We're going to kick it off. I'm Tycho Peterson. It's my pleasure to introduce Bruker. Frank, maybe just to kick it off, you know, came out of ASMS earlier this week, the biggest conference for you guys for the mass spec side of the business. Maybe just talk a little bit about some of the highlights there. You've got a couple of new product cycles that could be pretty meaningful.
Yes, indeed. Thank you, Tycho. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for all hanging in there. It's post 5:00 somewhere. Yeah, we just came in from Baltimore late last night. That's, of course, where the ASMS was and still is going on. It was the most important set of product introductions and innovations from Bruker, actually, I think, at the conference period, but also from Bruker since 2017, when we introduced the timsTOF for bottom-up proteomics to begin with. We introduced many additional solutions and software and chromatography. I won't go into that, but we introduced three major new products, all related to our timsTOF platform, which is really foundational for a lot of this multi-omics and other applications. I'll put them into three market categories for you that may help you. It's not just technology and applications.
The first one is in the traditional bottom-up proteomics. That's what we call proteomics. It's all bottom-up, meaning you digest your proteins, you take the peptide, the tryptic peptide fragments, you stitch them back together with software. That's what we generally call mass spec-based proteomics. We and Team Red are sort of a two-horse race there. They've done some innovation. We launched a new product called tims Ultra and AIP. AIP is a new Bruker name for an Athena Ion Processor. Don't worry what that is. It was developed in Athens, Greece, by a very capable team that we acquired a few years ago. It improves MS/MS sensitivity and bandwidth and gives you more peptides and proteins. Is that still important? I mean, more protein groups is always good.
We showed together with one of the new LCs that another smaller company brought to the market, the EvoSep Eno, some very high throughput towards 500 samples per day. That is all good. I would call that on the proteomics, as you can tell from publications, and the market is growing beautifully. The technology is now getting a little bit into the technology S curve is flattening again. Yeah, more throughput, more samples per day, more protein groups. We do all of that. The one area where the timsTOF Ultra AIP is still really differentiating itself, and I think it makes a difference, is Sensitivity. Sensitivity, it is further improvements. I think it is already the most sensitive instrument out there. Its predecessor, and now it is even more so.
For instance, in single-cell proteomics, years ago, we were amazed that we could do proteomics on a single HeLa cell, a cancer cell line. Today, those cells, we can now go to small bacterial to small immune cells. One collaborator even did precursor red blood cells, which are tiny. They're something like 25 times smaller than the big fat HeLa cells. Yeah, we can do proteomics on all of that now. We can also do subcellular proteomics. In that space where that has advanced so rapidly and become much more than a niche, it's become a major subfield of proteomics. Pushing further actually does make a difference. I'll give you one other example, and then I'll move on. In immuno-oncology, people take fine needle aspirates from individual patients. You don't get a whole lot of cells.
If that is enough cells to do the neoantigen discovery with a field called Immunopeptidomics, which we do very well on our instruments, we can do that even better. Now we can do it on patient-relevant sample and cell numbers that come out of fine needle aspirate. This really facilitates these wonderful, promising approaches to go into individual patients, clinical research at least, and clinical trials. Sensitivity still matters. You know, for us, this timsTOF proteomics, timsTOF business is about a $200 million business. It's a two-horse race. We're innovating very significantly. Team Red also had some nice new introductions. We took out, leveraged this TIMS technology for an even larger market that is more competitive, a little bit more red ocean, as I would call it. That is the high-resolution, accurate mass market for small molecules.
That has applied markets such as PFAS research or novel psychoactive substances or therapeutic drug monitoring and environmental and applied and toxicology applications. It's a huge market. On the other hand of that is the omics market, which is metabolomics, lipidomics. We estimate that that market is another billion-dollar market opportunity in which we so far have only, we did not have a dedicated instrument, so we were a very minimal presence in that. That's a busy market. Thermo, Sciex, Waters, Agilent are all in it. Who needs a fifth player? We have some very importantly differentiated new product offering with the what I call game-changing timsM etabo instrument that we launched. That's a benchtop instrument very much targeted for that market. It's 10 times more sensitive, always at speed, at scale, at depth. These are table stakes. What really differentiates us is the specificity and this 4D.
What does this 4D mean anyway? Four dimensions. We have these incredibly complex haystacks in the omics world in general. Metabolomics is the most challenging in a way because when you start with thousands of peaks initially, and this may surprise you, you probably can only annotate or identify maybe 15%, maybe 20%. Very different from proteomics, where you should identify most of the tryptic peptides. Metabolomics, there is a huge dark metabolome, and many of these peaks cannot be annotated. We do not know what they are. Getting the biggest pain point is annotation confidence, us being able to take apart peaks that are strictly overlapping, that have exactly the same mass in the mass spectrometer, but different molecular shapes with our TIMS technology, which gives us an additional dimension of separation.
It also gives us another molecular attribute that's really good for very high-quality AI and machine learning and for what we now call, with that 4D quality and differentiation, the digital metabolome archive. You can analyze it now, but you might want to accumulate that data and maybe search it again with AI a few years from now when you have a lot more data or maybe some new questions. So timsM etabo, what does it mean financially? I think within a few years, this could double the market opportunity if we have $200 million now, sort of mostly in proteomics, and that's growing very nicely. I think we could have an equal amount if we gain that market share of maybe just 20% in that market.
I think we should be, we should have a really fair chance at that because we have something very differentiated, and it addresses the key pain point. It's not some spec that doesn't matter. I think it really matters to customers. Last but not least, it's been quite an ASMS. This is obviously the most innovation we've driven. Check our press releases. We don't, we never, ever, just about never, ever use the word revolutionary. We launched a revolutionary new mass spectrometer called the tims Omni. T ims Omni is a combination of our timsTOF technology and a technology developed by another very capable, small technology company called Omnitrap, which is sort of a structural Swiss Army knife. That structural Swiss Army knife, coupled with our high-speed, very sensitive TIMS technology, cleverly called tims Omni i, so people know right away what it does.
That is a new category of mass spectrometer that opens up what I would call maybe Proteomics 2.0, doing proteomics top-down with intact proteins, not breaking the vase and stitching the puzzle pieces or the piece of broken pieces back together, but really working your way through intact proteins, industrial enzymes. Profiling antibodies or looking or sequencing parts of an antibody or of a chromatin or other types of molecules. It allows sort of a protein-centric protein science at a level of specificity that's impossible today. Much more importantly, that's kind of the new, that's finally the era of functional proteomics. We do not just look at protein groups. We look at the fully dressed, modified, glycosylated, whatever it may be, maybe otherwise mutated.
Of course, we call that an amino acid substitution, proteins that have the biological function or that may have the pathological function or that may be a much better cancer marker or neurodegeneration marker than what we've seen so far with protein groups. That's blue ocean. There is no competition there. The field's been fledgling around for 20 years, but we're really blowing this open with an instrument that can do it with sensitivity, at depth, at speed, at scale, and with the software to deal with this incredibly complex data. Pretty exciting, really missionary. We have to develop that market. That'll be the beginning of the S curve, is always shallow. It'll take a while for that market to develop. Maybe next year, that's just two dozen instruments, but at a million and a half, that adds up to.
Who knows, in five or seven years, maybe that's as big as the bottom-up proteomics market is, this functional Proteomics 2.0. You'll also hear it as top-down or as proteoform market. It kind of means the same thing. Sorry, I'll stop there. Not to take up all the time, but now you've had the broad side. It was really the most significant innovation and meaningful innovation that almost tripled our addressable markets over time in the omics world, if you like.
Super. I want to maybe step back a minute and address some of the backdrop, the macro. I'm sure you've probably gotten the NIH question all day long, but you got it academic down 20-25%. You know, that had previously been about 10% of revenues. A couple of questions there. Is your mix consumables, instruments within academic kind of consistent with overall corporate?
Are you kind of doing anything different in terms of how you're allocating resources? Are you shifting more R&D and other resources toward pharma, diagnostics, and industrial? Is having visibility and resolution on the 2026 budget enough to get that market to start spending again, even if we're down 20% or so next year?
Three softball questions. Thank you very much. Okay, I'll try to take them in that series. The aftermarket in consumables in academia can be a little bit lower, although, of course, some of the diagnostics tends to be in academic medical centers, but it's really in hospitals. It's probably more of the hospital market. It's probably a little bit lower than on average. I don't have a number for you, actually, but it's a little bit lower than on average.
Also, academia sometimes does not get service contracts in pharma or diagnostic laboratories almost always get service contracts. The reallocation of resources, yeah, no, I mean, it's not a coincidence that the timsM etabo can do metabolomics and lipidomics, but it can also do a lot of applied markets, including new diagnostic applications, maybe initially as LDT and things like forensics and toxicology, because that doesn't depend so much on ACA GAV budgets. Even the tims Omni, we expect about one-third of these systems initially to go even right off the bat. Yes, it's a new technology, but it'll be incredibly useful for Biopharma in making very crucial decisions, whether to advance a therapeutic program or to ask for more data or maybe to freeze it or discontinue it or divest it or so.
I think it provides very crucial decision-making information, whether it's a protein target, whether it's biologic drugs. Oh, by the way, it also is great for these RNA drugs. We had a customer from the University of Geneva, but she works on a lot of these modified oligonucleotide drugs with pharmaceutical collaborators. It's very, very good for that. It will even be used in very advanced at-line bioprocessing, not in the processing workflow per se, but biological processes. You've got to monitor their heterogeneity. These processes can evolve and drift away on you over time, or you may find, "Oh my God, only half of my biologics are actually therapeutically efficacious and are active, and the other ones may have some glycosylation or modification," which makes them hopefully not toxic, but they may not have the efficacy of the main compound that you would like.
I think this goes into Biopharma pretty quickly, into drug discovery and development mostly, but also probably in some very high-level troubleshooting and at-line bioprocessing. Those are some good examples that come to mind.
Just on the budgeting process, uncertainty obviously now, but I guess is having visibility and resolution on that budget for next year enough to get customers to start to spend, even if we're down?
They'll spend some this year, but it's greatly depressed. I mean, grants that will go down and it's greatly reduced and they're all slowed down in NIH and NSF, but some grants will come out at the other end of that. If a PI gets a grant, they'll spend it probably pretty quickly, right? There is some greatly reduced spending this year.
A resolution of what the NIH, but also NSF budget decrease will be for next year is on everybody's mind. Obviously, 40% for NIH in that case would be a bad outcome, and that would be, that could make next year even weaker. We don't expect that, but we don't know either. If it comes out at minus 20%, we'll say, "Yeah, okay, that's what we expected." I would expect '26 to be maybe not down further from '25, but also not a rebound from '25 on U.S. ACA/GAV. If it was down 10%, I might almost be happy. That's a strong word. I would be pleased because it could have been worse. Generally, we are, because we don't know, and this may get all resolved in September, but then again, there is Republican-Republican disputes and infighting, if you like.
We may, even with one-party rule temporarily, we may not have a budget in time. This could drag on for a while. That would not be good. Uncertainty is never good. We, Bruker, what are we doing? We are preparing for a moderate growth year 2026. Cannot give guidance today. We do not have enough feasibility to do it anyway. If we are normally in a normalized year, whenever that happens, grow, expect to outgrow the market at 200-300 bps . That is our goal. We think our high-growth portfolio can do that. That implies 6-8% organic growth. This year, 0-2% because of all the headwinds. We are expecting something in between for 2026 from what we see right now.
With that moderate growth, we, Bruker, are very committed and are working towards still delivering very significant margin expansion and very significant, hopefully, mid-teens or higher EPS growth. That is why we are taking very meaningful additional cost out in cost of sales in terms of taking some of our European sites, for instance, to an 80% workweek. There are mechanisms over there that you do not actually have layoffs, but they get paid by the government temporarily for a few quarters and then can snap back, go back to 100% or overtime. We have had that in the past. You do not have to rehire and retrain. We are also taking out G&A cost from some of the acquisitions we did. We think we can squeeze out, not even squeeze out, just get more from the integration. We did a successful ERP transition with S/4 HANA that was raised at lunch.
Yes, that worked, and we're still in business. We did that in early May. It's always a little nerve-wracking, but we're everything within, literally within a few days. Factories were all running and procurements running, so it looks all very good. We're taking some R&D cost out. What you saw at AGBT and AACR for spatial biology, what you've seen now in mass spectrometry, if you paid attention to ASMS, what you saw in our microbiology and molecular diagnostics, this is probably the peak of R&D spending this year. It's not going to go from 11%- 7% because then we would be underspending on this post-genomic era and other opportunities that we have, but it'll begin to lever off, and there's no holy cows. We'll do that as well.
Yes, we'll thin out some of our marketing and sales and commercial organization a little bit in response, for instance, in the U.S. to slower demand. That's not going to just snap back in 2026. That's the setup.
Maybe talk about some of the markets where you're feeling better. Semiconductor has been a nice growth driver for you. We talked at lunch about defense and some of the new opportunities there. Maybe just talk about some of the strengths in the end markets.
Yeah, some of our other idiosyncratic drivers. We have a small defense and homeland security detection business that's sort of radiological, chemical, chemical warfare agents and other toxins or toxic small compounds and explosives at airports. Normally that's sort of a $30 million-$40 million somewhat sleeper business for you. You probably have zero visibility on that.
It's mostly in Europe, but that's really been growing very significantly. That could grow by $20 million next year. There's a lot of backlog for Europe reinvesting in defense. Our stuff doesn't shoot. It measures, it detects, but you need that as well to protect not only troops, but also behind the lines. There's sort of a very, very low-level warfare going on in Europe already with sometimes train lines mysteriously being blown up. There's a lot of concern and that people need those detectors. We've also, and this will be very familiar, if you fly through Frankfurt airports, it's more than 100 of our explosive trace detector. Zurich and Geneva. Geneva, we had that for a while. Zurich is now also on. We're getting Brussels. We're getting all the Norwegian airports. We have Incheon in South Korea. We have a few French airports.
Also very familiar and close to home for more of you. We had a very significant order recently or a few quarters ago from United Airlines. Now we're getting, we got a very large order from American Airlines. This is not where your iPhones get swapped. This is for their international facilities where they're looking at bags and cargo and have additional American Airlines security in addition to whatever security the local government or airports provide. They have selected our explosive trace detection. Probably stuff that you have not been aware of. It is a nice margin business, and it is now growing pretty significantly. It does not grow enough to make up for ACA/GAV, but it is one of these idiosyncratic growth drivers. It could add 50 bp s of growth or something like that in the next two years. Not bad.
Much bigger is metrology for high-performance computing and AI and other chip foundry, logic chip, much less memory. We do not add in that. That is also not as good of a market. Advanced packaging, which you need for high-performance computing, goes to some of the best companies in the world. I mean, our, probably one of our top two customers in the world is now TSMC, who buys the very best equipment from us for making chips and then also for very advanced packaging, where we are a market leader. We have the best technology in the world. As they now expand into the U.S., as they expand also into Japan, they are building a big factory there as well. They are doubling down and building the next generation capabilities on Taiwan. By the way, Samsung does the same in Korea.
We really have an incredibly strong for our technology, for leadership, for geopolitical reasons, reshoring or shoring in the U.S., in Japan, and of course, Taiwan and Korea not wanting to fall behind. And then doubling down and investing even more into next-next gen. This is really, really strong for us. Oh yeah, plus there's a pretty big AI trend out there. So we're not, we are in the AI supply chain. It's not AI isn't around. NVIDIA aren't that successful because of us, but they also wouldn't be successful without us because you really need those metrology and measurement tools, and we have some very unique ones there. So that's about 8% of our revenue. Probably will go to 10%, maybe eventually 12% of our revenue. Great growth, great margins.
It's not usually in the life science sell-side analyst report because it's not bioprocessing, it's not diagnostics, it's not life science, but hey, it's something that we do and that's somewhat idiosyncratic to us, and it's just a very beautiful market. It's a great natural application of the very high-end material science tools we have in the Bruker Nano Group.
Maybe just sticking with the theme of stuff that could be getting better into next year. China, you were a big beneficiary last time of Stimulus. I think you're not seeing it in a meaningful way now. Maybe you're going to be a little bit later than somebody like an Agilent in food testing, but talk a little bit about how you think about the pacing of stimulus, where you'll see it in the portfolio, and how meaningful that could be.
Yeah, it's actually interesting because Agilent and us, we see sort of different ends of the animal, so it seems. They're listing it environmental, PFAS. They saw, I think they reported some orders in Q4, Q1. More recently, I think they may have also said, "Hey, it's locked and loaded and promising, but not being released." That's what we're seeing. Shovel ready, locked and loaded. We're seeing it very high-end research, biolife science and biology, molecular biology and cell biology research tools, mass specs, NMRs would benefit tremendously, some of our high-end microscopes, high-end big ticket items that you can only get when you get a really big stimulus package. The not great news is they're not releasing it in Q2 yet, as far as we can tell.
We had our Chinese mass spec sales country manager at ASMS in Baltimore, and he said, "Yeah, these projects are really very well defined and accepted by deans and university presidents. They have all the stamps and approvals. All they need in order to order is the budget release." The budget releases have not been coming yet. Our customers, and we therefore do not know the timing of that, but the read by our customers is while there was this extreme tariff war or skirmish, at least between the U.S. and China at 145% versus 110%, everybody was going slow on giving up cash. Now that there is a truce, at least temporary, they are hopeful that these budgets will be released. For us, they would be mostly, if they come through, which we are hopeful, but we do not know the timing.
If they came through in the second half of this year, which is possible, I do not want to call it probable because we just do not know, then that would really be very much a good guy for us in 2026. That could be a significant additional tailwind for us in 2026 because we have been an unusually strong beneficiary because we have so many high-end tools that are really also enabling new stuff. They want the latest and greatest. Even three, four months ago, Juergen, who was here, who has the Kallik group, he had to quote tims Metabos and tims Omnis that were not even on our price list on the market or released yet because they wanted to make sure that in their stimulus proposals, they had the latest and greatest, even if we were just releasing it at a later time, which we now have.
Very much focused on high-end, really unique capabilities and intending to be leading in biomedical and life science research.
Maybe just in the closing minutes, we can talk a little bit about some of the newer markets you've gotten into. Obviously, spatial through the NanoString deal, ELITech, you have a great microbiology business that sits well with the MALDI BioTyper. Talk a little bit about strategy and diagnostics and then also cell analysis.
Yeah, cell analysis. This was the old Berkeley Lights or PhenomeX, right? We have launched a next-generation $500,000 benchtop product in the Beacon Discovery. It's really a wonderful product, but it used to cost $2 million, and some of the high-end, higher throughput versions still cost $1 million. They're worth it, of course, but you also need it for smaller CROs or academic labs or cancer research labs.
When they do antibody discovery, a $500,000 benchtop system just really broadens that market. We did launch that at AACR in Chicago not long ago. That has all the same capabilities, just less throughput, less cost, less size, so much more manageable. It used to be in the early days, used very much and still continues to be used for very advanced antibody development, including antibodies to antigens that were very hard to have a good immunoprofile. Now it is also used for a lot of cell line selection in cell and gene therapy, and there are other very nice applications coming out, but we needed the smaller, less expensive instrument in order to broaden the market for that. The customers who have it, wow, it is their beacon. They love it. It is like on the old, whatever, used to be my Tesla, and now people do not brag as much.
My Porsche, whatever, except you really need it. So my Beacon is a thing out there in the pharmaceutical industry, and we now have a half the size, half the price, less throughput, but scientifically and for Biopharma has all the capabilities, just more affordable. We really think that will broaden the market and reignite the growth for that business. We've, of course, taken out tremendous costs. They had five sites, two in Connecticut, two in Northern California, one in Southern California. We have one site in, not Berkeley, in Emeryville, California, and have taken out costs, and it's a very, it's an excellent team. It's very, very motivated, very driven. So that's making good progress. Moving up the coast to Seattle, spatial biology, right? We curve market because, of course, of the headwinds from ACA/GAV, which they're feeling quite a bit.
Within that, other than taking out cost and consolidating and putting in a strategic and management process that I think the team there really, really enjoys, they're thriving in that. We've taken out cost, lots of site consolidation. We've also very much invested and reinvested in innovation, things that they had in the pipeline already and things that we added to them in more chemistry, in more detection efficiency. They were already on their way towards the whole genome, the whole transcriptome on the CosMx that's now been announced and launched, and we're shipping that, I think, late summer. These are capabilities that are very unique. We settled the IP lawsuit recently. You saw that. That big overhang and cloud over the GeoMx. By the way, GeoMx will be a great product because we've taken it to multi-omics. They were very transcriptomics focused.
We said, "Hey, we love multi-omics and proteins. Now you can do both on that." That is more for tissue. That is not for subcellular. Of course, the CosMx, I misspoke. Apologize. For the CosMx without IP overhang and with the whole transcriptome launched and also quite a bit of protein content. One of its areas where it was a bit behind was in throughput and detection efficiency. There, I think we have drawn even, we have really improved that. That was post-AGBT, that was AACR. We have also enhanced our spatial proteomics products, which now go through that NanoString sales channel. This is competing with Akoya and Lunaphore at Bio-Techne.
I think there we're moving up in the world very rapidly because of performance and very high ability to go to much higher plexing without losing epitope or tissue without damage. That is kind of unique. Last but not least, and then I guess it is also almost over here, we launched the PaintScape instrument, which is an entirely new category of infra-spatial biology for looking at location and interactions and structures within the nucleus in the DNA. That is a unique capability. That is more of a researchy capability, but it is not only fundamental researchers. People who do fundamental cancer biology, they want to know, "Oh my God, why do you have these aneuploidies? I did not know there is so much extra chromosomal DNA in our nucleus.
I didn't know that location within the nucleus made such a big difference. I thought Illumina just gives us 1D strings of genes and that's the genome. No, it's 3D. It's location. It's interactions. It's extracellular. It's aneuploidies. It's many, many more effects that we're only beginning to understand. Some of them may be aging. Some of them may be signs of recent viral infections. Some of them may be precursors to cancer. Some of them may be a lot of biology and cell biology we really have never seen. Just about everything they touch with a customer is probably going to be a cell paper. Very exciting, high-margin product, early days. That will not take a lot of missionary works.
People will look at that and say, "Oh my God, we've got to have this." Hopefully they'll fight budgets even in these budget-constrained times. Thanks for hanging in there so long.
Great. I think we'll leave it at that. Thanks, Frank. Thank you.