All right. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us here. First day of the William Blair Growth Stock Conference. If you do not know me, I am Andrew Brackman. I am the diagnostics analyst here at William Blair. On my team, Maggie Bowie and Kate Jansen here in the second row. You see us around the conference. Feel free to say hi. We are happy to chat anything and everything diagnostics. With us today, we have NeoGenomics. We have the whole team here in the front row. But presenting is the new CEO, Tony Zook. Tony, I will turn it over to you. Just one last thing. For a full list of research disclosures, please visit williamblair.com. Thanks, Tony.
Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, everybody. It is an absolute pleasure, Andrew. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here, and as well to William Blair for the support over the past few years. We truly do appreciate it. By way of introduction, as Andrew said, my name is Tony. I'm the CEO of NeoGenomics. I came on board just a few months ago, but I've had the great fortune of being associated with the company for the last two years as a board member. I have seen the company grow and been a part of that for the last few years. I could tell you, for me at least, the thing that drove me to NeoGenomics is the mission that the company has. I know every company has their placards on the wall. Every company says this is about patient health.
What I can tell you is what I have found at NeoGenomics, and it was from day one, is that it's a true spirit that runs across the 2,400 strong people of NeoGenomics. It's captivating. People do look beyond the specimen. They see that beyond that specimen is a real patient. It's more than just a job. It's a calling in many ways because we know that these patients are in the fight of their lives. We understand that. The best thing we can do to save lives is by improving healthcare and patient care. We do that with actionable results as fast as we can possibly provide them to the provider, as well as to the patient themselves. For me, it was that force, that gravitational pull that got me to NeoGenomics.
Now that I've been there for a few months, I've seen it in action every day. I will be making some forward-looking statements, so please read at your leisure. The safe harbor statement, for those of you that would like to go in more detail, of course, you can get it from our website. With that, let me start to share some insights that I have found with NeoGenomics. First and foremost, let me start off with a terrible statistic. I mean, this is just to me amazing. One in two men and one in three women will face cancer in their lifetime. When you think about that, let it sink in for a second. One in two men. Andrew, one in two. Right? We're going to face cancer. One in three women. And if it's not you directly, it's going to be a family member.
It's going to be a friend. Nobody gets out of this race, right? We all see it. We see the impact that it has on patients' lives. Now, the good news for all of us is that with the advances in treatment diagnostics and therapy selection and recurrence monitoring, combined with the outstanding innovation that's coming out of biopharmaceutical organizations, we're seeing cancer patients live longer, healthier, much more productive lives. We're seeing many of them actually beat the statistics and go cancer-free. It nonetheless is an eye-opening statistic. Another one for me that's equally important. The majority of these patients, those one in two men, those one in three women, 80%, 80% choose to be treated in their local community. Now, if you step back and think about it, it makes perfect sense.
Where you want to be, you want to be where you have your provider network, where you have your healthcare system network, your family, your friends, your support network, the cost-effectiveness of doing it locally. I think oftentimes we have this vision. People are diagnosed with cancer immediately. They're just running off to the top five or six hospitals across the country. That is simply not the case. For us, this very much informed who we are and who we wanted to be. The essence of our strategy is to win in a community hospital setting. We are committed to making sure that patients would receive the same type of cancer care treatment options at Memorial Sloan Kettering, come to their local community. It is how we built our organization. It is the key differentiator for us among other types of companies.
Now, if we step back and look at our positioning, we kind of sit between the large clinical reference labs to the left of us and the oncotechs to the right. I would tell you, we like this positioning. We like it for a number of reasons. First and foremost, we know that we can drive sustainable and profitable growth from this position because we have over 500+ test offerings. We do have a continuum of care offering by being a pure-play oncology company. We like that. We also have invested for years in the community setting. Our representatives, our entire organization was built on that premise of serving the community hospitals. We have very deep relationships with the pathologist community and in heme cancers. We are able to build upon that.
We believe that we can drive strong revenue and be profitable at the same time with this type of focused strategy. In fact, you can do both. You can drive revenue. In fact, you can be profitable. I think the management team here at NeoGenomics has proven that very fact. That one in two men, that one in three women that will develop cancer over time, there's an offshoot of that. Unfortunately, it translates into a pretty large and attractive market when it comes to cancer diagnostic testing. If we look at our own genesis as an organization, we started in that segment, diagnostic testing. You can see it's a large market at about $12 billion. It's very heavily penetrated at about 70%. You could say, well, Tony, your ambitions are to achieve double-digit growth.
The market's only growing 7%-8%. Why are you so confident that you can, in fact, achieve this outside growth? Even in that market, that's diagnostic testing, the $12 billion penetrated at 70%, Warren's commercial teams continue to drive share. Their modalities continue to drive share and growth even in that very crowded segment. We know organizationally it's not where we can stay longer term. Strategically, we know we have to move more to the right. We have to move into the therapy selection area, which we see again is about a $13 billion market. That penetration rate's only at about 35%. It affords us still a relatively good and healthy runway for more innovative product offerings like the NGS offerings that we have. There's opportunity for continued growth in this segment.
Of course, we look further to the right to the MRD marketplace, which some estimates have it as high as $30 billion. That penetration rate's only between the 5%-8% level. People ask, which markets do you anticipate competing in over time? MRD is certainly one of them because we see significant opportunity. We see significant growth potential. It's a relatively low penetration rate. The thing I would ask you to consider is remember, these penetration rates are total penetration rates. Imagine what it's like in the community setting versus just the pure academic setting. These innovations take time to catch up. We are very committed to entering this space and bringing offerings in MRD and therapy selection. That's how we continue to fuel our double-digit growth over our long-term plan.
Now, just to give you a little bit more insight on why we think we're so well-positioned organizationally, again, we've taken to heart that if you're going to be a leader in oncology diagnostics and if 80% of the patients are going to get treatment in the community setting, then we have to have a footprint. We have to have capabilities and reach to be able to deliver that outstanding service at the community level. This is just an example of smatterings of our footprint. There are many, many more. It gives you a sense of how we have invested to ensure that we can deliver to the community hospitals and to the community oncology practices so that, in fact, we can realize that promise of very fast turnaround times, giving them the information they need while they're in the fight of their lives.
Now, we also acknowledge that technology typically starts in the academic center, but adoption goes into the community. If you're going to be effective in this business, you have to have roots into the community to be able to drive adoption. If you step back and look at what the NeoGenomics team was able to do in 2024, you can see to the left side, we supported 700,000 patients in 2024. That was done through over 4,000+ accounts where we have relationships across the cancer care spectrum. I've shared with you again our portfolio of over 500+ tests so we can offer continuity of care for oncologists and community oncologists while at the same time giving them a way to reduce vendor selection. You see 100 million data points generated in 2024 alone. Our outreach into the community is certainly working.
It's giving us a point of competitive advantage that we're going to talk about in just a moment or two. Now that you have a high level of the market, you see where the markets that we are currently in and the markets we want to more formally penetrate. Let's talk about some of the strategic drivers for NeoGenomics. I've lumped our strategic drivers into three big areas. I highlight with the N, the E, and the O for NEO. We can talk about these in any order we want because they're not linear. We are doing all of these things at any given time across our business. Let's start at the foundation, the O. The O for NEO means Optimize and win the customer experience. For us, that is our competitive strength. We have invested heavily in the community hospital setting.
We continue to invest now in the community oncology setting because those deep relationships do pay dividends. Winning the customer experience for us is job one. What does that mean? We continue to invest in our sales force effectiveness work, our sales force efficiency work. We continue to invest in our labs. You know, we are now moving towards a one LIMS system, which we can then move and shut down eight legacy systems. That gives us a degree of efficiency that we did not enjoy before. It enables us to have industry-leading turnaround times. Warren and his team are continuing to look at new ways in the lab, automation, et cetera, so that in fact, we are better suited to meet the needs of our customers at the community setting because win the customer experience for us is job one. We can look at the E.
For me, that's Enhance our community channel strength. I've said to you now on a few occasions, I believe one of the competitive strengths for NeoGenomics is this community presence and the relationships that we have. To me, that's a leverageable asset. What can we do to further optimize that strength? You know, we've already shared a few of those examples that you've seen put into practice through some very effective, interesting partnerships. The Adaptive partnership comes to mind where we don't have a must-be-invented-here mindset. If we can find a way to augment our portfolio and create value for NeoGenomics while simultaneously creating it for a partner, we think that is a great way to leverage our strength in the channel. We recently made an acquisition for a geographic expansion in the Northeast. We can take our strength.
We now can build those capabilities out in the Northeast where we did not have the same ability to meet turnaround times. Now we have a local lab. We can build those turnaround time efficiencies back into the business and by definition, then start to pull the rest of the portfolio through. I see a world for us. Andrew, you and I have talked about this a little bit where, you know, we want to position ourselves to be a strong partner and a partner of choice. Just as an interesting aside, you know, we just came off of ASCO. Historically at ASCO, I would spend my time, you know, going to the scientific exhibits, what is new, what are people doing. We would spend a lot of time with customers.
I could tell you at ASCO this year, I was dominated with partner conversations because people see the opportunity and how they might more fully leverage our strength in the channel. We want to leverage that. As I mentioned before, we need Next-generation precision diagnostic solutions, the N. You know, we're focusing our own R&D efforts. We're putting a renewed emphasis in that space. Our organic efforts are being focused in MRD. Again, we are wide open and embrace business development and our own internal R&D as synonymous, right? You know, we just want to make the right solutions that are going to deliver the best outcome for patient health. By doing so, we can limit our own R&D spend. We could take advantage of opportunities in partnering that yield even incremental advantage for both companies. These are our drivers.
We call them NEO because it reminds us of who we are as a company. If you step back and you look at the broader R&D activities, as I had mentioned, we are not naive to the fact that most innovation starts in the academic center. They drive the initial uptake of these products, right? We truly appreciate that. While the initial testing and use comes out of the academic centers, if you want real utilization, you have to drive it into the community. That takes time and effort. That is where NeoGenomics comes into play. We leverage these great strengths that come out of academia. We then leverage our footprint in commercial so that we can begin to drive adoption of some of these innovative technologies and drive them further up the adoption scale.
By doing so, we start the flywheel effect of how we can help influence the R&D outcomes of the future. What do I mean by that? As we are driving increased utilization in the community, we can take learnings from those community centers, right? They have to practice against guidelines. They practice against real data generation, health economics data. They have different concerns than perhaps academia would have. We are able to leverage our own teams, for example, our oncology data services. Remember, 100 million data points are generated in a given point of time. Remember that these innovations have to continue to be cycled through. We can take those learnings. We can, again, inform our own R&D activities. With ODS and our pharma team, we can influence what pharma is doing as well.
All of a sudden, you know, this flywheel effect is taking root. We're becoming an accelerant to the process. The outcome is that we're now creating product opportunities that do not just serve academia, but they are also taking the needs of the local community into effect. We think we play a key role here. We want to continue to play a key role there. I did mention just briefly ODS, our Oncology Data Solutions, as well as our pharma segment. Let me just spend a moment on that. The two combined, they are our non-clinical part of our business. They really represent about 10% of our business. Economically, it is not a big driver for us, but it is very much a strategic driver for us.
We see the value that can be created here while we are also looking to monetize and grow that business. Again, to start us off and just groundset, relatively small percentage of our core business. If you look at Oncology Data Solutions, what are they doing? They are taking that 100 million data points that we have been able to generate. It is a large data set. It is robust. It is de-identified data. It is AI-enabled to capture, allowing for partnerships that also inform algorithms for ongoing R&D activities. We begin to create collaborations to investigate even new opportunities for future studies. On the pharma service side, we have customer assay development capabilities and validation expertise. We could do anything, as you can see, from support across all stages of pharma drug development.
It is an opportunity for us to stay at the forefront of innovation that is happening in the pharma sector and to stay informed along the way that, again, we are helping that customer, but at the same time, we are staying current with the recent innovations. From a business perspective, we shared that we have faced some macro headwinds in the pharma business. We have had some declines in that business. Again, strategically, we are very committed to the space because we think over time, it can still be a very good contributor, both revenue and margin growth over time. We are going to continue our efforts in the pharma space. Let's talk a little bit about our sustainable growth through clinical. Now, with our clinical business, this again is 90% of our business. It is probably the most important asset that we have within NeoGenomics.
You can see that because of the efforts that have been made for many, many years, we continue to build out those relationships in the community hospital. We are building out the same types of relationships now with community oncology practices. It is delivering very real results for us. If you just look to volume, we have had 8% year-on-year growth relative to volume, which is outstanding. NGS, which is a big growth driver for us in Q1, it grew approximately 18%. This was ahead of market growth. We anticipate that growth rate will continue to drive throughout the remainder of this year. We are also confident that when our own R&D activities are positive or through business development, we get access to new technologies. Our sales force is more than capable to drive that growth throughout the business.
Our proof point for that, five of our recently launched NGS tests generated 22% of our clinical revenue in Q1. This transition from diagnostic to therapy selection, you can see, is also very real for us. It is taking shape as we sit here today. Upon our sales force, as I said, we've expanded our sales force to 140 sales reps, the emphasis being in the oncology practice setting so that we build that same strength there that we enjoy in the hospitals. We've had some interesting partnerships. I mentioned briefly the Adaptive partnership that I think we'll begin to roll out in the second half of this year. We think that's a creative way for both companies to benefit from their existing sales forces, but in complementary ways. We've also made some geographic acquisitions. I shared one with you, the Pathline opportunity that we took advantage of.
We acquired Pathline. It is effective April 1st. With that acquisition, it gives us a stronger footprint presence in the northeast region. That becomes important to us because certain tests like flow need rapid turnaround times. By purchasing the lab, we can then take advantage of those rapid turnaround times that we could not quite service from Fort Myers, right? By doing it up in the northeast, we can now meet customer needs there. The added beauty is they do not do their own NGS testing in the lab. Over time now, we can use that presence to build out our own portfolio and drive that business in the northeast, similar to what we have seen our market share penetrations to be in other markets where we have this advantage, like in California and Florida.
I thought it was a really good acquisition that the team outlined. They executed against it because it's a phenomenal opportunity for us. We'll talk about the impact it could have just in our long-term growth trajectory in just a moment. Now, let's talk a little bit about PanTracer. I'm happy to talk about it because, you know, speaking of tests, this past weekend at ASCO in Chicago, we unveiled our newest product suite, PanTracer, which includes liquid biopsy, tissue, and tissue with HRD. This product suite is the next-generation evolution of our solid tumor NGS therapy selection portfolio. It's been redesigned. It's been redefined. Our man, we're going to relaunch it as part of our new flagship oncology portfolio. It's not just a name change, though.
For us, it's a strategic repositioning that reflects how we want to penetrate this precision oncology marketplace. This portfolio is designed for solid and liquid to work together, empowering oncologists to give them actionable genomic insights so that they can be taking confident, real-time decisions that's best for their patients. The tests can be ordered independently. They can be complementary, again, up to what the provider believes is in the best interest of that unique patient. Most importantly, from a business perspective, this fills the gap in our product portfolio that our customers were asking for. They see the opportunity to have vendor reduction. They don't want all these vendors constantly calling on them. If they have an opportunity to have an outstanding suite of products from Neo combined with our other 500 tests, they see that as a big win for their business as well.
Now, I'm happy to share that based on the feedback we received to date on our evaluation assessment program, or our EAP, for PanTracer liquid biopsy, we're extending the program for a limited time, making it available to any provider who would like to experience this high-performance assay. The broader program is going to help us validate the insights gained from EAP that have been clinically relevant in shaping a more compelling product profile and our overall competitive position. From a launch timing perspective, PanTracer liquid biopsy will now launch in Q3, while PanTracer Tissue and PanTracer Tissue + HRD will launch in June. It is an exciting opportunity for us moving forward. Let's talk a little bit about our financials. We are very proud of this.
If you look to the left side, you can see that back in 2021, to show you the transformation this company has gone through over the past five years. Back in 2021, we had sales that were approximately $484 million. You can see the EBITDA was minus, a negative. Go just three years later to 2024, we're generating revenue of $660 million + and a positive EBITDA of $40 million. I think that is just a phenomenal accomplishment. It shows the financial discipline that's been brought into the company. When I tell you, you don't have to make a choice between growing revenue and growing profit. In fact, you can do both. It is our plan over time for 2026 to be cash flow positive. I think, you know, Jeff and the entire team there have done a phenomenal job.
We are going to build upon that. That momentum continues. If we look to this year, we expect our revenue to be a growth of another 13%-15%, so double-digit growth, and the adjusted EBITDA up another 38%-45%. Strong performance across the business and things that we think we can drive long into the future. Speaking of that, why do we think we can drive it into the future? Earlier this year, we drove a guide. We increased the guide from 12% to 13%. Andrew, we get the question quite a bit, why would you do that, right? The reality was in 2023, you can see we grew the business 16%. In 2024, we grew the business 12%. That was in the face of rather significant headwinds on the pharma side.
Our core business continued to grow quite nicely. We see higher volumes than we've ever seen on our clinical side. We also knew that business development tucked in Pathline. We were already on the five-yard line with that. We knew that was coming. The Pathline acquisition alone offers us approximately 200 basis points of this growth of the 12%-13%. One of the whys where we saw the strength of the business, we saw the Pathline acquisition, and we thought it was reasonable and appropriate to give this guide of 12%-13%. We also saw opportunities ahead. We were investing in our sales force, you know, as we've talked about. We've invested more in the oncology side of the team. The full effect of that won't even be seen until the latter part of this year, but it will be seen.
We are quite confident of that. We have new product offerings, like you've just seen, the PanTracer family of opportunities. We also are going to continue to find operational efficiencies. We mentioned the Lynn System. That's just the start. We believe there's continued efficiencies to be found for margin improvement across the business. We see where we can continue to drive and grow the business over time. We are quite optimistic about what the future holds for NeoGenomics. I'll just summarize and say, you know, I found the company to be exhilarating. I love the passion that our employees have. I think we have a very focused strategy of winning in the community setting, in the community environment. I think we are poised well for the next phase of growth as we own our own R&D activities combined with business development.
I think it's an exciting journey for us to take. Hopefully, our investors will see the same. I'll stop there, Andrew. I do appreciate the time. Thank you all very, very much.