Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us for the MaxCyte management presentation. My name is Matt Larew. I cover tools here at Blair. Pleased to be joined this afternoon again by MaxCyte's management team, CEO, Maher Masoud, and CFO, Doug Swirsky. Before we get into the presentation, just two quick things. First, the breakout session is upstairs in Burnham B. Second, I'm required to inform you that for a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, please visit williamblair.com. With that, again, pleased to have MaxCyte here today, and, Maher, I'll turn it over to you.
Thank you, Matt, for the introduction. Good afternoon, everybody. Before I get into the heart of the presentation, I kind of want to give you just an overview or a recap as to what I hope you get out of the presentation. From a high level, what I hope you get out of this presentation for the next 20, 25 minutes is the state of the cell and gene therapy space, where MaxCyte sits in that state, and why I truly believe we're perfectly positioned, perfectly positioned to capitalize on the tremendous growth of the cell and gene therapy space over the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years and beyond. The attorneys make me put this up there. It's a forward-looking statement that says, you know, don't rely on any statements that I make. I used to be an attorney myself.
We make people put this up, so apologize you have to read this. So before I get into the presentation as to what MaxCyte does, I want to take a step back. It's a step back and just talk about what the cell and gene therapy space means for patients, and I want to point your eye to the screen. I want you to remember this screen 'cause I'll get back to this slide towards the end of the presentation as well. So if you look at what medicines have done in the last 50, 60, 70 years in the modern world, they've been more of treating the symptoms of diseases, right?
If you look at small molecules, if you think back on antibody therapeutics, where you have therapies developed in the lab that are, in essence, meant to treat the underlying symptom, but not necessarily provide a disease-free life for patients, not necessarily be able to cure or potentially allow patients to have hereditary diseases to be able to live disease-free. That's what medicine has been, and it's been effective. It's been fairly effective. But what the cell and gene therapy space is doing is something that 20-25 years ago was considered science fiction, where, in essence, we are... with therapeutic developers are working on modifying cells, making genetic modifications within the cells, with the goal of allowing people that have hereditary diseases or illnesses, even, even oncology, you know, you know, indications, to be able to live a disease-free state.
That's something that's going to transform how the entire medical industry thinks about treating patients, and that's who you see here, patients, 'cause that's what this is about. And again, I'm going to say again, keep an eye on this slide. I'll get back to it at the end, and I'll tell you why that science fiction of the cell and gene therapy space is becoming a reality, where patients are being treated, where underlying diseases, where genetic diseases, patients are able to live, in essence, disease-free, something that was never thought about even 20 years ago, much less, you know, 30, 40 years ago. So the cell and gene therapy development space is the fastest-growing, most prominent treatment modality, right? It's the ability to engineer cells, to engineer patient cells, to be able to address a host of human diseases, unmet diseases.
Traditionally, this space really came about when you think about it, in the 2017 time period. If you've heard of therapies such as Yescarta and Kymriah by Novartis and Kite, these were CAR therapies that are basically meant to take a patient's cells, in essence, supercharge those cells to make them tumor-killing cells. That's what those therapies are, and those therapies, for the most part, have all been in vivo. What that means is the delivery of the genetic editing material, the delivery of that therapy into the body has been done in vivo utilizing viral vectors. That's been the traditional medicines. However, in the cell therapy space, what we're seeing, however, over the last 4, 5, 6 years, and something that I'll get to that really transpired late last year, is we're seeing those therapies become not just for oncology.
We're seeing those therapies really start to address where you're making modifications to the cells, you're making modifications to the gene in the cell to address hereditary diseases, to address illnesses that were before never thought that we could ever address. And that is lending itself to go from in vivo delivery, in vivo, in vivo cell engineering, to ex vivo cell engineering, where you're beginning to see companies over the last 5-6 years, a little bit longer than that, start to engineer those cells outside the body, right? Engineer those cells in an efficient, non-viral manner. And that ex vivo engineering that I'm talking about is what MaxCyte has focused on for the last really 20-25 years.
That ex vivo non-viral cell engineering is where truly the only way to do ex vivo non-viral cell engineering is to use electroporation, which is MaxCyte's platform that we've developed, our proprietary platform over the last 25 years. And that trend away from viral delivery of making cell modifications, making gene editing modifications, we're seeing that trend continue to increase. Cell therapies are getting vastly more complex. The modalities themselves as to what indications we're going after is lending itself to treating diseases and making modifications to cells that 7, 8 years ago were something that was unimaginable, and that lends itself to ex vivo non-viral gene delivery, ex vivo non-viral cell modification, and that's where the MaxCyte system is coming into play. Who is MaxCyte?
We consider ourselves the pioneer, the enabling technology pioneer for non-viral cell engineering, non-viral gene delivery as well. This year celebrates our 25th year anniversary, and you're saying to yourself, "25 years is a long time." We were doing this before even cell and gene therapies were something that was on the horizon. This is something where there was a vision for this company to truly... that believed that cells themselves can become a therapy someday.... We are the premier, you know, flow electroporation transfection technology. And late last year, that idea of using a cell to become a therapy came to reality, where with the approval of Casgevy for the treatment of sickle cell disease by Vertex and CRISPR, that utilizes our transfection system to engineer the cells.
The vision that we had 20 years ago, 25 years ago, became reality, and this is just the beginning of that reality. The MaxCyte system itself, in addition to cell therapy, has the ability, and it's part of our, of our revenue model as well, to be used outside of cell therapy. You can use electroporation, where you're using a cell for bioprocessing, or what I like to call, we're using a cell to become a factory to produce antibodies, other proteins, viral vectors, even in vaccine manufacturing. That's where electroporation can also be used. However, my presentation here today is mostly gonna focus on just cell therapy. That's where the space is going. That's where the majority of our focus on as a company as well.
Bioprocessing is a portion of our organization, but for this presentation here, the cell therapy space is where I wanna highlight the focus of what MaxCyte does and where the future is going as well. What you see here is an example, you know, if you wanna take a step back and say: Well, how does cell therapy work? How does ex vivo cell therapy work? How do you actually engineer cells? How do you make modifications to the gene in the cell? What is that workflow? What does that mean when you hear that a product is being edited outside the body?
In essence, what it means is, and this is a simplified, very simple drawing of how it works is, in essence, you're collecting cells from a patient, collecting blood from a patient, and then you're selecting for the cells that you want to engineer. So in CAR T cell therapies, you're collecting for those T cells. If you hear CAR NKs, or if you hear, you know, TIL therapies, which are tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, or TCRs, you're isolating for the cells that you want to engineer.
Upon that isolation of the cells, this is from a patient, either a healthy patient, which would be considered a donor cell, or in an autologous setting for the patient that you're gonna eventually treat, you're selecting the cells, you're aphering, selecting the cells, and at that point, oftentimes you're expanding the cells because you need to have a certain volume of cells that you need to engineer. Upon that expansion, you then have to concentrate the cells back down before you wanna engineer them. You concentrate them back down, and then depending on the therapeutic developer's payload, payload being the genetic editing materials that they want to get into the cell, we call that therapeutic developer payload. At that point, once the cells are concentrated down, the cells and that therapeutic developer payload sits in a buffer.
We have a proprietary buffer that MaxCyte's developed, and those cells in the payload, in the buffer, in a closed process, in a cGMP-compliant process, run through our electroporation platform. And what electroporation does is it emits electrical pulses to that buffer that allows the cell membrane to temporarily open. When it temporarily opens, at that time, the payload, the therapeutic payload that's gonna engineer that cell, engineer the gene, engineer the gene in the cell, will enter in through, through the membrane, double-- the double membrane, and at that point, we, we shut off the system, and they gen... and it gently closes the cell membrane, and what goes into the cell has now efficiently gone into the cell. And then at that point, we collect the cells off of our system, and your engineering step is completed.
You have a recovery step thereafter before it gets infused back into a patient. That's called expansion. That's where you hear bioreactors oftentimes used, where you want to expand the cells back up in a healthy way before you, before you actually, you know, inject the cells back into the patient. But that cell engineering step, where you see in the middle, I'll point your eyes to the middle, that is what we focused on for the last 20 years. That's where we have the only EP technology for cell therapy, clinical development, and commercial development. With the approval of Casgevy, we're the only electroporation technology that's used for the production of a non-viral cell therapy. And how have we done that?
We've done that through having, in addition to our cGMP system, a Master File that's been accepted by the FDA in over 60 clinical trials utilizing our system. What that Master File does, it allows our therapeutic developer, customers, and partners to reference that Master File when they're using our system to engineer those cells, to, in essence, de-risk the engineering step, where that process now is something that has been, in essence, accepted by the FDA in over 60 clinical trials.
It allows them to reference our Master File to say that this is the engineering platform that's being used to engineer those cells, and it's de-risking that side of it now, where the rest of the regulatory landscape has companies can focus on, not have to focus on what does it mean to engineer a cell in a clinical setting because we have a Master File with our cGMP system that's been used in over 60 clinical trials. Part of our ability to do something that no other company can do in this regard is we've built the last 25 years, we have over 100+ protocols, depending on what cell you want to engineer, depending on what the therapeutic payload is you want to enter into the cell.
We have the ability to engineer cells with each therapeutic payload at higher efficiency and higher cell viability of that engineered cell than any of our competitors. And those hard protocols are what we develop in-house. We end up licensing those protocols and those know-how on a non-exclusive basis, which I'll get to later as to what our business model means for that. And that's something that, you know, we have focused the last 20 years on being a science company, understanding what it takes to engineer a cell, understanding what it takes to make sure your cell has the highest viability post-electroporation, to allow our therapeutic developing customers and partners to have the highest chance of success when they're in the clinic and in commercialization. We consider ourselves an enabling technology.
However, in addition to being an enabling technology, our advantage that we have over our competitors is the ability to accelerate that translational timeline of development from early research to the clinic. We can do something that many companies cannot do, which is we allow customers to use our platform in research, be able to use processing assemblies where they're electroporating as little as 75,000 cells, and then seamlessly going to electroporation of 20 billion cells in the clinic without having to do repeated optimization. That is something that in the industry is almost unheard of, where you can do early optimization at research, have in essence a commercial optimization protocol when you're simply electroporating very small scale, and have the same protocol and the same ability when you're in the cGMP clinic and then at commercialization.
So we, in essence, are providing our therapeutic developing partners everything they need for the scale from early 75,000, you know, cells transfected all the way up to 20 billion cells transfected with the same protocols, same technology, without having to do repeated optimization that they have to do with other companies. We've done that again by our renowned scientific team that we have in-house. We have about 35+ scientists at our corporate offices, as well as in the field. In the field, we call them field application scientists. These are people that sit at the bench with the therapeutic developers to ensure, and we say this, it's part of our DNA, to ensure that obsession with the success of that program occurs, to ensure that the...
Our—that obsession with our customers having a therapeutic program that has the most efficiently engineered cell, the most—the highest cell viability of that cell occurs no matter what we have to do. That's the dedication that we have, and that's through our scientific team that we've built over the last 25 years. This slide here is... it's an eyeful, but this shows you the ability for us to scale from very early research all the way through cGMP processes with processing assemblies that can be used on our smaller ATx, ExPERT ATx system, all the way through to our ExPERT GTx system that's used in the clinic.
We've over the last 15 or 20 years, we've ensured that we've allowed that we have the capabilities where our partners and our customers can use the same system early in research, early clinical, and all the way through commercialization. And we've done that with a litany of processing assemblies that are all optimized from research to commercialization to allow that speed to the clinic and speed through clinical development as well. The cell and gene therapy space does come with its challenges, right? And those challenges is what we've been focusing on for the last 20 years. The development delays I talked about, where you're trying to take something from small scale to larger scale into the clinic, is something that is real 'cause you're dealing with real live patient cells.
These are therapies that need to be reproducible and need to be optimized in a very fast manner. You know, the cell therapy space is not exactly a cheap space to be in. Right? If you look at what it takes for a therapeutic developer to fund a program, oftentimes they're spending at least $1 million a month for each program that they're developing. So the faster we can get them through the therapeutic development timeline to get them from research into the clinic, each month that we shave off that timeline is $ millions in cost savings, and that's what we focus on as well.
What's happening also in the cell therapy space is we're seeing the modalities and the cell engineering steps themselves becoming far more complex, where oftentimes you're seeing companies having to make multiple edits to the cell, multiple knockouts, multiple knockins. That's where our scientific team has been focused on for the last 15, 20 years, to ensure that we understand how to allow companies to have those edits done in an efficient manner, where you have the highest cell viability and highest cell efficiency of those edits. In addition to that, that Master File that I talked about is doing something that is seamless. It's de-risking the regulatory framework for our customers and our partners as they get into the clinic by having the access to our Master File that's been used over 60 times in clinical development.
All those challenges that I talked about, what does that do? That allows us to reduce the vein to vein timeline for these therapies, where now companies can optimize earlier. Companies can go through clinical development faster. We can do the electroporation step in as little as 30 minutes, which allows the cell therapy step itself to also be reduced from a vein to vein perspective. These are the challenges that the cell therapy space as a whole is going through, that we've been focused in the last 15, 20 years to ensure we can overcome. So what does that mean for MaxCyte? So there... And I'm gonna point your eyes to the right here for one second before I get into what I call the bioprocessing drug discovery.
The beauty of our business model in the cell therapy space is we have two ways that we can generate revenue. One is a pure razor-razorblade model. When we're working with companies where they're utilizing our system for research, we sell them our systems. We sell them our ExPERT ATx system to allow them to do research, and then they have to buy processing assemblies each time that they're optimizing their process and doing research. That's a pure razor-razorblade model. However, because of the optimization that we can provide to go into the clinic, because we can provide scale of transfection that no other company can provide, because we provide the scientific partnership that no other company in the enabling technology space can provide, we also have a licensing model that goes along with the razor-razorblade model.
When a company is ready to go from research into the clinic, at that point, they have to enter into licenses with us. Those licenses are your traditional therapeutic licenses, where as they're utilizing our systems in the clinic, they pay us an annual license fee. In addition to the annual license fee, as their programs are moving through the clinic, there are early milestones, early clinical milestones, mid to late clinical milestones as well, that they have to pay to us, and then also marketing approval milestones that they pay. In addition to that, they also, upon commercialization, are paying, you know, a share of the economics on the net sales of the product. While that's happening, we also are licensing our ExPERT GTx in the clinic, as well as licensing our ExPERT GTx when it's commercial.
We also have the recurring revenue for the processing assemblies that are being used each time that they're transfecting cells to engineer the cell. So really, we have a razor-razor blade model with a licensing model for the cell therapy side. On the drug discovery business development side, on drug discovery bioprocessing side, I apologize, where the cell itself is a factory, in essence, where you can electroporate cells, as I mentioned, to produce proteins or antibodies or viral vectors. That's a pure razor-razor blade model. That's a smaller portion of our revenue. The majority of our focus is in the cell therapy side for the purpose of this presentation. But that's where companies can purchase an ExPERT ATx, ExPERT ATx, or our ExPERT STx, which is specifically designed for bioprocessing.
They have a razor-razor blade, where they purchase a system, and each time they're using that cell as a factory to transfect it to produce proteins or viral vectors or other antibodies, that they also are purchasing processing assemblies. So what has that meant for us as a company? When I talk about that razor-razor blade model and then also that licensing model, and why do we have that licensing model and the key differentiation factor. We've done something that no one else in enabling technology tool space has been able to do. We have 28 licenses with premier companies in the cell and gene therapy space, and you'll see them. We signed 5, 5 licenses this year. We call these licenses Strategic Platform Licenses, or SPL for short. I like to call them SPL, it's easier to say.
But those 28 licenses have the potential where over 160 programs can be taken into the clinic, and those companies right now have 16 programs in the clinic utilizing our system to engineer cells, to treat patients with the hopes of doing something that was never done before, potentially allowing patients to live disease-free, potentially allowing patients to overcome, you know, cancer indications, that, that had never been thought of, that could be done before. And then in addition to that, as I mentioned, we have one approved non-viral cell therapy utilizing our platform that was approved in December of last year. That's Casgevy by Vertex and CRISPR. That was approved in the U.S. and the E.U., and now has been approved in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain as well, for the treatment of sickle cell disease.
This is a slide that obviously it's colorful, but this is what we show when we want companies to partner with us, and why it makes sense to partner with us. We're not just an electroporation platform. We're not just that system that you saw up there. We're far more than that. Our goal is to make sure we can accelerate the timeline for product development, from research into the clinic and through the clinic. When we say we provide unparalleled support, that's not just a call center. Those are real PhDs and scientists that we have in the company, that we've dedicated the last 15, 20 years to ensure we can build the know-how around them.
Those are dedicated field application scientists that are trying to understand the science as well as therapeutic developers that they have accessibility to at all times, the research in the clinic and even upon commercialization. We also have a stable supply chain in the sense of with the last 2-3 years, we've brought all manufacturing in-house to allow us to be able to produce all of our processing assemblies and our instruments in-house, to be able to support the therapeutic approval of Casgevy and future approvals in the years to come. That's something that even during the COVID days, when there were supply chain issues with many of our competitors and many companies, we never had any supply chain issues. The reason being is, as I mentioned, the cell therapy space is dealing with live cells. These are patient cells.
If you have losses because of supply chain, you, in essence, can have the potential for patients not to live, and that's something that we're never—we as a partner, are going to make sure we'll do everything we can to be that partner that can do our job as that partner, to give you the scientific support, to give you that unparalleled support across the board. So what has that meant? You'll see here a chart as to those 28 SPLs I talked about. You can tell the first one we entered into was 2017, and that was with Casebia, which was part of CRISPR. That 2017 license I'm talking about is the same license that then became the Vertex approval of Casgevy.
That's what the space is, and if you think about it, it's a very short timeframe as to what's happened here. CRISPR, in essence, has been discovered no more than 10, 11 years ago. CRISPR Cas9. In those 10 years, what has happened is we've gone from something that was just a concept, where you can actually engineer a cell and make edits to the genome, to something in a span of 10 years that went from just a theory to a reality, where we went from 2017 license to then having an approved product that is now treating patients with sickle cell disease and treating patients pretty much sickle cell disease-free. That's what's happened over the last 10 years.
With those licenses, as I mentioned, we get to participate—those license deals allow us to participate in the economics of those deals with clinical development milestones, as well as a share of the economics on the back end of the—upon commercial approval, while we have a licensing model that allows us annual license fees and processing assembly recurring revenue from these therapeutics when they're in the clinic as well. And you can see the chart here, where it's been a steady flow of these license deals, where we've shown our scientific know-how, we've shown our scientific support, and it allows us to sign something that has not been signed by any other company in our space.
And we're proud of the fact that we're there, ensuring that we can do everything we can to de-risk as best as we can, the therapeutic development timeline and potential outcome of these therapies. This here is an example of a typical one of those licensing deals for a product as to what it means for those economics. And you can see here, it's broken out by, you know, the instrument and processing assemblies on your, on your green chart below, what we make from a typical product licensing deal. You can see what the milestones are, right? In that dark blue, that shows how we participate on a mid-six-figure on early development milestones. As the therapy gets later into the clinic, where you have registrational studies, those are along seven-figure milestones.
Upon approval in the U.S., Europe, and Asia as well, you have your marketing milestones as well. Then generally, for each product that's approved, we have participation of the net sales of roughly about 1% of the royalty on those net sales. While that's happening, we also allows us to have an annual license fee for each system being used, in addition to the processing assemblies as well. And I'm going to point your eye to the light blue, and in essence, when we say the commercial phase, if you look at where we are with Casgevy right now, which was approved the end of last year, that is, in essence, where we're starting now.
We'll start in the next, you know, at the end of the year, towards next year, to begin to participate in the commercial success and have the ability to garner, you know, right, you know, the royalty rate. In essence, that. If you see that light blue chart, we're in the beginning of that light blue chart for that one product. That's where we are right now, and then over the years, it'll begin to progress further and further, and that should be the case for each therapy that's approved utilizing our product as well. So you're probably asking yourself, what does that mean? So what other products are utilizing your system? We like to show this wave chart of what's next and what's to come. So we had our approval late last year.
In the next two to three years, in 2026 and 2027, there are potential for six other approved products utilizing our system to engineer the cell, utilizing our system to dose the patient, and, you know, after that cell is engineered, and it's a multitude of indications, where it's for solid tumor cancers, you know, for blood cancers as well, and then also for additional sickle cell disease treatments, in addition to Casgevy, as well as where we see the space growing. We're seeing this space lend itself, the cell and gene therapy space, really lend itself to being used in autoimmune diseases, and we have a few of our partners and our customers who have licenses with us that are using our system to engineer cells for autoimmune diseases such as lupus, systemic lupus.
You can see this wave throughout. The first wave is in 2026, 2027, and then we have another wave in 2028 to 2030, and so on and so on. Our goal that we've set is, in general, we guide to about 3-5 of these licenses that we plan to sign every year. That's not for any one particular year, but on average, that's what we feel is a healthy way for us to participate in the cell therapy field as the cell therapy field continues to mature and grow.
And this is, this is a list of all the indications, when you look at this, of everything that our partners are working on, and it as you can tell, the two that are circled, and it looks like my, my circling, I'm probably not the best circler there with a check mark those are sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia. That is Casgevy. That's what was approved late last year in the U.S. and in the E.U., for Vertex and, and, and CRISPR. But you can tell the, the other indications as well, for solid tumors, for infectious diseases, as well as, you know, obviously, that when I mentioned autoimmune diseases, which this field is lending itself to.
You can tell on the right the modality of how the editing is happening, whether using CRISPR-based editing or ARCUS or base editing. These are all things that we develop protocols around to make sure that regardless of how the cell's being engineered, regardless of what the payload is, regardless of what the nuclease is that's being used, that we have the protocols to ensure that we can create the highest efficiency of transfection with the highest cell viability post-transfection. This chart here is, if you recall, I said we have about 16 clinical programs that are currently utilizing our system to engineer cells in the clinic. That's what this shows here. This bullseye is showing you where those programs are.
You see the majority of them are really in that phase I, phase II, about to enter into that pivotal registrational study. But the other thing you'll see here is that our system can be used because of the scale that we can provide, where we can transfect up to 20 billion cells. Whether you're doing an autologous product, where you're using a patient's own cells, or you're doing an allogeneic product, where you're using healthy donor cells to create a big batch of therapies for more than just one patient, our ability to transfect up to 20 billion cells lends us to have 3-4 times the potential volume of transfection compared to our competitors.
So as you see here, about half of those clinical trials are, you know, engineering our allogeneic products, whereas the other half are engineering autologous products, and either way, we have the advantage over our competitors to lend itself to either modality. The other aspect you see here is, you see it's probably more than 16 bullets, right? I said we have 16 clinical programs in the clinic. The reason for that is we also work with the academic industry as well, where there are about four or five academic clinical trials utilizing our system to engineer cells to treat patients in the clinic, and that's really the beauty of our system.
It can be used in small scale all the way up to large scale, and that, and that's something that we can do that no other competitor can do, and we'll continue to focus on that, that scientific expertise from academia all the way to commercialization. So where does that leave MaxCyte now? In essence, as I mentioned, and I'll probably repeat it three times now, we have 28 of these SPL licenses. We have 708 installed platforms. That's in academic research and clinical platforms as well. We ended the first quarter of 2024, $11.3 million in total revenue. We had $9.9 million of gross profits in the first quarter of this year, and as importantly, we had 88% gross margins, and I'll repeat it, it's 88% gross margins.
That is something that, you know, we ensure that we can continue, you know, to maintain, and it's part of our and our business model lends itself to ensuring that we can maintain those high gross margins. And as I mentioned, we have over 60 clinical trials that have referenced our Master File, 60 clinical trials that have utilized our system to treat patients in the clinic, and now we have one commercial product that is utilizing our system to treat patients. And we ended the quarter with $202.5 million of cash, and we project at least $175 million at the end of the year. What does that say?
So if you look at the achievements year-to-date, you see the five licenses that we've signed this year with Lion TCR, Imugene, Wugen, Be Biopharma, and just last month with Legend Biotech. That's also culminated with, as I mentioned, last year, having that validation for the cell therapy space, where we had the first non-viral cell therapy utilizing our system. I want to end on this slide. This is the first slide I started with, and the reason why I ended on this slide and why I'm so, why I truly believe the cell therapy space is doing something that has never been done in modern medicine. That young, courageous person you see in the middle, her name is Victoria Gray.
So Victoria Gray, and that picture there is of her in our offices, talking about her experience as a sickle cell disease patient from the time she was pretty much born until she was 34 years old. Victoria Gray was the first patient dosed by Casgevy in a clinical trial back in 2019 at Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Tennessee. Up until that time period, this young lady had been dealing with sickle cell disease, where basically the entire community had given up on her. They, they thought that she was a person that was just complaining about her illnesses, constantly tired. The reason that was the case is because she cannot produce fetal hemoglobin.
So just like we can sit here and have hemoglobin, there are perfectly spherical that can go through our body and carry oxygen throughout our body. Her hemoglobin is actually in a sickle shape. That's why it's called sickle cell disease, and it cannot carry blood through the body. It cannot carry oxygen through the body. So you can only imagine how that would be. Even getting up is difficult. This young lady here, since 2019, was dosed with Casgevy, and sitting in our offices, she actually has been sickle cell disease-free until 2024. It's been 5 years where she's been illness-free. So that's why I say it's sci-fi. We really are at the age of sci-fi, and this young lady exemplifies that, and this is why we do what we do.