Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the MaxCyte half year results for the six months ended 30 June 2020. Your host for today is Doug Doerfler, Chief Executive Officer of MaxCyte. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session through the phone lines, and instructions will follow at that time. Participants can also submit questions through the webinar platform, which will be answered by the company at a later date. As a reminder, listeners should join to the call through either the webcast or the telephone lines for the best viewing experience.
This webcast will be recorded and available on demand from the LSE and MaxCyte websites shortly after the event. I will now hand over to the CEO, Doug Doerfler, to open the webinar. Go ahead, sir.
Well, good day, everyone. Thank you for attending our mid-year results. A very exciting morning for us, and I hope that you have received the publication this morning. This is Doug Doerfler, founder and Chief Executive Officer of MaxCyte. Joining me on the call today will be Amanda Murphy, our Chief Financial Officer, and Ron Holtz, our Chief Accounting Officer. Next slide, please. We are a listed company, and please refer to our written documentation. Slide three. For those of you who are not familiar with the company, I'll give a very high-level overview of what we're doing, then we'll talk about the basic technology, our partnerships, the financials, and then close with our asset CARMA, and then finally, we will do a Q&A at the end.
We are a leading global cell therapy company, working in the area of cell-based medicines, where the cell is used as a drug. We have a proprietary technology that our partners acquire either through license or acquire instrumentation. This is a products company, not a services company. What we're going to talk about today is our licensing business and our product sales business. This is a technology that's high efficient, reproducible. It's the only one of its kind in the world, and that allows us to engineer virtually any cell with any molecule at any scale. The cells that we typically are working in are either for the bioprocessing industry, these are the workhorse cells, if you will, for discovering development of drugs. We also use cells for treating patients.
These cells are usually stem cells that can be modified for treating inherited genetic diseases or immune cells like NK cells, T cells, dendritic cells, which can be used for treating oncology applications. It's a very, very interesting technology. Happy to answer any questions that you have eventually. Underlying all this is a very disciplined business. It's a business that has been growing on average between about 25%- 30% per year over the last five years. The revenues that we announced this morning was $10.9 million, which was our trading update, sorry, a couple of months ago. We announced our half year full financials, which includes a positive EBITDA for our base business. We're very excited about the business. Again, we've been able to grow this business at 30%.
The first half of 2020 was 30% over 2019, and 2019 was 30% full year over 2018. We've entered into a number of commercial arrangements in the first half of this year with companies such as Allogene, Caribou, and APEIRON. APEIRON is in Austria. These are really the leaders in the cell therapy field. We also launched the expanded disposable range for our ExPERT product, the systems we launched, the new instruments last year, and this year, we've been focused on launching an expanded range of disposables. These are beneficial for our existing customers so they can use our technology in new ways and also for opening up new applications for our technology. We license our technology to companies, and we are the go-to company for nonviral therapies in cell therapy, both for oncology and for inherited genetic diseases.
We have over 120 cell therapy licensed, 90 for clinical use, are just a blue-chip client base. All 10 of the top 10 pharmas are our customers, 20 of the top 25 biopharmas in the world are our customers, practically every one of the cell therapy developers are MaxCyte partners now. We're going to talk a little bit today about our wholly owned subsidiary. It's called CARMA. It's a unique way of manufacturing and delivering a product. In this case, it's directed towards solid tumors. Solid tumors in oncology is 90% of the oncology market, which is $100 billion a year. Huge opportunity for the company. In addition to that, we have announced that we're anticipating independent financing by the close of 2020. Our product, MCY-M11 is in clinical trials, we expect to complete the enrollment and dosing of that trial by the end of this year.
Next slide, please. We have assembled just an amazing leadership team. We've expanded the team quite a bit, actually, since May, with the addition of Amanda Murphy, who will introduce herself later in the presentation, and just recently added Steve Nardi. Steve joined us on Monday, last Monday. He joined us from a couple major companies, one of whom is Haemonetics, which is a major U.S.-based company who manufacture blood product equipment. He has extensive experience in the development and manufacture, and scale-up of the manufacture of instrumentation and disposables. We're getting to the point now as a company where we need to be really thinking about what the next generation of manufacturing requirements are going to be for our partners as they move toward the commercial setting. Next slide, please.
Talk a little bit about the product and a little bit about the business model. On the left-hand side, on the purple, this is where we sell the instrument, the STx, and the companies who use the cells that are modified to discover drugs. Again, this is a products business. We ship these instruments to our partners. They come pre-programmed. There is a touch screen on the instrument, and there is a drop-down menu. They will push the cell they want to modify and then the volume, and they push a button, and pretty much it is a walk-away technology. This is where we sell the instruments for $125,000 a piece. Every time an experiment is done, there is a single-use disposable that we charge anywhere from $200- $1,500, depending on the number of cells that the customer wants to reprogram.
There's a nice recurring revenue base, and again, all top 10 of the pharmas using this technology. They're using it for small molecule discovery, which is basically the pills, and then also for biologics development, which would be protein drugs. On the right side is where the cell itself is a drug that's either allogeneic, which comes from another source, or autologous from the patient. These systems are then leased to our partners. We retain the rights, and the price is $150,000 per instrument per year pre-clinically, and then when the instrument is used in a clinical setting treating patients, it's $250,000 per instrument per year. Plus, if they want rights for commercially use our technology, then we negotiate milestones, clinical milestones, and typically some sort of a sales-based payment based on a share of their commercial revenues, either through a sales-based milestone or a royalty.
We think it's a very, very exciting business, one that's just starting to get recognized in the marketplace as we've really built this out in the last one and a half or two years. Next slide, please. A little bit about the market in cell therapy. This is a fast-growing market. When we went public in 2016, very few groups knew about the whole area of cell therapy. Now many of you are following it very closely, which we know. The drivers have been the explosive growth of CAR T in blood cancers. What we're seeing, though, is that there's been over $25 billion that's been invested in the cell therapy space over the last four or five years, and there's only been two products that have been commercialized.
The reason for that really is that we believe that there are certain constraints that are preventing drugs from moving through the clinic and into commercialization, many of which are developed using viruses. These viruses have constraints around the availability and the development cost. There are some continuing safety concerns and supply chain challenges. What we're seeing in the non-viral side is that there are an additional number of technologies that are coming to the forefront. Obviously, MaxCyte's enablement allows these to be used in a therapeutic setting. They're being used in both immune cells for the treatment of cancers, but also modifying stem cells which are, if you will, the mother of all cells that come from your bone marrow, then produce all of your blood cells, and basically all the cells in your body come from your bone marrow.
Companies are working to take these stem cells and reprogramming them to treat, and sometimes we believe cure, inherited genetic diseases. A really exciting new area. MaxCyte, we believe, is optimally positioned for the transition into the non-viral setting. On the next slide, we are going to detail ExPERT. Slide seven now. ExPERT is the instruments that we showed you, but it's more than that. It's a brand of our field support. We have people, PhDs, typically ex-customers in many case, all around the world that work very closely with our partners and customers to assist them in developing their process using our technology as the center of that enablement. We have research and development wet labs in Gaithersburg that really allow us to fine-tune the biological outcome of the cells with our partners. Finally, regulatory.
I didn't mention her name, but Kathy Wekselman, who runs our regulatory group, has global responsibilities. We work with companies all around the planet, including in Japan and China and the U.K. and the E.U., South America, U.S., all around the world, helping these companies move into the clinic, and then once they're in the clinic, move through the clinic with our support and with local regulatory authorities. Now, the value that we bring to these companies isn't just the ability to put something into the cell. What we're really delivering is a way for them to accelerate their path to the clinic, which we've been able to show that we can accelerate by several months, and in some cases, a whole year. What that does is it reduces the program risk for these companies, reduces the unnecessary cash burn.
As you can imagine, if we can reduce the time it takes to get a program into the clinic, or that partner then can hit an important value-generating milestone, we can get them there quicker. It provides significant value for those clients, which allows them to get the key commercial milestones, increase valuations, increase in their capital, and moving those programs closer to commercializing and treating patients. Next slide, please. This is the slide that is the result of all this work. Again, we have over 120 licenses. Just to give you a sense of how dynamic this business is, if you compare 120 to the same period in 2019, it was 80. We've moved from 45 clinical programs licensed to 90 in one year, and we've gone from four commercial licenses in the half year of 2019, now to 11.
The partners are on the bottom. Some of these are very well-financed private companies like KSQ Therapeutics and Vor Biopharma, and the other ones are all very well-financed public companies who have market capitalizations in excess of $1 billion. That includes Precision BioSciences, Caribou Biosciences, Editas Medicine, Kite Pharma, Allogene Therapeutics, CRISPR Therapeutics. This is practically all of the companies in the cell therapy field, many of whom have adopted MaxCyte's technology at the very beginning and have built their product portfolio based on MaxCyte's enabling technology. I'll give you an example for three of these. One is Kite Pharma, which was the company that was recently acquired by Gilead Sciences for close to $12 billion about a year and a half ago. Their next generation product is based on MaxCyte's technology.
Allogene is a very recently formed enterprise that went public in the last 12 or 18 months, has a market cap in excess of $2 billion or $3 billion. In CRISPR Therapeutics, you may have heard the word CRISPR, which is the core technology, but CRISPR is using our technology both in the development of therapies for cancer patients, but also in inherited genetic diseases. One of their programs is quite exciting in sickle cell disease, where they're treating patients and being able to treat a patient for a long period of time, in some cases over nine to 12 months with a single infusion of the product. They're focused on basically providing a cure for these patients that have these inherited genetic diseases. Our partners are using our technology for both oncology applications and genetic diseases.
From a business perspective, all of these partnerships are non-exclusive, every one of them. We have, in many cases, several partners that are developing competing products against the same target, against the same indication. This is really, if you will, a bit of optionality on the whole cell therapy space, and I'm sure Amanda will talk a little bit about that when we get to the financial section, when she introduces herself. The next slide, please. I mentioned milestones. Milestones now are in excess of $800 million. These are pre-commercial milestones. This does not include any royalties that we receive from the sale of our partners' programs or products. It also doesn't include the single-use disposables, nor does this include the annual licensing fees. These are all pre-commercial milestones with our partners.
As you can see, the rather significant ramp over the last 12-18 months, and we're starting to see some of these milestones actually come into the company, and Ron will be addressing that. Finally, before we move into the financial section, this is a slide 10 that we've developed to give our investors and to give the public a better sense of what MaxCyte's all about. What we're all about is developing therapies for patients. This slide indicates the clinical trials currently being conducted with these diseases that are enabled by MaxCyte's technology. Genetic diseases, infectious diseases, the whole area of solid tumors, and heme malignancies, and other diseases.
Again, MaxCyte is on the forefront of this new area of cell therapy, and we're seeing this area of cell therapy really become a major arrow, if you will, in the quiver of the medical community now being able to treat diseases that otherwise really can't be treated, and in some cases, they're developing therapies that could be curative. With that, I'd like to move this over to my colleagues, Ron Holtz and Amanda Murphy, who will talk about the financial aspects of the company, which is on slide 12.
Thank you, Doug. On slide 12, I want to review first half 2020 financial highlights and our thoughts on the outlook going forward. We had a really great first half, hitting near $11 million in revenues, 30% year-over-year growth, with a strong start to the year pre-pandemic and then weathering the pandemic environment later in the half. In particular, our cell therapy customers continued to move their programs forward, and that meant strong growth in milestone revenues, and that drove margins up 240 basis points to near 90% for the period.
COVID, to some extent, changes the way we interact with customers, restricting travel, limiting conference expenses, which have gone pretty much all virtual, reduced lab activities to some extent, and that led to a 4% year-over-year reduction in operating expenses, and that, along with strong revenue line, resulted in first half positive EBITDA before CARMA of $600,000, and a decrease in CARMA investment to $5.2 million for the period. On the balance sheet, we closed June with $38 million U.S. in cash, netting out operating cash flows with the $30 million raised in the Casdin Sofinnova-led crossover we did in May. Looking forward, recall that in April, we gave a preliminary view towards the risks that we saw in the pandemic environment. With a bit more experience, we can say our outlook has improved from that very high level of caution and uncertainty.
Although COVID does still limit visibility, particularly in instrument sales and, to some extent, disposable sales as well. That means we expect full year revenues to be at least a bit above prior market expectations that were set as we were entering the pandemic. I think it's important to note that we continue to be optimistic about the midterm. As Doug pointed out, we've signed 11 clinical and commercial cell therapy deals to date, five last year, three year to date in 2020. The instrument and disposable revenues and the acceleration of clinical milestones as those partners move multiple programs into the clinic leaves us quite upbeat about 2021 growth, despite some modest caution in the near term. Want to move to the next slide 13. I believe you've all seen this five-year summary before.
First half revenues built on five years of 25% compound revenue growth, instrument placements with similar growth, and as Doug pointed out, partnered program licenses growing even faster, now standing at more than 120 program licenses and more than 90 licensed for clinical use. Towards the bottom of the slide, margins generally near 90%, stronger than that in the most recent period. Recurring revenues, which are the annual repeat license of instruments and the repeat purchase of single-use disposables, that continues to strengthen, particularly in the cell therapy program. That's it for my slides. I wanted to hand the floor over to Amanda. Really excited about Amanda joining the team. She brings a wealth of experience and some really deep insights into the cell therapy space, which is a unique opportunity for the company. Amanda?
Thanks, Ron. Yep, I'm very happy to be here, and good morning or good afternoon, depending on which side of the pond you are. Just to give a little bit of background from what I was doing before, and then two quick thoughts on to why I came over to MaxCyte. I think Doug mentioned I had been on the sell side for 14, 15 years, covering all sorts of things, but mostly instrumentation sales with tools, I'm sorry, that space, as well as the cell therapy companies, including many of the ones that are partnered with MaxCyte. That's how I got to know MaxCyte. I got to know Doug a couple of years ago, and obviously the company has a great trajectory.
Just at a high level from a macro perspective, as you know, as I mentioned, I covered a lot of the space, and clearly you can see that many of the therapies are now moving into human trials with some good data, lots of capital raising in the space, and I feel like every day there's a new company raising Series A. Lots of investment on the therapeutics side. Clearly, MaxCyte is a key component of that, as evidenced by the fact that they are able to put in place these strategic contracts with the partners, which I haven't really seen on the instrumentation side before. In addition, very good metrics around the base business with high recurring revenues and high margins, as Ron just walked you through.
I think there's many trajectories that we can take to move the company forward and grow above and beyond. I'm very happy to be here and really excited to work for such a great team with a great culture. Doug?
Thank you, Amanda, and welcome. A couple of things, Amanda. As you all know, we just raised a significant amount of capital for our company in May, and part of that was to execute against a number of initiatives that we've identified. We really felt that Amanda would be the perfect person for us to think through how to strategically move our understanding of our business, how we can leverage the position we have because of her unique vantage point in the cell therapy space, where she's been describing this ecosystem quite uniquely around how cell therapy developers, the companies who are developing the binary risk, if you will, of a development product, along with enabling technology companies like MaxCyte. How they work together.
How they really form this industry that's become the cell therapy industry, which MaxCyte is really in the center of. Is, we think, driving that next generation of cell-based therapies. In addition to that, there's no secret that our two investors we brought in are crossover investors. One of the things that we have been thinking about is doing a dual listing on Nasdaq and obviously with Amanda's background at BTIG and before that, William Blair, it provides us, again, unique insights from, if you will, the other side of the table and helping us to really make sure that we are presenting the company in the right way to investors and we're making the right execution against initiatives to really build a substantial company with not only near-term exceptional growth as we've announced today, but long-term participation and, again, enablement in this really, really exciting industry.
Also, I'd just like to point out that as we've grown, Ron's been with the company for, I think, 15 years, and his leadership, many of you know Ron, and he is really now going to be focused most of his time on helping us really build the engine that we call MaxCyte with the forecasting, budgeting, and helping us with really making sure that we continue with the same discipline that we've had over the years. As you know, I think MaxCyte has a reputation in the city for being a company that does what it says it's going to do and sometimes exceeding that. A lot of it has to, as a result of Ron's careful and professional development of this company and the systems and the processes and allowing us to really predict what moves we want to make as an organization.
We're really excited that we've been able to expand a team with Amanda and equally excited that we're going to be able to build a business around what Ron has helped us to build. Let me move on to CARMA, which is the next slide. As I mentioned earlier, CARMA is a subsidiary within MaxCyte. We've been developing this program for a number of years. The next slide, this was based on some insights that we have. We've been working in the field of cell therapy since we formed the company. The company was formed in the cell therapy space, and I think over the years, in addition to our powerful technology, we've also created, I think we've been able to develop some insights into how we can really move these programs forward and help the industry in general.
I think that the proof is in the pudding, if you will, with the slide that we showed about our partners. We conceived of a new product, and this new product was, we believe, going to be important to address solid tumors. Solid tumors are 90% of the oncology market. The other 10% are blood cancers, and that market is $100 billion. The two approved products, the CAR T products, are focused on blood cancers. We believe, obviously, that there's a huge unmet medical need in the solid tumor area. That's why we really started to develop what's known to be the CARMA platform and the products that come from that platform.
MaxCyte has invested a considerable amount of capital for a company our size, over $33 million into this program, that's allowed us to build the platform, but also a very, very impressive intellectual property portfolio. Many patents that have been issued around this IP. We also were able to discover and develop our lead program, which is MCY-M11, move that into the clinic, we're moving through the phase I clinical trial. We've established a cGMP manufacturing process, which is typically a major source of concern for many of the companies developing cell therapies. We have established that, we've built an excellent core team, which I'll talk about in a few minutes. We're seeking independent financing for CARMA. Our guidance has been that we will have that financing in place by the end of 2020. Next slide, please.
What CARMA is, it's an autologous mRNA-based CAR therapies. I talked about the two products that are approved for blood cancers. Those are based on a virus, in this case, a lentivirus. These products are very well suited for blood cancers. They permanently change the patient's T cells into cancer destroying cells. They're always on surveillance, which is critical for treating diseases like leukemia or blood cancers. When you move over, however, to solid tumors, solid tumors have the ability to have, when you treat them, quite a bit of toxicity because you don't want a cell that's constantly surveying the antigen on a solid tumor because that antigen, which is a protein on the cell, is also found on normal tissue. In those normal tissues, you can't manage that on target off tumor toxicity.
We believe by using mRNA, which is a transient short-term based expression system, we're going to be able to do that with multiple dosing, prospectively managing, if you will, the toxicity. I mentioned our lead candidate, MCY-M11, which is now in the level four dose cohort. I'm sorry. We presented data at ASCO in the second quarter that showed that there was no significant safety concerns through the third dose cohort, and we've given guidance that we will complete the enrollment and dosing of this trial, this is the non-preconditioning trial, by the end of 2020. It's a very innovative approach, we believe, for the reasons we talked about prior, the ability to repeat dosing, control toxicity, and the last part is a one-day manufacturing process. I'm going to skip to slide 19 if I could, Adina. 19. I'm sorry, 18. Sorry.
This is the manufacturing process I alluded to. If you're working with a virus-based cell, the manufacturing process, the process for actually engineering that cell is about two weeks, and the whole process takes about four to five weeks from skin to skin. The manufacturing process for MaxCyte takes less than one day. We've been able to demonstrate that and reported that in our ASCO paper. We've been able to validate that we can produce this product in less than one day. The advantage of this is quite extensive. One is the cost of goods sold for this drug should be much less than a virus-based product.
Secondly, because of the short dwell time, the higher throughput in a manufacturing facility, the capital investments in bricks and mortar should be significantly lower, and it can be also be done decentralized so we can get these therapies closer to the patient, which will have huge benefits. I think the last thing is that time to treat, and when we talk to clinicians, one of the areas that is becoming very important is that some of these more extensive therapies that take anywhere from a month or in some cases two months to produce, it's very difficult to manage the patient and to manage the expectations of families.
If you think about if you or a loved one has late-stage cancer and you're told that, yes, you're going to get this drug, but you're going to have to wait one or two months before it's administered, that is problematic to manage that patient. What we're finding is, what the clinicians are finding is because of that length of time, about 25%-30% of those patients are either no longer eligible for the drug once it's produced for whatever reason, and also because of the complexity in the manufacturing, the drug cannot be manufactured and even delivered to the patient. This is a really, a breakthrough way of thinking about cell therapy, getting it closer to the patient, and being able to reduce the risk, but also being able to treat patients faster, which we think is going to be very important.
The prior slide, please. Slide 17. We built the team within, it's called the CARMA team, and these folks are dedicated, these professionals are dedicated to this CARMA platform. We have people here who have joined the CARMA program from the National Cancer Institute, both the head of our non-clinical studies and our chief medical officer have come from there. They also went on to major companies such as Takeda Millennium. Our head of business development spent a number of years at Human Genome Sciences and worked with a number of really high level biotech companies, and we're continuing to build out that team with cGMP manufacturing and operational excellence. This program will be funded separately by outside investors. I can move to slide 19, please.
This is a wholly owned asset of MaxCyte, and of CARMA, and we have contracted just world-class partners that work with us. Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore did our preclinical work. As you likely know, our clinical trial was at National Institutes of Health and Washington University in St. Louis. We've just announced last month or so that we've expanded the number of clinical sites to include Hackensack in New Jersey and Mass General, a unit of Harvard. We've also have expanded the trial slightly, which I'll talk about in the next slide. The next slide, please. As you can see, the upper left-hand corner is the existing phase I trial. It's an IP infusion. Sorry, intraperitoneal. It's early here. No preconditioning. We have announced that we are going to do multiple cycles and add preconditioning.
What preconditioning is, it's a light preconditioning, so after we take the cells from the patient, the patients then go through a very light, single dose of chemotherapy, which knocks down some of the reactive cells within that patient. Then we'll give the MCY-M11, and then we've gotten the clearance to do multiple cycles. What that means is in the trial, the upper left-hand corner, that trial, we can only give three doses for a single cycle, but now we can give multiple cycles. So give three, six, nine doses for a patient, those patients that we see on stable disease. We did see some patients that exhibited stable disease when we presented those data at ASCO. We then, once the funding is completed, we'll move into an intravenous infusion of the product, which will expand the indications dramatically.
It's the same product, the same manufacturing. The only difference is the route of administration. We also are working on a second generation MCY-M11, which we'll disclose eventually, and we have two additional confidential programs that we will be announcing once we hit the funding in place for the CARMA program. Next slide, please. This is, we think, a unique program. It's the potential to really expand the whole CAR field into solid tumors, again, in an area of huge unmet medical need, huge commercial potential, and based on our internal capabilities that we have built around translational research, manufacturing, and clinical development. The next slide is the one slide, if you want to take a screenshot, this is the summary of the company. Again, just robust revenue growth over the last several years, particularly in the last term.
The first time we've showed a positive EBITDA for the life sciences business, not including CARMA. Total cash and cash equivalents of $38 million at the end of June, we just see a very strong period for us ahead in terms of rapidly growing milestones, continued progress in instruments, and also in the development of new partnerships.
With that, I'd like to, again, look at the next slide, which is upcoming news flow, which would be the, again, recurring revenues, continuing to invest in product development, increasing the potential pre-commercial milestones, identifying new areas of new opportunities for us in cell therapy, driving our top-line growth, continuing to make investments in sales and marketing, new initiatives that I mentioned before, certainly with Amanda coming on board to help us evaluate and then execute against those, and then finding and exploring the independent financing for CARMA and completing the enrollment and dosing of those patients in that first phase I trial by the end of 2020. With that, I'd like to open up the lines for any questions that you may have, and thank you for your attention.
Thank you. At this time, ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. Again, to ask a question over the phone, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. Our first question comes from the line of Paul Cuddon of Numis.
Hello there. I've got two, if you don't mind, please. Firstly, the revenue from lease elements in the notes to the statement shows sort of 50%, or 55% growth, actually. I'm just wondering between the licenses on the machines and milestones, whether there was any major difference between the two. Secondly, we're closing in on the end of kind of 2020 now, and you must have a better feel for the likely kind of shape and structure of the independent financing for CARMA. I'm just wondering if there's anything that you can share with us on that we should be sort of aware of going into the year-end. Thank you.
Paul , I can take that first question. I think you're referring to in the notes of the financial statements, there's a table which gives a little bit of a breakdown required under GAAP on where the revenues come from. If you look at instrument leases and milestones, those are structured a little differently. Instrument leases are solely in the cell therapy space. Occasionally, we do a lease in drug discovery, but usually that's an interim step to a sale. In the cell therapy space, instrument leases are, they grow pretty steadily and they're growing quite well because with 11 deals, whenever a company, they start out in a research license, usually with a single instrument, but once they commit more broadly, the number of instruments grows as their clinical sites grow, the number of programs in the clinical grows.
It's a fairly kind of a steady growth as opposed to the milestones which were on a small space, zero a few years ago, and continuing to be the fastest-growing line item and quite lumpy. Underneath that aggregated number, you'd see consistent growth in instruments and much more rapid growth in milestones, if that helps.
Okay. Thank you.
Paul, nothing to report really on CARMA other than our expectations of having the financing closed by end of 2020. There's quite a bit of activity that's been going on to properly position the CARMA program, and really figure out what is the best structure for this asset, which will benefit the shareholders of MaxCyte, as well as ensure that we have the right investment syndicate for the CARMA program.
I thought it was worth a try. Thank you.
Always, Paul.
Our next question comes from the line of Lala Gregorek of Trinity Delta.
Good morning, good afternoon. I have got three questions. To start off with, obviously you've had a pretty robust performance. It's been a bit of a tumultuous period too. Given the press is sort of assuming subsequent COVID-19 waves, would you be able to comment on what would be operationally different this time around, what have you learned, and how might you sort of mitigate any future impacts? Secondly, looking at slide 10, it's quite obvious that there's a breadth of potential applications rather that you have for ExPERT. Do you feel that there are any obvious gaps or areas that you're underweight? It'd be quite interesting if you could comment there. Lastly, obviously there's not a lot that you can say about the timelines of the underlying partner program or when you might get further licenses.
With respect to CARMA, given the changes with the potential for the expanded MCY-M11 dataset, could you give me a recap on what your expectations are for when data might come through? Would it be fair to be presuming that that might be at sort of future scientific meetings, as per in the past?
Okay. Lala, thanks. We usually only allow you two questions, but we'll let you have three this time. Let me start with the last one.
Thank you.
CARMA, it's our plan to complete the enrollment and the dosing of the remaining 4th dose level cohort in the no preconditioning trial by the end of 2020. I think we've been very consistent that the only data that we're going to be presenting will be at scientific meetings. It's not our intention to announce anything from a public relations perspective, and I think that in many cases, these meetings have deadlines and processes for putting the results into, and then they evaluate for publication. We think it's really important to do it in scientific meetings because the customer really, if you will, in that arena would be the big pharma companies, and they don't read press releases. They go to scientific meetings. We want to make sure that whatever we publish has the rigors of some sense of peer review and a discussant.
Sometime after we finish those dose level cohorts, and if there's any data we develop between now and then that we can find the right scientific meeting to publish, we will. It's going to be based on that calendar. In terms of slide 10, which is, I think you were talking about the slide with all the different diseases. This has been an incredibly rewarding time for this company as we've been able to position ourselves to be able to participate with these diseases. I guess the simple to answer your question is that there's enough here for even more than one company, frankly, to be able to be a part of. We're really not that interested in expanding into new areas other than leveraging the position that we have with these companies.
Again, we have this, not intimate, but very close relationships with our partners, and we've been a trusted supplier to them, a trusted partner to them with enabling technologies. As we identify additional technologies that will aid them in moving those programs forward, we will develop those and provide those to our clients and expand the client base as a result of that. A big opportunity, we think is really when these programs move from the clinic into commercialization, and you start looking at some of the patient numbers for some of these, the prevalence and incidence, and they're quite significant, certainly in a number of these solid tumors where you have literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of global patients who have these diseases. The challenge for us really is focusing on what does that mean from an operational perspective.
What do we need to do to increase the number of disposables from where we are today to a factor of 10 times, which is frankly a high possibility given the progress that our partners are making. That's one of the major challenges that we see, and opportunities for this company, is to support our partners, find new partners, and then support their development and eventual commercialization. Your first question I'll touch on and then I'll let my colleagues chime in, fill in any of the gaps. There's been a lot of learnings. First of all, what's most important to us is our employees. We meet almost every other week. Everyone is on very restricted travel schedules, if not completely restricted. The offices are basically closed. We're all working virtually. We're calling in today virtually. We're on split shifts in manufacturing, split shifts in the lab.
Everyone is being tested on a routine basis. Family members are also being tested on a routine basis in the household that they live in. We have created a virtual way for doing demonstrations, a virtual way of installing instrumentation. We've been very active in creating these new digital conferences, which these companies are still pulling together these conferences, but they're not in person, so they're digital. We've been able to develop ways that we can build our pipeline, continue to meet with our clients on a routine basis. Actually, we see that becoming a part of the norm, even when we start to see people being able to congregate in large numbers. I think you're still going to see this virtual digital aspect continue, so we think that's a worthwhile investment. Let me stop there and see if Ron or Amanda, you have any additional thoughts.
Doug, I think I agree with everything that you said. I think the team has done an amazing job with figuring out how to work with customers remotely because we've decided to protect our employees or because our customers have said no visitors in some cases, or countries are shut down. Installing the instruments, setting up instruments, doing virtual training. The marketing team, the field application scientists team, and the sales team have all worked together to put in processes and documentation to allow us to do that remotely, and also, as Doug pointed out, to do the demonstration process, which has always in the past been face-to-face, to do that virtually as well. There's some question as to what effect does that have on sales cycle.
The pipeline route continues to be quite strong, but doing virtual demos it's a different process than what we've done in the past. If we're cautious about the second half results, how those virtual demos work their way through from pipeline to sales is one of the things that we're learning our way through at this time.
Great. Thank you. That's really helpful.
Next questions, please, then I think we're getting near the end, so maybe one more question. Again, if you did send your questions in, we'll endeavor to answer those in rapid time. Another question?
Our next question comes from the line of Charles Weston of RBC.
Hi, Doug. I'm glad I snuck in at the end. With apologies for not having been as diligent as Paul at going through your notes to your account. On page five, when you split out your two addressable markets, I'm just wondering if you could split out your revenues in that same way, i.e., how much is in the sales to discover drugs and how much is in the sales as drugs category? My second question, within the left-hand side, could you just give us an overview of the competitive landscape here? Clearly you have a very strong position in electroporation on the right-hand side, what are the key barriers to stop you taking more market share, a material part of the addressable market on the left-hand side? Thanks.
Let me take the last question first. Ron can take the questions that I'm sure he'll handle. On the left-hand side, the addressable market is quite large in the bioprocessing space. It's typically more of a price-sensitive market than it is on the cell therapy space. The cell therapy space has the requirement that you really do have to have a safe product. When you're transfecting or modifying a cell on the manufacturing side, it's a means for, so that you can use other methods, and those other methods could be viruses, it could also be just straight chemicals. Those chemicals tend to be very inexpensive. Those could be lipids, Lipofectamine, and those sorts of products, calcium phosphate, which is very, very inexpensive. That market is highly segmented around those areas.
It's an area that we're quite interested in. Our interest will be to really look for high-value applications where we can make a major difference, and we can really aid in the discovery and development of drugs, as we have done on the cell therapy space. For us, it's not all about top line and growing, it's figuring out how we can position this technology to really move the industry forward. We think that will provide us and our shareholders with a long-term, stable, attractive growth that we've been able to show certainly over the last five or six years.
Yeah. Just to go back to the first question, we haven't given detailed breakdowns of how the revenues flow through, but if I can just give some pointers about how we might think about it. When we went public on AIM, I think the cell therapy and drug discovery markets were about evenly matched. While we've been public, the cell therapy market has just exploded with the launch, as Doug pointed out, two new commercial products has brought so much new capital into that space.
While we love the drug discovery market, it's a more mature set of companies to work with, so it's more a steadily growing opportunity, whereas cell therapy is just growing so quickly with new company formation, with the 11 deals that we signed and with really a new and rapidly growing revenue line contributing to the growth of the cell therapy. That combines to give us sort of a disparate weighting of the growth rates in those two markets, with cell therapy obviously being the much stronger grower.
Thanks, Ron. Amanda, anything to add before I close?
Yep, I think you guys covered it. Thank you.
Okay, great.
Thank you.
Thank you, Charles. Thank you very much for your continued interest in what we're doing. Thank you. I'd like to close by expressing my thanks, our thanks, on behalf of the MaxCyte team, for all of those who have joined us today. My best wishes to all of you. I hope you're keeping safe and well at this time, and we look forward to catching up with you again in person as soon as possible. Thank you for spending some time with us today and your support of MaxCyte. Thank you very much.