big markets with significant growth, especially in the cell therapy field, where the growth is expected to be really significant in the coming five years. What is common between all these three markets is that they are still relying on manual sample preparation. This is something that needs to be addressed for the cell therapy to be a readily available treatment for the cancer patients that need it. For diagnostics to become faster, more efficient, and more accurate, you need to bring things down and into the devices instead of having people handling the samples. For the flow cytometry, it's a lot about enabling better sample quality for the really, really new and advanced instruments because they don't really cope that well anymore with the sample preparation technologies that are used today with the manual handling. This is where AcouSort comes in.
To enable the development of new point-of-care diagnostic devices, there is a need to remove the centrifugation step and be able to build in sample preparation into the devices to make them simpler for the end user to operate. Because as long as you need to do sample preparation of your blood sample before you can load them on the device, then they will be confined to larger hospitals or larger laboratories and not to the real point-of-care diagnostic applications. In the cell therapy, it's a lot about driving down the costs. Today, producing cell therapies, it's expensive, and it's time-consuming, and it requires really advanced sterile labs. This makes the preparation of the doses really, really expensive and requires a lot of resources that limit their ability to manufacture enough doses. To be able to bring down the costs, automation is also needed here.
It's needed to make it safer, not to introduce any contaminations, to make it cheaper, and also to improve the health of the cells during the process. AcouSort's solution can actually provide all of this. We can provide an automated, safe, robust, and reliable technology that can be integrated into devices. As an example, in the CAR-T cell therapy field, there has been enormous development from finding new target drugs or target training molecules for the cells in the last 10, 15 years. In the last five years, people have started looking into the manufacturing process. When we now know that the therapies work, if you can produce them, how can you produce them in a way so they are actually affordable? Currently, producing a dose of cell therapies for a patient can be several hundred thousand dollars.
Of course, at that cost, it will be a very exclusive treatment and not benefit all the patients that could be benefiting from this treatment. The reasons why the cell therapy treatment is so expensive is because we have all these handling and separation and cleaning steps. First, you extract cells from your patient. Thereafter, you need to find the right cells. This is done today with different types of fairly manual cell selection systems. This could instead be done using AcouSort technology. In the second step, the cells are trained to recognize the cancer cells. After the training, the cells yet again need to be purified. This is also done manually today but could be replaced by AcouSort technology. At the last stages, the cells are expanded so you get enough of them to be efficient in the treatment.
After expansion, they need to be purified again and prepared for dosing back into the patient. Also in this step, AcouSort technology could enable a fully closed and integrated solution. We see that in the CAR-T cell therapy field, there is a lot of synergies with companies looking into novel solutions and with AcouSort technology providing a robust and gentle way of preparing the cell therapy doses. Another example where AcouSort technology has been a real game changer is in the Werfen GEM7000 system. AcouSort started out working with Werfen in 2018 with developing technology to be able to separate out plasma from blood samples to be able to detect hemolysis in the samples.
When you work with blood gas systems, detecting hemolysis is critical because if you get hemolysis in your sample, some of the measurement values in the system will be severely wrong, giving a high risk of treating the patients incorrectly. A blood gas instrument is something used for critically ill patients, which means that mistreating a critically ill patient is even more severe than mistreating someone that is feeling fairly well. Also, in addition to that, when you have these critically ill patients, hemolysis is more common. When Werfen launched the system last year, it was really a revolutionary system. It could provide inline hemolysis detection thanks to AcouSort technology. How it looks in the Werfen system or what AcouSort technology is doing in the system is shown in this video.
When you turn the sound on in one of our microchannels, you open up a window of blood plasma, which you can measure through to detect the hemolysis. Today, Werfen is the only blood gas manufacturer in the market that provides this technology. I know that it's something that many of the blood gas manufacturers have been looking for for many, many years now. Werfen, together with AcouSort, was the first ones to be able to solve this issue. If we look at our business model, AcouSort is a provider of technology and OEM modules containing our technology.
We work with device manufacturers either in the diagnostic industry, in the therapeutic industry, or in the scientific instrumentation industry, where we provide our acoustic drive modules to be integrated into the main device, while our separation modules, so the chip where the actual separation of cells or blood occurs, is integrated into a cartridge that can be a consumable in some cases or in other cases a semi-consumable. For the cell therapy space, everything is a consumable since there are samples going back into the patients. For the blood diagnostic field, the components are most often semi-consumables, where you will use the unit several times before it's discarded and a new cartridge is used.
If we look at what one partnership would mean for AcouSort, if we become a OEM provider of our technology to a partner within the point-of-care diagnostic field, we have estimated that one partnership could generate an annual revenue of OEM sales of around $5 million-$10 million. For the cell therapy space, we see that one partnership could bring up to $10 million-$60 million. The model is a little bit different in the two cases. In the cell therapy case, we see that there are fewer doses per year, but each dose is more costly compared to the diagnostic field. In the diagnostic field, you make a lot of measurements, but each measurement doesn't come at the same cost as in the cell therapy space. Wrapping up my presentation here today, why would you invest in AcouSort?
I think AcouSort is a very interesting case. We now have a validated technology. Our technology is built into the Werfen GEM7000 system, approved by FDA for diagnostic use. We see interest from both the diagnostic field and from the therapeutic field in looking into new technologies to be able to automate sample preparation, which of course is something that benefits our sales of OEM modules and our building up of new collaborations. That is also something that we've seen over the last years that we have a lot more engagement from life science companies, especially within the cell therapy space, but also from diagnostic companies and then from the flow cytometry field.
Lastly, by providing our components as semi-consumable or consumable OEM modules, while a product goes to the market and our technology is built into that system, you will generate the recurring revenue by selling the consumables to the company. By that, I will finish my presentation here today. Thank you so much for listening in, and I'll be really, really happy to answer some questions.
Yes, I can see that Dennis has written a few questions in the chat. Do you want me to read them out loud, maybe? Been a while since we heard news about these collaborations. Could you run over them in terms of still being active or if you feel like they have downprioritized their project?
Yeah, sure. We have a few different collaborations in the cell therapy space.
We have our largest collaboration that we have been communicating on in, I think it was in the Q4 report, where we have been having discussions with the company for quite a while now regarding the next steps. The status there is still the same. We have not moved on with these discussions due to any new formalized collaborations. For the US-based cell therapy company, they are really, really active at the moment. They bought a couple of evaluation kits early on that was delivered early on this year. These evaluation kits, they are now building into their device. They are sort of up and running with that. We expect that to be ongoing for a while more before there are any news to tell about that.
For the European cell therapy company, I know that they have been in a funding round lately, and we don't quite know how that has been going for them. That collaboration has not been happening that much in the last month. On the flow cytometry side, we have a couple of US-based companies where we're still having discussions. One of them is working quite actively with an evaluation kit they bought a while ago, but we haven't got any clear details on how they are planning to move on. I'm sure there are a few more. I don't quite remember exactly which ones, but.
Yeah, I think we can move on to a follow-up question there on the collaboration. What constitutes a collaboration? Is there always anything written or any monetary transaction going towards AcouSort?
Yes, usually when we communicate a collaboration, it's either that we have entered into a collaboration agreement around looking into application development or product development. In most cases, when we refer to a collaboration, we refer to something where we have been generating revenue from the collaborations. Either where we have sold a feasibility study, where we have sold a rental contract for an AcouWash system for someone to evaluate the technology, or where we have sold evaluation kits.
Let's see here. About David Chantz, what is his function?
AcouSort is continuously looking into new financial options for the company. We have since autumn been looking into ways of connecting with investors outside of Sweden. A person like David is one of the options that we may use to be able to connect with larger investment firms.
This is something that we will continue on even after this round of funding to make sure that we can build up relations with more investors and secure potential future funding of the company.
Yeah. About AcouSome, status on single-use plasma module.
Yeah, the AcouSome project is an innovation project that is funded by EIC. In the AcouSome project, we work with looking into how we can transfer our technology to plastic modules that could be consumables. It is a combination of using polymer chips and using another type of piezoelectric material to actuate and create the sound in the cuvettes. The project is moving on.
We have seen some positive examples of how you can use the plastic modules to generate acoustic separation, whereas today it's still not as efficient as the separation we can do in the glass chips. The project will continue for another year, and we will continue to focus on developing that together with our university partners.
Do you need any additional funding to see those modules going forward?
I think that is a little bit too early to see. I think we need to evaluate if we believe that they will, in the short term, be good enough to replace the glass modules we have today. In parallel, we are looking into other options of decreasing the manufacturing cost for the glass modules as an alternative to moving into plastics as well.
Is it still scheduled to be market-ready in 2026?
I don't think we've ever mentioned that the AcouSome module would be market-ready in 2026, to be honest. The AcouSome project is finishing in 2026. There will be some kind of conclusion of the project by 2026, but I would not expect a market-ready product from that project.
Yeah. Which value inflection events do you see in the funded period?
We are running several collaborations that I think have good potential, where we have very engaged partners that are spending significant time on evaluating our technology for fit into their products or their new products. What we are hoping for, of course, is that at least one or two of these would develop into true commercial collaborations where we can sign contracts with the companies in the coming years.
However, this is very difficult for us to predict how that is moving because we are, as you may know, not in control of the decisions made by the companies in how to proceed with different projects. We are continuously trying to strengthen and build out our collaborations with companies, and we are actively trying to seek out companies that we believe are suitable for AcouSort to collaborate with when it comes to building new OEM collaborations. We do a lot of personal reach-outs to persons that are having suitable roles at companies that we would like to collaborate with.
We do a lot of email campaigning to all people we meet at conferences, and we try to visit as many conferences as we can accommodate and pinpoint the people we believe are the right collaboration partners for AcouSort at these conferences and schedule meetings with them before we go to the conferences to maximize our exposure at the conferences.
With regards to the collaborations, how do you view the likelihood of success with the two core collaborations beside Werfen, being the EU, FCM, and the major city partner?
I think there is a good opportunity that we can continue these collaborations, but with both of these companies, we are in a discussion phase on how to continue. Before we have concluded these discussions, I think it's quite difficult for us to know how that will end up.
It's always difficult, as I said before, to know how decisions are going in these types of companies and if they decide to proceed with product development projects that are ongoing or if they suddenly change their strategies.
Do you see continued interest in feasibility studies to support the partner funnel?
We do see an interest in feasibility projects. We also see that with the development we've done over the last year when it comes to improving the performance of our technology, especially the work we've done on the AcouWash technology in the last two to three years when it comes to bringing up the performance of the chips so we now can run around 4-5 milliliters per minute instead of running around 400-500 microliters per minute.
We can also see that with the products that we provide now, the need for bringing big feasibility studies in is slightly smaller than it used to be. Before, any customer we talked to almost needed to have a feasibility project to be able to evaluate if the technology would be useful for them. With the new development we have done, especially with the test kits we have built up, it is easier for us to tie connections with new customers without having to do feasibility studies. I think this is a positive development because the more customers that we can reach out to that can efficiently by themselves evaluate the technology, the more potential partners we have in our system that can convert into OEM collaborations.
What would the cost be for the hospital with an automated CAR-T treatment using AcouSort technology?
That is a question that I have a little bit of a hard time to answer because AcouSort will not be the one providing the final instrument to the hospital. That will be our collaboration partners that are building in AcouSort technology into their devices, and they will be the ones that are providing the final device to the hospital. That is something that we have not been discussing with them, what they are planning to charge for the devices.
Okay. The stock has had a small performance in recent years despite the Werfen launch and new evolution and research collaborations. Wish to gain a better insight into issues such as, one, when do you estimate that a break-even point for positive cash flow could occur? Two, what milestones in the next two to three years are expected to significantly improve cash flow?
I think these are questions that you have to ask to us, Torsten. I'm afraid that I will not be able to answer these questions today.
What is the likelihood that Werfen would outsource part of production to AcouSort for the hemolysis module?
The discussions we had with Werfen is that they will keep all production in-house during the launch period and until they feel confident that the performance of the system is robust and as expected. First, when they have reached that point, they will be interested in discussing outsourcing of manufacturing with other partners. They have expressed before that AcouSort, of course, is one of the sort of top players for that, but where we are today, they have not made any indications on timing on when they would be outsourcing the manufacturing.
Was the module shown on the front page of David's pitch, our new CT cartridge?
No, that is not the new CT cartridge. That's an example picture of how such a cartridge may look. It is not AcouSort technology that is shown on that picture.
Could you maybe elaborate on the capabilities of the new cartridge?
I mean, that cartridge is just a picture to display how such a cartridge may look. In reality, the systems are usually a little bit more complex than that, where AcouSort's module would sit in between different stages in the manufacturing process. With the collaborations we are today, we have not been designing any specific completely enclosed cartridges yet.
AcouSort has mentioned in the PM that you're viewing new candidates for the board. How is that work going?
That I think is also a question for Torsten.
I'm not involved in the selection of board members.
Then we have some questions regarding your lack of participation in the transaction. I don't know if you want to comment on that.
Yeah. As you may know, the employees of AcouSort, like myself, are sort of regular employees and not investors. We usually don't sit on much capital. People put their money into paying off the mortgages of the houses, for example. I think people are really, really keen. I mean, my experience from working here for several years is that everyone is really passionate about the company, but most of us don't have any funds to participate in emission processes like this.
Let's see. I think that we have checked off all the questions. If not, please write the questions again in the chat, and I will read them out loud.
Any news from any of our three KOLs?
Yes, sure. There are quite a bit of news, I think. Alfonso has been working really intensely with the AcouTrap system in Dublin. As you may know, we are part of the Everest project as well, which is a staff exchange project for promoting extracellular vesicle research all across Europe. So far, the development that Alfonso had been doing has been presented at posters in several smaller conferences around Ireland. For Vera, she has been working a lot with the AcouWash system lately and been producing some really, really nice data that she will present at SIPO in the poster as well. What I see with these key opinion leader collaborations is that, of course, we see that they will end up being publications in the future, but it's also a really good way.
Both Vera and Alfonso have tight connections with many of the big flow cytometry companies. For me, that's another way of benefiting from having the key opinion leader collaborations, apart from that they talk with their colleagues and say that, "Hey, have you tried the AcouWash system? It's really nice and it's working so well. Look at my nice data." Of course, if they are really happy with the technology, they have another channel into these companies that we are not collaborating with today, but we would like to collaborate, which is significantly stronger than I try to call them up, that some of their collaboration partners that they themselves have selected promote AcouSort technology. I think we've had good development. In Van Andel Institute, they are up and running with the system, but they have not had time to run as much as the other groups.
Perfect.
Let's see if there's any other questions here. Can you give an indication or guess as to when AcouSort will be net positive?
That is also something that I think you will have to ask Torsten directly.
I can just throw in a question here. Can you tell us a little bit about how far the proceeds from the share issue will take you?
Yes. The proceeds from the share issue, we have secured it to 73%, and at a minimum, that would bring us to the end of 2026 if you count in the revenue that we know that we will receive from Werfen's royalties and other secured fundings. We will still continue working with investor relations and trying to find alternative ways of financing the company for potential future needs during this period. We will continue working on that.
Thank you.
Let's see if there's any other questions here from the group. Why would I invest at 4 SEK in the emission when I can buy it cheaper in the market? Maybe short pitch.
I think it's, as I said before, I'm really, really passionate about AcouSort and the technology. And of course, I mean, if you can buy shares cheaper in the market, I see that investing in the company at a higher price is hard to motivate. To support the company and to make sure that the fantastic technology that we have can continue being evolved and developed into true products, I think that that would be the sort of value of investing in AcouSort. I really see the potential in developing the company. I think that the business model we have with providing OEM modules is attractive for the future.
Any more questions?
California, what's the status on that?
We've had a few different discussions in California. We currently have one CellFRP collaboration that is US-based and based out of California, which is proceeding. If you refer to the collaboration with the flow cytometry company we've had, they have had other priorities for quite some while, and the status there is the same. I think that has been communicated in one of the quarterly reports quite a while back now, but the status there remains the same. They are really interested and keen on the technology, but they are developing a lot of products themselves that they need to focus on.
With regards to flow cytometry, how do you view the potential for OEM partnerships?
We see a lot of interest from the flow cytometry companies for looking into better ways of preparing samples, especially companies that are working with these advanced flow cytometers, where they need to have a higher sample quality and less debris in the samples. There we see that there is a lot of interest, but we also see that it's quite slow-moving. Some of the discussions we've had for several years, and they are still poking interest, and we are having discussions, but the speed of the project of starting up a larger project seems to be quite slow. I think we will need to continue pushing them and continue to interact with them and reaching out to new people in the companies when we meet their demands. It seems to be a lot of interest, but quite slow on action.
Okay.
We have been involved from the start, have lost 60-70% of our investments, and you still think it is reasonable that we should support the company above market price?
I think that is a common question, Julia, that I have a little bit of a difficult time to answer.
Yeah. Any other questions? I guess not, but if you have any more questions, you are welcome to contact Agnes or Torsten directly or us at Carnegie. Thank you very much for listening in, and thank you, Agnes, for a good presentation and good answers.
Thank you all.
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Nice bye.