Hello, and welcome to the 3D Systems to acquire Volumetric Biotechnologies conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to John Nypaver. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Kevin. Good morning and welcome to 3D Systems conference call. With me on the call are Dr. Jeffrey Graves, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Jagtar Narula, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Dr. Jordan Miller, Co-founder and President of Volumetric Biotechnologies. We will begin with a set of prepared remarks, followed by a question and answer session. Note that the question and answer session will be limited only to today's topic on our regenerative medicine efforts and the acquisition of Volumetric Biotechnologies. Management is not in a position to answer questions on other topics, including our Q3 financial results, which we will report in our upcoming earnings release. The webcast portion of this call contains a slide presentation that we will refer to during the call.
Those following along on the phone who wish to access the slide portion of this presentation may do so on the Investor Relations section of our website. For those who have accessed the streaming portion of the webcast, please be aware that there may be a few seconds delay and that you will not be able to pose questions via the web. The following discussion and responses to your questions reflect management's views as of today only and will include forward-looking statements as described on this slide. Actual results may differ materially. Additional information about factors that could potentially impact our financial results is included on this slide, in last night's press release, and in our filings with the SEC, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Now, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Jeffrey Graves, our CEO. Jeffrey?
Thanks, John Nypaver. Well, good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. It's an exciting day and one that I believe will be notable in the years ahead for our company, our partners, and most importantly, for those suffering from debilitating disease and traumatic injuries around the world. It's the day when we announced the merger of a unique and exceptional group of researchers with their counterparts in our organization to further a seemingly outrageous goal of creating an unlimited supply of human organs to save the lives and restore vitality to tens of millions of people in need of a transplant worldwide. Before I discuss details, let me begin with a few basics for those that are new to this topic. First of all, we're often asked by the investment community a very basic question, and that is, what is this field of regenerative medicine?
Well, quite simply, it's the treatment of disease by repairing or replacing damaged tissues or organs using a patient's own cells, thereby restoring functionality while avoiding the risk of rejection. For organs, this involves first the creation of a three-dimensional scaffold, which forms the basic structure of the organ, along with the intricate vascular network that enables blood flow throughout. This scaffold is then perfused with cells derived from the patient. Under the right conditions, these cells reproduce to create the functional organ. We make the scaffold using 3D printing, which in this application has often been termed bioprinting. Once developed, this bioprinting technology can be applied to all major organs in the human body, as well as a wide range of other human and laboratory applications that we'll touch on in a few moments.
With that as a foundational background, let me tell you how we're approaching this market from a strategic perspective. We think about the market for bioprinting in three basic segments. The first and the one that's driving our core technologies to exceptional levels is the printing of human organs. We started down this path four years ago when Chuck Hull, our founder and Chief Technology Officer who is now focused on regenerative medicine, was approached by the visionary leader of United Therapeutics, Dr. Martine Rothblatt, to develop 3D printing process to print scaffolds for a human lung. This may sound simple in concept, but it required a quantum leap in bioprinting technology in order to attain the extremely fine dimensional capability, the precise microgeometry control, and the materials capability to produce biocompatible vascularized structures capable of sustaining living human cells.
Over the last few years, working in intimate partnership with United Therapeutics' Lung Biotechnology Group, this joint effort has progressed very well, and we've now attained what we feel is a tremendous technology foundation to build upon. The exceptional progress we've made in our bioprinting technology is illustrated by yesterday's joint announcement with United Therapeutics of an expansion to the lung program. This expansion includes an increase of their funding to us, an extension to two additional organs, and a commitment for joint collaboration to continue into the future. Simply stated, we're seeing groundbreaking progress, and we, supported by United Therapeutics, are increasing the effort. With this progress toward a human lung continuing to gain momentum, where do we go from there?
Well, in addition to expanding the scope of our organ development with United Therapeutics to include two additional organs, we laid out two additional strategic paths for our company to follow. The first is to take the core unique and disruptive technology developed for bioprinting of organ scaffolds and apply it to other parts of the human body. There are a tremendous number of these applications, ranging from the printing of human skin for burn victims to soft tissue for reconstruction and repair to critical blood vessel and bone replacements and many, many more. We're now forming partnerships focused on each application area, where we can combine our bioprinting expertise with the appropriate application experts to provide unique and highly impactful solutions for people in need.
An example of this was in our announcement earlier this year to co-develop with CollPlant Biotechnologies, a soft tissue matrix for use in breast reconstruction procedures. You'll hear more of these partnerships in the months ahead. Our third strategic path, and one that's equally exciting, is to extend our bioprinting technologies into research labs, providing advanced printing systems and unique biological materials to those that study the basic science of regenerative medicine, and then into the pharmaceutical laboratories, where the ability to print high-precision, three-dimensional vascularized cellular structures can be used for the development of new, more effective drug therapies. We estimate this portion of the laboratory market alone to exceed $1 billion, and this does not include several others, such as those focused on development of new cosmetics or newly designed cultured meats and many others.
Our acquisition of Allevi earlier this year, with their presence in over 300 research labs worldwide, was a key enabler for entering the laboratory markets. With these three exciting markets now opening before us, our next key question was, how can we move faster? The answer was announced last evening, and that's to merge our efforts with those of Volumetric Biotechnologies. Volumetric is a remarkable group of bioengineers and scientists that were brought together in 2018 by Dr. Jordan Miller and his colleague, Dr. Bagrat Grigoryan, as a spinoff from Rice University. They have specific expertise in biomaterials and regenerative medicine that combines synthetic chemistry, 3D printing, microfabrication, and molecular imaging to direct cultured human cells to form more complex organizations of living vessels and tissues.
Their group adds critical skills sets to our 3D Systems team, which we believe will enable us to move forward more quickly toward the ambitious goals that we've set for ourselves. Under Dr. Miller's leadership, he and his team have done foundational research in the bioprinting of human organs with a particular focus on the human liver. Knowing that he will not say so himself, I'll tell you that Jordan is a brilliant, visionary, passionate leader and someone that I've truly enjoyed getting to know over these last months. You certainly don't have to take my word for it alone. Jordan's pioneering work on bioprinting has been cited in numerous scientific journals and publications, including being featured on the cover of Science in the May 2019 edition, along with Forbes and several others.
In the words of Chuck Hull, our leader for this critical area, Jordan and his team are a perfect complement to ours, bringing strong biological expertise and cellular engineering skills, along with highly creative bioprinting systems to our development group. We believe these unique capabilities, in combination with those of our team and our colleagues at United Therapeutics, will allow us to not only expand the organs we have under development, but will also now allow us to accelerate progress in other human applications and into our targeted laboratory markets. Through this combination with Volumetric, I believe we are uniquely positioned to reach the ambitious goals that we've set for ourselves in these three exciting market areas that are now opening before us.
Before I turn the call over to Jordan for a few comments, I want to thank the early supporters of Volumetric, including the visionary folks at Rice University and the Texas Medical Center, for their backing of Jordan and his team in getting to this inflection point. This commitment to biotechnology inspires us to build upon the foundation that Jordan's team has established in Houston and create a world-class development capability to carry us into the future, where we have a collective vision of producing an unlimited supply of human organs for transplantation so that no one need die waiting on a vital replacement to extend and enhance the quality of their life. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Dr. Miller for a few comments. Jordan Miller, it's great to have you with us today.
Thank you, Jeffrey Graves. It's wonderful to be here. Hello and good morning, everyone. I'm Jordan Miller, Co-founder and President of Volumetric. Before I talk about Volumetric, I'd like to give you a little background about myself. I've been passionate about the field of biomaterials and 3D bioprinting for over 20 years, having worked in some of the world's top research labs at MIT, Rice University, and the University of Pennsylvania. My focus in the field of bioengineering is on applying the principles of engineering to solve major problems in biology and healthcare. I started my own research lab in 2013, leading a small team of brilliant scientists on one of the greatest challenges of our lifetimes. Could we build tissues and even whole replacement organs for human patients? I then launched Volumetric in 2018 together with my co-founder and COO, Dr.
Bagrat Grigoryan, with a concerted effort to develop the technology that would finally be capable of making whole organs for human therapy. We built a team of innovative bioengineers and advanced biofabrication technology that I believe is ripe for acceleration and scaling together with 3D Systems. Backing up for a minute, why do we need replacement tissues and organs for human patients? The issue is immediately apparent when you go to get your driver's license. You go to the DMV, you're filling out the application, and you have to answer this question, do you wish to register to be an organ and tissue donor? When I turned 16 and I was confronted with this question, I was awestruck. Where does this question come from? How could I possibly sign up to be an organ donor? Aren't I using all of my tissues and organs right now?
The stark reality is that humans cannot regenerate most of our own tissues. If you fall down and you skin your knee, you develop scar tissue. It turns out that the same thing happens to our internal organs. If they are sufficiently damaged or injured or diseased, they cannot recover, and they often develop non-functional scar tissue. For many patients, the only option left is to get a replacement organ from someone else. In the 1950s, pioneering doctors and patients were able to show that it was possible to transplant a whole organ from a donor patient into a recipient. Now, almost 70 years later, the mechanics of treatment of organ failure are essentially the same. There are thousands of patients right now in the U.S. that are waiting for someone to die so that they can live.
Today's patients that are able to get a compatible organ transplant do have an incredible improvement in their quality of life. But they have to go on immunosuppression therapy for the rest of their lives. There are not enough organs to go around. There are millions of people around the world that need an organ transplant, but will never even make it onto a recipient list and never receive a needed transplant. The need for a breakthrough has been palpable. In recent decades, medicine has progressed at a rapid rate from small molecules like aspirin through key biologics like antibodies, and even today, to cell-based therapies to treat a range of conditions. Despite this progress, we still have rampant organ scale diseases without cures, affecting millions of patients and costing hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone.
The donor organ supply is so constrained that only about 100,000 people are even eligible to be placed on the organ recipient wait list. Our mission at Volumetric is to provide a new transformative class of therapies for organ-scale diseases, manufacturing whole replacement organs for human patients. At Volumetric, we have been quietly, vertically integrating a comprehensive bioprinting strategy capable of producing human organ scaffolds, quite unique in our field. Starting at the bottom left, we do the design and organic synthesis of the raw materials to make the inks. We develop and we formulate these reagents into bioinks that can be used for bioprinting. We design, build, characterize, and utilize novel bioprinting systems that we believe are in a class of their own. We design tissue structure and fabricate the scaffolds. We've also conducted animal studies demonstrating the implantation potential of these scaffolds.
We study the biocompatibility of the tissues that we make. Finally, we've started to publicly demonstrate the raw technical prowess of our new Tesselle bioprinting technology. It's called Tesselle because it's a tessellation or a tiling of the projected image at the print plane for a massive improvement in photopolymerization. We have over 500-fold improvement in the complexity of scaffolds that we can now generate. With these exciting technical milestones achieved, we are primed to join forces with 3D Systems through this acquisition. We believe our developed technology is right for acceleration and integration with the 3D Systems team and their market-leading manufacturing of medical devices and implants.
As part of this acquisition, we will fully integrate with 3D Systems, and by doing so, join their partnership with United Therapeutics to progress our shared technologies towards the ultimate goal of an unlimited supply of replacement organs for human patients. I wanted to close with a more near-term example of what's possible with bioprinting technology today. VenaStent is a clinical stage tissue engineering company developing tunable, bioabsorbable, smart polymer wraps to fundamentally transform the efficacy of the 5 million vascular surgeries performed each year. They are working to address this $21 billion market. Current dialysis and bypass surgeries have high failure rates in just the first year, owing to the fact that human veins don't normally experience arterial pressures. VenaStent has been using Volumetric bioprinters to manufacture their self-wrap bioabsorbable device, which is designed to help arterialize human veins.
It is a perivascular wrap around the arteriovenous junction that provides mechanical stability to this surgical junction.
VenaStent this week announced the enrollment of 20 end-stage renal disease patients in an initial OUS human feasibility study. In the near term, we will continue to seek out and empower advanced biomaterials companies like VenaStent with our next generation biomaterials and biofabrication approaches. I'll end by saying how thrilled I am to be joining Chuck Hull and the 3D Systems organization. It's an honor I will forever carry with me. With that, I thank you for your attention, and I'll turn it back over to Jeffrey Graves.
Thanks, Jordan Miller, and again, it's great to have you with us. Before handing off to Jagtar Narula to talk more about the acquisition, I'll share a few more details about our plans for the future. In conjunction with the acquisition, we'll occupy a new 20,000 sq ft facility within Houston's East End Maker Hub. This location will house our Houston regenerative medicine operations, including both print process development and bio lab facilities that will support advances in organ printing and development of non-organ tissue applications. The Houston operation will be led by Dr. Miller, who will report to Chuck Hull and become our new 3D Systems Chief Scientist for Regenerative Medicine. He'll work in close coordination with our existing resources in regenerative medicine as well as our partners at United Therapeutics and elsewhere.
We're excited about the environment in Houston and the leadership the Texas Medical Center is taking in establishing this region as a leader in biotechnology research. With that, let me now hand off to Jagtar to discuss more details about the Volumetric acquisition. Jagtar Narula.
Thanks, Jeffrey Graves. As we have described, the combination of 3D Systems and Volumetric allows us to continue to advance the state of the art in applying 3D printing to regenerative medicine. We have made considerable strides in applying 3D printing technology to the application of tissue printing and the creation of transplantable human organs. We believe this acquisition will significantly increase our capabilities in the space and put us in the enviable position of combining world-class printing and biological expertise to create highly disruptive applications that will improve the lives of patients in need around the world. We are very excited by the opportunities in front of us. Our combination of advanced printing technology, combined with the supporting research and application development infrastructure, is truly unique to our industry. Now I'll turn to the economics of the Volumetric acquisition.
The upfront purchase price of this acquisition, subject to customary closing adjustments, is $45 million that will be split roughly equally between cash and 3D Systems common stock. Volumetric shareholders have the opportunity to earn up to an additional $355 million through December 31, 2035. These future payments, also split roughly equally between cash and common stock, are based upon the achievement of significant and likely newsworthy milestone events related to the development and commercialization of organ and non-organ applications stemming from our joint regenerative medicine technologies. At this time, we expect minimal impact of this acquisition to our non-GAAP operating income. Initial program costs will be funded through the expansion of our partnership with United Therapeutics. We expect additional investment over time towards the non-organ application efforts that will be funded directly by 3D Systems.
In the future, we expect the organ and non-organ development efforts to result in additional revenue tied to the sale of our advanced printing technology, as well as recurring revenue from the successful commercialization of applications. We will provide additional guidance in the future as we ramp and expand these efforts. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter. With that, I will turn the call back to Jeff rey Graves for closing remarks.
Thanks, Jagtar Narula. As I mentioned in the beginning of the call, the activities we're now undertaking in regenerative medicine are an exciting opportunity. This transaction brings us together with a set of organizations working in partnership to solve a potentially monumental achievement of creating 3D-printed transplantable human organs. In that quest, the advancement of the technology will open up additional non-organ applications. I'm personally humbled by the exciting contributions these researchers, scientists, and engineers are making to both our company and to the advancement of humanity. This acquisition emphasizes our commitment to continue these efforts. I'm excited to welcome Jordan and the entire Volumetric team to 3D Systems. With that, we'll now take your questions. Kevin, you can open it up for Q&A.
Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to be placed in the question queue, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing star one. One moment please while we pull for questions. Our first question today is coming from Greg Palm from Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Your line is now live.
Yeah. Hey, guys. This is Danny Eggerichs for Greg Palm today. Congrats to 3D team as well as Jordan Miller on the acquisition. Sounds super exciting.
Thanks, Danny Eggerichs.
Thank you.
I guess just starting out, from a revenue standpoint, look, I mean, in the near term, is there really gonna be any material impact? Do you think you can ramp this in the next few years at all? It sounds like from a P&L standpoint, from a cost side, there's not much to do there.
Yeah, Danny Eggerichs, this is Jagtar Narula. So you're right from the P&L side or the cost side, we don't expect any near-term impact from the organ work as this is in conjunction with our expansion with United Therapeutics, who is supporting our development. You know, over time, you know, we will invest additional in non-organ applications. But, you know, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we'll provide additional guidance on that over time. On the revenue side, you know, near term, we expect, you know, we expect revenue from our relationships with United Therapeutics as they begin to purchase printers from us to, you know, continue to expand their presence and the work they're doing in the space, that will expand over time.
You know, we've got arrangements like we talked about in our earnings call, our Q4 earnings call related to milestone payments for progress on the initiative. We expect that this acquisition will accelerate that. In the future, hopefully with the success of the organ applications, you know, we'll get recurring revenues from the arrangement. On the non-organ side, you know, we're starting to expand the partnerships. You know, we mentioned the CollPlant one. We'll invest in other applications over the next year or so. We would expect to see revenue ramp up from that over the next few years. On the bioprinting side, we're actively selling.
Sorry, on the research lab side, you know, we're actively selling those markets, and we would expect that revenue to ramp up, you know, over the next couple of years.
Danny Eggerichs , just to add, as Jagtar Narula summarized it well. We'll provide color for the investment community on the three market areas that we're focused on, laboratories, organs, and non-organ applications. You know, clearly the organ work in conjunction with United Therapeutics, they'll be the spokesman for in terms of, you know, accomplishments and timetables. For the non-organ applications and the laboratory markets, we'll provide additional color ourselves. I can tell you. What I can tell you today is the greater our technology moves forward, the more excited we are about the market potential of it. In the laboratory markets alone, we talk about a multi-billion-dollar opportunity there in this area.
If you look at basic research labs and pharmaceutical labs, which are really our strong focus, those are clearly into the billions. The non-organ applications, as those evolve, and we're doing a lot of seed work with application partners today. As those evolve and become, you know, closer to a marketable commercial product, we'll certainly provide color on those in terms of both market opportunity and revenue stream. Okay? So more to come.
Got it. That's really helpful. I guess just moving on to the milestones, 2035, obviously a long ways away. I mean, just the structure of that, I mean, what I mean, I guess what type of milestones are we viewing for these earn-outs? You know, is there something that an earn-out can earn you $10 million, or is it bigger than that? I guess just what kind of milestones are we looking at?
Yeah, Danny Eggerichs , it's a significant earn-out, you know, tied to specific milestones. Those milestones we're not gonna talk about in detail, but I think Jagtar Narula summarized them well when he went through it. They're milestones that are required for use in the human body for proving and use approval in the human body. They are significant milestones that undoubtedly we will be talking about publicly as they occur. Yes, they amount. Obviously, it's a big number in total. There are several milestones, so they amount to tens of millions of dollars a piece. They're worthy of that.
I mean, given the magnitude of the impact on people in need of transplants, they're very much worthy of that kind of payout.
Yeah. Danny, the other thing I'd add is there's multiple applications tied to the earn-outs, hence that, you know, 2035 date.
Yeah.
We'd expect some of them to earn sooner.
Yep, that makes sense. Maybe one more from me. Maybe just competitive environment. Is anyone else trying to do something similar to this, or is it just kind of you guys right now?
Well, you know, Danny, I'll tell you, in terms of bioprinting, scaffolds and then cellularizing them, I think the team that we have in place is uniquely positioned to advance that application. There are other approaches to produce transplantable organs that we're certainly aware of. I mean, clearly we love this approach, and we're making significant progress toward it. In terms of other companies being in the field that are trying to do it with 3D printing, it's a very limited base right now. I know our goal is to put together the very best team to pursue that goal, which is why we wanted to combine with Volumetric. It brings us an amazing array of tools to make this application successful.
All right. Appreciate the color. Congrats, everyone, and good luck.
Thanks, Danny Eggerichs .
Thanks.
Thank you. As a reminder, that's star one to be placed into question queue. Our next question today is coming from Sarkis Sherbetchyan from B. Riley Securities. Your line is now live.
Hi, good morning, everyone. I would like to extend my congratulations to all the parties involved as well.
Thanks. Thanks, Sarkis Sherbetchyan . You're a little bit garbled, so we may ask you to repeat it, okay? Especially the compliment. We'll ask you to repeat that, but I got that one.
Okay, perfect. Just kind of thinking through the in conjunction announcement with the expansion of your bioprinting program with United Therapeutics. I think in that press release, there was also the potential to extend the development and demonstration to two additional human organs. Care to comment on which organs or areas that program is potentially exploring?
Got you. I missed the very end, but I think the heart of the question was around what are these other two organs that we're gonna work on? I would tell you know, it's still under discussion and planning with United Therapeutics. They're really determining what the prioritization sequence are on organs. I can tell you the basic scaffold technology we're developing is—we've clearly gotten it to the point now where it's more broadly applicable than just lungs, which in and of itself is an amazing area to progress. Given that it's now applicable to multiple organs, we will be picking up work now on two additional organs, and that the discussion process is still underway. It'll come together, I think very quickly, and we'll start progressing those as well in parallel.
But we're not in a position today to talk about what the two organs are.
Understood. Thank you for that. Now, I think in the release, it also mentioned that United support is designated through 2025. Jagtar Narula, I think, you know, you talked about no material impact on the cost side. It seems like that support is related to United's essentially funding just to R&D. Is that the right way to think about it?
Yeah, that's accurate, Sarkis Sherbetchyan . You know, we're gonna expand the spend into the program, especially with the addition of Volumetric. You know, we also expanded our agreements with United Therapeutics and, you know, the investment they're making in us on R&D.
Sarkis Sherbetchyan , the way to think about it, exactly as Jagtar Narula said, the core technology that we're using, this toolkit of technologies is being developed, targeted toward lungs and now other organs, is broadly applicable to other parts of the human body, and specific tools are. The pursuit of those is stuff that we'll pick up under 3D Systems R&D program, as they're evolving, as we're doing now. It's just a relatively immaterial number today. That number we fully expect to grow over time from both an R&D expense and a CapEx perspective, because those non-organ applications are equally life-changing to people in need.
I mean, if you just look at the example that Volumetric has pursued with the stent application, remarkable impact on those that are in need of stents. So each one of the applications I expect you'll be talking about in the future, we're supporting, if they're not organ, we're supporting, and I expect all of them to be fairly dramatic life-changing applications for the targeted population. Then the laboratory work is fantastic. It certainly supports basic research in regenerative medicine, and that's more of our traditional model of selling printers and consumables. But we're very excited about moving into the pharmaceutical lab arena because now we have the capability to print three-dimensional tissue structures that are vascularized.
When you can do that, if you're a drug development company, it allows you to do some really innovative drug testing and accelerated testing on both healthy and diseased tissue, so you can study the effects on a human-like cell structure, but without risking a patient's life in doing so. We're really excited about all of those markets, and you would expect our support for them to ramp up over time.
No, that's great. Thank you for that color. I guess I want to kind of come back to the milestones. I know you're not really discussing this, but I guess just from a structural perspective, you know, you mentioned tens of millions a piece. There seem to be several milestones. Just to kind of pair it up with you know, the potential for FDA approvals and your kind of expertise in navigating that environment, is it based on FDA approvals and sales, or can you kind of help me understand what the structure might be?
They're tied to the scientific progress you have to demonstrate to give an organ in a human body. Those regulations will evolve over time. It's the very clear scientific milestones that you have to attain to show both safety and efficacy of the product itself. We'll be working down that path. The milestones are really clear, and they're groundbreaking. It's we wanted to pick things that because the magnitude of the payout, quite frankly, we wanted to pick things that our investors would fully understand, it's worth the payment if you can attain this milestone.
I think it was, you know, a shared commitment on the part of Volumetric to say, "Yeah, we'll sign up for those milestones." That's what we'll tie our shareholders' value creation to as well. It shows you the confidence that they have in our collective ability to hit them. We are truly incredibly excited about them. I think they are obviously ambitious, but they are life-changing, and we are committed to hitting them in partnership with our partners at United Therapeutics.
That's fair. I think, you know, it's very helpful for us to be able to fully understand what those may be. Hopefully more disclosure as time passes. Thank you very much for the call, guys, and congratulations.
Thanks, Sarkis Sherbetchyan.
Thank you. As a reminder, that's star one to be placed in the question queue. Our next question is coming from Shannon Cross from Cross Research. Your line is now live.
Hi. Thank you very much for taking my question. I'm at the risk of being way out of my league here in terms of the medical part. I was looking on United Therapeutics and they're using a lot of, which I've heard about actually, you know, pig hearts and kidneys, I believe in that. I'm just curious from sort of the medical standpoint, is this a phased thought that, you know, we would use organs from other animals if that works, which would be amazing, and then, you know, move on to being able to print them? Is it just sort of levels of development and stages of where things are at? Because I'm curious as to, you know, the amount of focus and investment that will be made in both areas. Thank you.
Yeah, Shannon Cross, it's a very logical question, especially for folks out, you know, outside the community. There's a lot of work that's gone on for a long time in animal testing and the testing of, you know, animal benefits in human beings. Obviously, United Therapeutics has to speak for their own work and what they're doing across the spectrum to bring benefits to patients worldwide. I love this approach of bioprinting. I'll ask Jordan to comment here in a few moments, you know, because we do end up producing fully biocompatible organs when we're finished because they're derived from basic materials that are biocompatible and of the patient's own cells. We love that approach.
Obviously, there are parallel activities, some done in part to prove specific techniques and technologies, and some done because they offer potential in and of themselves. I would refer you back to United Therapeutics for their, you know, broader game plan in this whole area. Jordan, maybe I could ask you to comment a little bit on maybe the scientific aspects of animal usage.
Sure. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. We love the work that United Therapeutics is doing across all of their endeavors. I think you can see in the clinical setting, there are already pig-derived materials that are used in the human body. Think of heart scaffolds for valves. There are pig heart valves implanted in people all the time now. There are people dying every day from a lack of organs. I think there's a concerted effort between 3D Systems and United Therapeutics to think about this from a comprehensive standpoint and, you know, multiple shots on goal. There's also theoretically some organs that may work better if they're from human cells versus from pig cells.
We're really trying to understand the scientific basis of what is possible, what is fastest to help somebody that may need it today, and then longer term, the real potential of 3D printing to derive the organ from the patient's own cells, make it totally biocompatible with their body, not subject to rejection, and you know, actually able to grow with the patient theoretically. We're very excited about our approach, and we're looking to learn from a lot of what United Therapeutics is doing across all of their very exciting endeavors to expand this space.
Just to clarify. Yeah, Danny, thank you very much. Just to clarify, is United Therapeutics contractually obligated to fund this through a certain period of time? Then my last question is, how do we think about it. I realize you're not going to give us specifics on the payouts, but is it sort of linear in terms of payment or is, you know, the big payment at the end? I don't know, just to give an idea, since it's, you know, relative to your market cap, it's a relatively large investment. Thank you.
Sure. Yeah, no, both good questions, Shannon Cross. So the program was expanded and the funding that's targeted for this was also identified. We have an existing contract that stretches out in time with United Therapeutics. You know, this is a science-based program, so it's you know, you kind of you have to prove it all along the way. With the progress we've made today, they were very comfortable in saying, "Okay, let's expand to two more organs, and let's extend our game plan out through 2025 with funding, with real funding." So that's the way I'd look at this. I wouldn't look at 2025 as a terminal date, that's where the planning proceeds to now.
Obviously, it can be accelerated or expanded at any time based on progress. This was a significant step forward to say, "Okay, we have some of the foundational work done now to take on additional organs." It's a reflection, I think, you could say on the progress of the program, and something we're very pleased with. Shannon Cross, in terms of the milestone payments, we've tied them to specific demonstrated things and not constrained them in time. I, you know, I would hope they happen in the very near future. We needed to put some time bound on it, so we extended the ultimate payout period to 2035. I would not again look at 2035 as, you know, they all crash together at that date. They certainly won't.
You know, if as we progress, we'll hit milestones that are paid out. I can't tell you it's linear. I hope it's not linear. I hope it's more concentrated in the front end. But realistically, it'll be spread out over time. The 10-year bound was something we had to do basically for accounting purposes. We had to put a time bound on it, and we said, "That'll be it." That's about the full story, Shannon Cross.
Okay. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
Thank you. We've reached the end of our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back over to John for any further closing comments.
Well, thank you for joining us today and for your continued support of 3D Systems. A replay of this webcast will be available after the call on the investor relations section of our website. Have a good day.
Thank you. That does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your line at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation.