To introduce our next presentation here at Planet MicroCap Toronto 2026, powered by MicroCapClub. Introducing Microbix, we have Cameron Groome.
Great. Thank you so much. Appreciate everybody coming this morning, and give you a review of Microbix and what we do and why you should be interested. Microbix is very central to ensuring that medical diagnostic tests work. I can have great confidence that of everybody in the room, you have been impacted by one or more of our products. Pardon me, can I?
There's a button on the number pad.
Oh, thank you. You have been impacted by one or more of our products if you or any member of your family has had a medical diagnostic test for any kind of infection. I am just going to give it a moment pause to see if the presentation can be put up on the projection screen. Thank you.
Can I get support with that?
Should have an extend screen or duplicate screen setting there.
What just happened?
We'll just duplicate the screen.
Just duplicate screen. Thank you.
No problem.
There you go. Thank you so much. Again, we're involved in the medical diagnostics field, principally. We also have our own rights to an FDA-approved biological drug that dissolves blood clots that is very clinically relevant and will be returning to market over the next couple of years. Some very impactful things. I won't dwell on forward-looking statements, but you know what they mean. We're supporting. Excuse me, the screen is down again.
Very strange. Okay. All right.
Great, and if we could go to full screen, please.
Yes.
Great, thanks. See if this continues to bedevil us throughout. Otherwise, I will just forgo the screen altogether. So we are supporting next-generation diagnostics, and if you get a medical test, you would like to think you can take it on faith that it actually is accurate, but it is not the case. Medical tests have very complex workflows, a lot of moving parts, literally and figuratively. It is incredibly important that both the test ingredients are exquisitely refined and pure to make the test, and that you are regularly challenging the people doing the testing, to make sure that that testing is accurate and that errors in testing, which do inevitably occur, are caught. That is what we do. We are very well established in this business.
We have built a lot of infrastructure in this business, and we are teed up to be securing new major multinational clients for different projects to move that forward. I will get into more details. We are a market cap in the CAD 40-odd million range. Revenues of our company for this year are in the CAD 16 million to CAD 17 million range, having a down year due to some client issues.
A very good balance sheet. We do have equity research coverage from Bloom Burton, which is a life sciences specialized investment bank, as well as company commissioned research from a former equity research department director, Bruce Krugel. Leadership team is great. We have some very good bench strength, so if I were to be hit by either a lottery ticket or a bus, the company will continue on very nicely, thank you. So good bench strength, resilience, and succession planning.
We also have an experienced independent board of directors with expertise ranging from Merck and Bayer to Johns Hopkins, generics industry, government relations, and medical affairs. Two main elements of our business are antigens, and these are test ingredients. These are purified and inactivated viruses and bacteria that actually need to go into certain medical tests of the form that are looking for antibodies in your blood. So we literally enable millions to tens of millions of infectious disease diagnostic tests to be manufactured, and are one of very few companies in the world with this capability, and fewer still with it at scale. We also are creating and manufacturing mimetics of positive and sometimes negative patient samples so those tests can be challenged to ensure that they work.
Some of our test ingredients covering a number of important disease categories, and our test quality controls, as I mentioned, a growing area for us that are critical for the adoption of tests and are a real growth market for us. Our partner companies and our clients include names you would know, firms like Abbott, Becton Dickinson, which is now Waters, Roche, Cepheid, Danaher, and major accreditation organizations, the auditors for the labs, as it were, our customers, groups like American Proficiency Institute, the College of American Pathologists, and Labquality in Scandinavia, as well as others. These are just disclosed collaborations. Our customer list is of course broader than that, and we're very active globally. Over 95% of our sales are exports, split between the U.S., Western Europe, Scandinavia, and actually Australia and the Indo-Pacific as well, and a growing presence in South America also.
Where we sit is really at a junction between our customers in the diagnostics industry and their markets. Our customers range between what are called the external quality assessment or EQA agencies. These are, as I mentioned, those agencies that actually challenge the labs at regular intervals with blinded packages of our products, and the labs will be challenged. They'll get a box and say, "These are 20 different respiratory infections. Tell us what they are. These are 20 different gastrointestinal pathogens. Tell us what they are." Unless the labs get all of them correct, they need to get all of them correct in order to continue to be certified to do that testing and to get reimbursed for that testing. Again, our product's very central to making sure lab tests are accurate and are moving forward. We also sell to the test manufacturers.
These are the large multinational brand name companies as well as smaller niche operations, and then to a growing extent, to the clinical labs themselves. For many years, we were the unknown Intel Inside, the transmission in the Mercedes that you've never heard of the maker of that, but we're growing and selling a growing proportion of our products to end users where it's actually our name on the label, which starts to build the value of our brand and our franchise as well. Those can be for what are called research use only or lab-developed tests, where the labs are not using a brand name test but are using something home brew to save money. They can be for the FDA-approved diagnostic tests or EMA-approved diagnostic tests, and they are to a growing extent to the point-of-care tests.
Rather than having an instrument, a fully automated instrument that takes up a whole wall of a clinical laboratory, there can be toaster or even smartphone-sized instruments that do complex molecular diagnostics at non-traditional sites, and those can be small neighborhood clinics, doctor's offices, long-term care homes, schools, cruise ships, mine sites, prisons, all these non-traditional settings where labs can be tested. Well, you've got to have some way to know is the technician making errors? Is the instrument failing? Are the reagents spoiled? Again, that's where our products become central to that. I'll take a pause for a moment to talk about as well our FDA-approved drug. We have tremendous expertise in different elements of cell culture and complex biologicals, and we found an opportunity to actually acquire the drug master file for an FDA-approved biopharmaceutical.
For that product, we needed to validate new manufacturing to bring it back to market for its different clinical indications, one of which is dissolving blood clots in venous catheters. Somebody with a central venous catheter for chemotherapy or nutrition, somebody with a dialysis catheter, some of these can be indwelling for months at a time and get blood clots in them, and this drug dissolves those blood clots. We brought this into the firm. We did not want to dilute shareholders by raising the CAD 50 million + it would take to bring it back to market. We have actually partnered this project with US Private Equity. We are putting up 100% of the funding, and we will actually be clipping milestones as well as ongoing double-digit royalties for this product. Really a kicker on the diagnostics business that is the day-to-day of our company.
From a manufacturing and infrastructure point of view between our diagnostics business and our interests in the therapeutics, we have a very real operating company. We have 120 staff, three operational facilities based in Mississauga, Ontario. Actually doing a little investor site visit on Friday afternoon if anybody has interest. There we manufacture about 400 different products that we make and sell around the world for those lab purposes that I mentioned. Plenty of capacity built up, and this is where it starts to get exciting, is we are actually working with major multinational companies on their next generation of assays where our products will be embedded in them in different formats, particularly on the test control side. These can be in the liquid vials to emulate a patient sample.
They can be on a swab to emulate other forms of samples or even as molecular pathology type samples as well. Quite a bit goes on with our business, and you could see just some of the things that we have been able to disclose over the past months. We have welcomed the College of American Pathologists, the real ultimate arbiter of test quality as a client. We have advanced our drug product. We are creating leading-edge reference materials for supporting things like the cervical cancer screening, the migration of that from 1950s cytology Pap testing to PCR-based molecular testing, and are also supporting cutting-edge work in validating tests for even RNA viruses where we can use synthetic biology to safely emulate even the most dangerous viruses, but without ever having to work with the native organisms. Again, really advancing a lot of cutting-edge science that drives the business.
This slide is a bit of an eye test, but as a takeaway, it is available on our website. You can see very much how we have been systematically building the capabilities of our company, and as some of the comments of yesterday's presenters really emulate, many small caps become a 10-year overnight success story, and I think you would see that the fundamentals that we built on our business are really quite extensive to be able to realize opportunities with large multinational partners that I am hopeful we will bring to ground in the coming months.
Financials have been a little bit up and down. We had two clients fall off in the same quarter in mid-2025 and have been rebuilding our revenues from about CAD 10 million lighter than I would have hoped at this point. We will be around between CAD 16.5 million and CAD 17 million for our fiscal 2026.
Our break-even point is about 22, so we have a modest burn rate currently, but really positioning for those capabilities. The real way we will be growing things out is in leveraging our existing relationships, the capacity and capabilities we have built, and the new markets. It is really building first capabilities, then capacity, and those two then build the credibility with major international partners that we can become a fully validated supply chain partner. We have actually announced that in September that we completed with five of the 10 largest diagnostics companies in the world. We have fully validated as an audited and fully qualified supplier where they have actually come in and done detailed evaluations of our quality systems and our capabilities that make us eligible for large projects with them.
How will we grow over the next while expanding with existing customers, adding new customers, growing our product portfolio, and benefiting from industry structural tailwinds. This is the capabilities that you see emerging with cutting-edge science, and it is also the greater rigor that is being brought to bear by regulators, whether it is in the U.S. or Europe or Scandinavia or elsewhere, on making sure tests work. I will give you a personal example. Last fall, I just suddenly felt like death and realized I had strep throat. I go to my GP and what does he say to me. He says, "Well, Cam, you know the test that I have to run is garbage. I know the test I have to run is garbage.
After we run it and it gives us the wrong result, I will give you the prescription you need." Sure enough, I tested negative when we both knew that I was positive for strep throat and got an amoxicillin prescription and 24 hours later felt reborn. That is not a situation that we want to see. It is not a situation where you want your tax dollars going for a test that everyone knows doesn't work. We also don't want to see situations, for example, where other tests for cervical cancer, for example, there are 14 types of the human papillomavirus that are completely demonstrated, proven to cause cancer.
The way testing has been done historically, you wait for those viruses to actually transform the cells in the cervix, and that can be in other parts of the body and even in men as well, to create cancer cells and then a pathologist looks and says, "Geez, these cells are transforming into cancer or they have transformed." You can use testing to go 5- 10 years earlier and say somebody has a persistent infection with HPV. It is not a judgment. Everybody in this room has been exposed to it. It is just whether your immune system cleared it or not. With those tests, you can get the jump on something by a decade if you do it right. If you don't do it right, you are given a false sense of security, and cancers can advance and become much more serious.
All technology, it's that double-edged sword. If you do it well, huge benefits. If you do it poorly, much less so. That's very much where we're benefiting. Where would I give you some takeaways about our business? We'll have some good time for questions, I think, here. One, we have a very well-established platform with global customers. You can go onto our publications on our website and our disclosures of collaborations. We have a very clear path to expanding our business based on the relationships that we built and are building with major multinational players, and those are the Abbotts, the Becton Dickinsons, the Roches, and so forth, as well as the LifeLabs and Quests and Labcorps and others. We have tremendous operating leverage from existing infrastructure.
Good margins already, but as we move from smaller run to larger run manufacturing, those margins start to expand vastly. We have the additional upside from our partnered therapeutic asset, which is the clot buster drug Kinlytic, and that should be kicking in in 2028 or thereabouts from a revenue perspective. Again, extensive group of individuals that we have a great group of qualified scientists, technicians, and staff that you see a picture of our group from last year's Christmas party. The one with the hat, with the bald head is me. Just a great team of people around. We have about five minutes left for questions, and I'd be delighted to take them from you. Yes, sir.
I think there's a new product line in development in diagnostics, QUANTDx, and I think you mentioned that it could potentially be as big as QAPs. Can you maybe just give a little bit more details on what gives you the confidence about it and so on?
Yeah. Well, for a lot of testing, it's becoming more and more apparent that quantification is important, not just a yes/no answer on a test, but being able to quantify the amount of signal you're getting from a test. For example, if you're testing somebody for HPV, I'll use that example, and you get a high copy number of virus, that's interesting. But what do you interpret from that data? We're getting a little bit, I'll geek out for a moment here, a little bit into the weeds, but are you getting a high signal from a small sample, means a very advanced cancer potentially, or are you getting a high signal from a huge sample, which might mean less, it might mean it's less advanced.
You really have to have both the numerator and the denominator in a lot of cases for testing to really understand what the signal means. Those QUANTDx samples that we provide let the test developers target their tests better, develop their tests, and get a more refined answer and signal on that. Again, that next generation of diagnostics, and also getting us embedded earlier with the development of tests by providing those reference materials. They can also be used inside the cartridge of each test, as well as the QAPs, the controls that are included in a box of test cartridges. Again, perhaps in every cartridge rather than one of our products in every box of cartridges. Hope that helps.
Yeah. I have one more question.
Yeah.
Can you provide more or elaborate on these add-on vials that are embedded in the QAPs? What is it about? Just give more substance than this slide about being embedded.
Sure. I will just provide some visual examples here. For example, I do not want to traumatize everybody, but many of you probably remember the infamous COVID swabs, for example.
For 19, 18 and older.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, famous instance in Birmingham, England, half a million COVID tests were run in a certain area around that, and they were getting 2% positive rate. Then people started to scratch their head and say, "Gosh, why is it only 2% positivity in this area where all around, all the counties around are getting 8% positivity?" They realized they were missing 6%-10% positive testing rate in that area and literally had tens of thousands of people told, "No, you don't have COVID. Go back to your job in the ICU. Go back to your job in the nursing home. Go visit your sick relative." And killed people. If they had been using a positive control from Microbix to actually check whether those tests were working, they would've caught that right away.
It is that kind of product that we are providing, not just for respiratory testing, but for a whole variety of tests and in different formats. These could be in liquids, these could be in swabs, these could be as tissue sample mimetics even to control things like genetics testing and cancer pathology as well. So these are the sorts of products we provide. I think I am down to the last minute. If there is another quick question, I could probably address it.
On the Kinlytic side, what makes you confident that it will take market share? I guess there is already an incumbent product out there. I think you mentioned before that they like to have diversity of supply. So, looking out five years, what would you think of the unit market share Kinlytic would be?
I think we should be able to capture 40% of unit volume at a combination of a better product, frustrated customers that want better pricing and supply chain security, and we have room temperature stability where they do not. So some very good advantages. Thank you. I am at time. Thanks, everyone.