All right, good afternoon. I'm Julia Qin, Lead Analyst covering Life Science Tools and Diagnostics at JP Morgan. It's my great pleasure to introduce you to our next company presentation by Repligen. With that, let me turn it over to Tony. Welcome.
Great. Thanks, Julia. Delighted to be here. Look forward to bringing you guys up to speed on all the things going on at Repligen. I thought it might be useful for the first few minutes to give the audience a little overview of where I see the bioprocessing industry as we enter 2023. There's been lots of questions on this. I think, you know, if you look back over the last five years, tremendous growth in bioprocessing really started mid-2018, and it's been really fueled by increased number approvals, monoclonal antibodies. There's been a significant investment in cell and gene therapy, which has spawned a whole set of companies that have scaled and started to use bioprocessing equipment from Repligen. Obviously the pandemic hit.
As the pandemic hit, then that just was an extra. It really accelerated the growth in bioprocessing. That's obviously lasted through to 2022. As we enter 2023, while there is some legitimate concerns about the drop-off in COVID revenue, which is real, and the fact that there are pockets of inventory that have built up in the at our customer level, the real kind of story entering 2023 is that the markets are incredibly healthy. One of the things that I've personally done over the last quarter is gone out and visited a whole set of customers in Europe and North America, and really just tried to understand exactly what the state of investment was like.
You know, to a person that I spoke to, what I saw and what I heard was significant scale-up happening. An awful lot of money is moving into the cell and gene therapy into mRNA. Biosimilars have been scaled. Cell and gene therapy drugs are being scaled. I would propose that the bioprocessing market is incredibly healthy, and there's a couple of quarters of inventory challenges that we have to move through. What does this mean for Repligen? I think when you look at Repligen as a company, we've really differentiated ourselves in the marketplace by focusing on innovation. We're the true innovation leader now as we enter 2023 in our markets. We've done that with single-use solutions. We're very focused on yield.
We're very focused on improving productivity for our customers. If you look at what we've accomplished over the last five years, we've been able to take the company from about $140 million in revenue in 2017 to $800 million approximately at the end of 2022. We've grown at about 41% CAGR over the last 5 years. If you take COVID out of the equation, it's been really growing at 26%. About a third of our revenue is now coming from new modalities. You combine what we've done in COVID with what we have in cell and gene therapy, about 30% coming from there. One of the important parts of our strategy is around launching disruptive technologies, and this is how we differentiate ourselves for some of the big competitors we have in our space.
About 10 disruptive products have been launched in my tenure. When you look at our customer profile, 65% of our customers are in clinical development, and 35% of our customers in terms of generating revenue for the company are in commercial. This is ex-COVID. This compares with the big players in our industry. They're more like 75%-80% in commercial, and then sort of 25% or so in clinical. This gives us a big runway. You'll see later in the presentation when I show you some of the data on adoption of some of the technologies, this should be a tailwind for Repligen as we go through the next few years. How do we set the company up, right?
If you go back a few years ago to 2017, I mentioned $140 million in revenue, but we were, you know, three divisions, three franchises in the company: filtration, chromatography, and proteins. Pretty evenly balanced from a revenue perspective. What you can see in the last five years is our filtration franchise has really gone from about 35% of our revenue to now a little over 60%. That's been driven by the disruptive technologies that I spoke about. We've brought a lot of products to market in filtration over the last five years that's really differentiated us versus our competitors. If you look at the other franchises, whether it's analytics, chromatography, or proteins, all of these product lines are doing incredibly well.
In each of those franchises, we also have highly differentiated products that have set us apart. If you think about the $800 million in revenue and you ask the question: How's that split up, right? About 75% of our revenue is coming from consumables and 25% is coming from capital equipment. Most of the capital equipment revenue has really come from the fact that we did two deals, one for Spectrum back in 2017 and one for ARTeSYN at the end of 2020. That's really helped us balance our portfolio and add a lot more capital equipment into what we do. From a customer perspective, about 80% of our customers are either in biopharm or CDMOs, and the other 17%-20% are what we call the integrators.
The integrators are other bioprocessing companies that we sell to. From a modality point of view, 70% of our revenue is coming from monoclonal antibodies and 30% is coming from a combination of cell and gene therapy and COVID, which for the most part, for Repligen is mRNA. Where does that leave us when you look at the markets, right? We believe that the markets are incredibly healthy. If you look at the monoclonal antibody market there's over 140 drugs that have been approved. There's 800 in phase I through III clinical trials. A lot of products still going through the scale up. You know, as we have more products in our portfolio, we have more opportunities to be involved in those monoclonal antibodies.
When you look at cell and gene therapy, again, very healthy, 14 approvals, a better year last year for cell and gene therapy approvals. We expect that the number of approvals is gonna continue to go up with 500 trials ongoing. Again, a really positive position for anyone in bioprocessing and good for Repligen, given the interaction we have with cell and gene therapy companies. When you look at the mAb piece, and you dig down a little bit more, and you look at biosimilars, there's about 100 active programs out there in biosimilars today, with a lot more biosimilars getting approved in the U.S.
For example, in 2023, you will see 8 biosimilars for Humira hit the market in the US, and there's 4 other blockbuster drugs that are gonna come off patent over the next 4 or 5 years. That's going to fuel a whole flurry of activity in the biosimilar space. When we look at where Repligen is, we have way more products today than we had in 2017 when a lot of, say, the Humira biosimilars were really developed. We expect that we're gonna play a significant role in the development of next set of biosimilars. The last piece of the puzzle is mRNA. As I said in my intro remarks, I spent a lot of time talking to mRNA customers in Q4, and there's a significant investment happening.
If you look at the main players, whether it's Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech, CureVac, players that were involved in COVID, they've really pivoted to non-COVID programs, whether it's on the vaccine side or it's on cancer. You've seen over the last three or four months, some very positive results, Moderna working with Merck on a Keytruda combo trial, BioNTech moving forward and expanding their manufacturing. If you have listened to what Sanofi is doing, they're building two vaccine centers, one in Lyon in France and the other one in Singapore, which again shows that the level of investment that's going on is quite significant, and it's going to be another driver of growth for bioprocessing. How does this leave us when you look at the addressable market for bioprocessing? We see bioprocessing as a $23 billion market today.
Repligen, our addressable market is about a third of that, at $8.5 billion. If you look at our at our franchises, both our filtration and chromatography franchises are all showing about 10%-12%, 12%-13% market share. Plenty of room for us to continue to take share in these markets. Then the other franchises in proteins and process analytics, we're about 5%-6%. Lots of opportunity for us to grow and expand in a market that continues to really grow at a pretty good pace. Our total, you know, of our TAM, we're at 9%-10%. If you look at the products we have, we think that there's huge room for growth for us over the next five years.
How do we think about, you know, what have we learned in the last nine years as we've developed and built the company up? What can that tell us about where we need to go in the next five? We see our strategy and our blueprint for success centered in three areas. One is around M&A, and our strategy in M&A is always about technology first and find companies that have great technology that are underinvested in some way, and then bring it back in-house into Repligen and start to invest from an R&D perspective. When we think about R&D, we wanna be first to market.
Can't be first to market in everything we do, but a lot of what we've been able to accomplish over the last, say, 5+ years is bring products to market that are highly innovative, highly differentiated, and this gives us a better competitive position. We're not competing with the Big Five. We intend to end up competing maybe with one of the Big Five for some of these products. The last part's around operational excellence. There's a lot of conversation, if you went back and listened to the last couple of J.P. Morgan presentations, I think the main theme was around capacity and how do you increase capacity and get ahead of the demand curve.
Well, the good news is capacity, I think everybody has invested increased capacity, and I think now everybody's looking for commercial organizations to continue to build the order funnel for the companies in our space. Commercial is important, and we'll talk a little bit about what our commercial footprint is like. We'll start with M&A. Over the last 9 years, we've done 11 M&As. As I said, it's all around technology. If you look at our filtration franchise, we acquired 4 companies, generating roughly about $60 million in revenue. We've been able to take that $60 million of revenue, and that ended up last year about $505 million.
We've done a really good job of taking companies and really accelerating their growth through the strategies we put in place. For process analytics, this was the C Tech acquisition in the end of 2019. That's more than doubled in the three years that we've owned it. Fluid management, and our strategy during the COVID years was to build out fluid management. That group of companies franchise is now up about 50% in a very short period of time. I think for us, it's not about volume of acquisitions, it's about finding the right technology that is the right fit for Repligen and to the strategies that we have for each of our franchises.
Because M&A is an important part of what we do, R&D then plays an even more important role as we're always looking for what do these companies have that we can really build upon. Depicted at the very bottom of this slide, there are, you know, five examples, six examples of products that we see as highly disruptive. Whether it's the RS20, which is over on the left-hand side of the slide, which is a dedicated system for cell and gene therapy, which came out of our ARTeSYN acquisition, to what we've done with TFDF, which has come out of Spectrum, to our ATF technology or our FlowVPX technology, which came out of CTech. In each case, it's all about getting to technology leadership.
I would say that today we are the not only the technology leader, but the market leader upstream for process intensification. When you go downstream, we're the market leader in pre-packed columns, and when you go into the world of analytics, we've really established ourselves as the premier player in advanced analytics. That puts us in a really strong position as we go through the next four or five years. While we talk a lot about M&A and we talk about what we're doing in R&D, there's also a lot of work going on in terms of recognizing when we should partner. 2022 was an important year for us in partnerships. We did two. One was with a company called Daylight Solutions. They play in the aerospace defense, not a company you typically associate with bioprocessing.
We recognized that they had done a lot of work in mid-IR and using it to look at second-order structure of proteins, which we clearly could see there was a benefit to putting that into bioprocessing. We signed a 15-year partnership with them, and we're focused on bringing their technology, which is called Optio, to market, and expect to see this, you know, in the market this year, and then over the next 1-2 years, getting integrated into our ARTeSYN systems, which will give us further differentiation in the marketplace. The other partnership that we did in 2022, was Purolite, and this is some company we've worked with very closely for the last five, six years.
We extended the agreement we had with them on Protein A ligands out to 2032, but we also expanded the relationship to include ligands coming from our Avitide acquisition from 2021. That allows Purolite now to have a much broader portfolio of ligands that they can put onto their affinity resins and compete quite successfully in a pretty big affinity market. These are just two examples of the importance of doing partnerships. The last two pieces of the strategy is around capacity. $165 million spent over the last couple of years. We've increased, you know, capacity on our key product lines anywhere from 3-fold to 9-fold. It gives us best-in-class lead times. It gives us really great business continuity when we talk to our customers.
We essentially have 3-5 years of capacity now, for us to kind of drive right into our customer base with really short lead times. Capacity is in good shape. Commercially, we've got about 300 folks in the commercial organization split quite nicely between sales, field service field, customer service, and field applications. I think we're in good shape, good balance across the regions, and expect to see incremental adds as we go through the next few years. The real story in the company is about being first to market. We want to set standards. We want to set standards with single-use solutions. The best way to kind of show this is to look at what we're doing upstream and downstream.
In the upstream space, we probably have two of the best technologies in ATF and TFDF. We have seen really great results with our customers using these technologies in biomanufacturing processes. Samsung has endorsed us in the use of ATF technology in N-1. They see a 30% reduction in production time. If you look at the work we've done with McGill, a 30-fold increase in lentivirus vector production rates. This is incredible results. When you see these kind of isolated one examples, what you really wanna be asking is, are we really moving the needle and are our customers really scaling and implementing our technologies in commercial processes?
When you look at ATF and TFDF, and you look at the number of late-stage commercial processes and the wins we have, 45%-46% of the wins are now in late-stage commercial. About 54% are in phase I, phase II. If you look at it by modality, most of this is in mAbs and but we've also built up a very nice customer win rate in cell and gene therapy. This is in great shape. If you go downstream. Our focus has been on systems, right? With our ARTeSYN acquisition, we've added in both chromatography and filtration systems that are single-use, they enable PAT technology, highly integrated, automated software, again, highly differentiated. We were able to take what we had done with ARTeSYN and bring this into the world of cell and gene therapy.
Just in Q4 of last year, we launched the first, you know, cell and gene therapy system that's fully automated, highly, you know, easy to use, scalable. When you're dealing with drugs where every drop counts, this is what our customers need. The reaction has been incredibly positive. We see this as a big win for us and expect it to be a standard in the industry as we move forward. What about our downstream portfolio? Where are we in terms of adoption? If you look at OPUS, you can see incredible growth in OPUS columns over the last 7 or 8 years, and expect we'll be close to the 2,500, 3,000 columns in 2023.
If you look at our Flat Sheet Cassette and hollow fiber portfolio, again, almost a third of the customer wins are now in late- stage commercial, two-thirds in early -stage. When you look at it by modality, about 60% is in cell and gene therapy, which shows that we've been able to jump in to the newer markets and get established very quickly. We still have about 1/3 of our revenue and wins coming from coming from the mAb world. This is an important kind of balancing between the different modalities that are in the marketplace. What are we trying to accomplish as a company? I've kind of shown you on the left-hand side of this slide, the individual products like ATF, like OPUS, like Flat Sheet Cassettes.
Where are we going with our portfolio, and how will we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace? What we wanna do is take these individual product lines and start to integrate them with flow paths, and then take those integrated flow paths and put them into our systems, and then take our systems and differentiate our systems with analytics. The kind of two key things that we need to do over the next couple of years is really focus on our advanced analytics and on our fluid management. I'll spend the last few minutes just talking through what we're doing here. In the world of analytics, we just launched the first real-time process monitoring instrument that allows you to monitor your drug concentration towards the end of the manufacturing process. Nobody else can do this in real-time today.
We got this launched in Q4, which allows the process development scientists to really model how to do this at the bench top scale. As we go through the next year or so, we will bring the same technology into the larger- scale systems. When we come to fluid management, to get into fluid management, we had to go and acquire four companies. We did that during the COVID years, and what that has allowed us to do is take tubing and fabrication and liners and clamps, and bring it all together and put it into what we call assembly centers. Now our assembly centers are built, qualified, validated since September of last year. We now have a $50 million business that we believe will grow to about $200 million over the next 5 years.
That puts us in great position, and I'll just finish with kind of where we are financially as a company. You saw where we finished in 2021 at $670 million, expect somewhere in the $795 million to $805 million range in 2022. Our margins are holding up in the high 50%. Operating margins are doing well as well, somewhere in the 28.5%-29.5% range. With $600 million in cash, I think we're in great position. We've shown that we can grow at a very high growth rate. We have shown that we can increase adjusted EPS 5-fold in that same time period. I would leave you with kind of the final words on where we are as a company.
I think we're incredibly well-positioned for future growth. We're the innovation leader in bioprocessing. We've expanded our addressable market. We have an R&D engine that is bringing out really important disruptive technologies. We've done the capacity expansion that everybody that we all needed to do. We've got a great track record in M&A, and I think we've had outstanding financial performance. W hen we've set our target earlier or in the middle of last year, in September timeframe of $2 billion on our way, we really believe that we can accomplish this goal in the 2027, 2028 timeframe. With that, I'll stop and hand it back to Julia for some questions. Thank you.
Excellent. Thank you for that great overview, Tony. I think we can all agree that bioprocessing is one of the most promising end markets in healthcare in the long term. Repligen has definitely consistently been a best-in-class bioprocessing story. Maybe just to get some of the short-term dynamics out of the way for the sake of our audience, one of your peers pre-announced 4Q bioprocessing results, pretty strong. Can you maybe give us an update on, you know, what kind of trends you saw in 4Q and kind of, you know, what's the latest dynamic in terms of those near-term order normalization patterns?
We definitely haven't announced our Q4 results, but when we did our Q3 call, we called out that our base business, so ex-COVID, would be around 33%-34% growth. I think we're pretty confident about those numbers, and so expect that 2022 was a stellar year for the company. W e're really happy with the portfolio, the performance. Obviously, as I said in my prepared remarks, that we're all dealing with a little bit of, on the order front, some slowdown in orders due to pockets of inventory that have been built up, but expect that that's going to work its way through the system over the next couple of quarters. We're two quarters in.
Expect that it'll last another couple of quarters and then, that should be out of the system.
Great. Looking at the 2023 outlook, I know you're not issuing your official guidance yet, but I think Street is currently modeling the high end of your 16%-20% long-term outlook. How are you feeling about that at this point, and any puts and takes you'd like to call out or we should think about?
We'll definitely give more guidance when we get to the end of February, in terms of where we think 2023 will finish. In terms of, you know, what we said at the Q3 Call, which was we gave some guideposts as opposed to guidelines as to where we think we could be in 2023. We think that 15%-20%, 16-20% range at constant currency is probably a good starting point. We obviously need to keep an eye on the FX rates. They've turned a little bit and more positively in the last few weeks. I think that's very encouraging. In general, we really like the portfolio of products that we have, and our funnel is strong.
Just to supplement that 16%-20%, 15%-20% is on base business, not total business.
Great. You know, in terms of pricing contribution, it was about 5% of gain that you realized last year. As we look into this year, how do you expect pricing dynamics to evolve? Do you see an opportunity to further step up to offset some of the inflationary pressures and?
W e think we're in a period in bioprocessing now where there is some pricing traction that we can get. You're correct. In 2022, we're projecting about 5% overall realized price. In 2023, we've already gone out with price increases in December, at the beginning of December, and we're expecting that we should be able to get another 3%-4%. We think this will be kind of the last significant opportunity for us to go out and grab a reasonable piece of price. Remind everybody that 3%-4% we think we can get this year compares to our historical norm of about 1.5%-2%. We're definitely seeing some additional traction there that we can get.
Great. back to that order normalization, we have, you know, one or two quarters, of additional headwind. Where in your portfolio do you see, maybe relatively a greater magnitude of that headwind compared to others, or are we looking at a pretty consistent patterns across the portfolio?
I definitely think it's more in the filtration portfolio because the inventory, you know, the inventory levels are probably more at COVID accounts and at CDMOs associated with COVID vaccine manufacturing. Given that most of our COVID revenue came out of filtration, I would say filtration is probably the one franchise that's has more exposure to that.
Got it. Looking at margins, I think you previously mentioned that you'll be facing $30 million to $40 million of operating margin headwind from that COVID roll-off. There's also FX, inflation, whatnot. How should we think about the relative magnitude? I know you're not giving guidance yet, but relative magnitude of the costs or, you know, CapEx reductions that you are thinking about at this point.
Sure. What we're experiencing right now and through the fourth quarter is a reduction in the COVID revenues. A big majority of those COVID revenues were filters and consumable products. We're going to be backfilling that with other products, some of it being filters, some of it being OPUS, some of it being systems, et cetera. A little bit of a mix play that's going on there here at the end of the year and going into next year with the COVID unwind. We're also seeing some FX exposures that I think everybody in the industry is experiencing right now. A large chunk of that drops through to the bottom line for us. More recently, we're starting to see the FX rates come in a more favorable position and recover with the foreign currency strengthening.
That's a positive sign, but we'll see where that goes by the time we give guidance. You know, we're also seeing the full impact here in Q4 of the 2022 cost inflation on the products that we're buying from vendors. We carried a large amount of inventory into the year. We've been burning that off through the first 2.5 quarters. We're experiencing the 2022 pricing of those type of materials in our P&L. Those are hitting us as well. Where we go from here, you know, we projected as an implied gross margin about 56% at midpoint of our guidance for this year. That's gonna be a reasonable starting point for next year.
I wanna remind, you know, the benefit of this business, when one of the great things about this business is the ability for us to leverage our margin or our cost profile when we grow. This year it's going to be a bit softer because of the COVID situation and some inventory destocking situations. Remind everybody, in 2019 through 2021, we were able to grow our gross margin by 310 basis points, and we grew our operating margin in those three years by 1,180 basis points. Reinvesting in the business now, positioning ourselves for long-term growth. Wanna continue to grow well above market.
If we can continue to do that, then we'll be right back in margin expansion, hopefully, you know, later next year or later in 2023, but definitely in 2024 and moving forward, you'll be able to see a significant margin expansion for us over the next few years.
We're well-positioned now to really be able to take on volumes and get to that $2 billion target that we have by 2027, 2028. We have that capacity well in hand with minimal investments for additional volumes that we'll take on. We're in a great position to continue our above-market growth, which is a great thing.
Excellent. Now touching on some of the end market dynamics, I know gene therapy is an area you're very excited about. You previously know that you have about 20 gene therapy accounts that are above $1 million in revenue. How many of these are kind of, you know, in phase III and could be looking at a near-term commercial scale of opportunities? How should we think about the magnitude as your clients move from phase III to commercial?
W e're definitely in some phase III. I don't have the exact numbers, but I think I would say that the big thing for cell and gene therapy is more commercial approvals. I think we saw in 2022 finally a at least a step up in the number of approvals. Expect that that's going to continue to go in that direction in 2023. There are some important drugs up for approval. As I said, we're definitely in some of the phase IIIs.
Great. Is a five-fold volume increase a fair number to think about in terms of?
It depends. It does depend, right? It just depends on the drug and the indication. I would say that somewhere in that 3-5-fold is probably reasonable.
Great. A longer-term question is you've noted that the cell and gene therapy industry has yet to converge to a standard, right, in terms of manufacturing technology. What do you think is the timeline that we should be thinking about for such a convergence over time? Which products in the Repligen's portfolio do you think will be best positioned to define that standard?
Standards are honestly getting defined every year. You probably can see over the last few years that the large CDMOs are playing a bigger role. More pharma are getting involved in cell and gene therapy. I think as the CDMOs and the larger pharma players begin to add their weight into the manufacturing processes, then the standards get assigned. I think we have a number of products in our portfolio that can become standards in cell and gene therapy, and I would argue can become standards in mRNA as well, because it's a very similar kind of situation. I think mRNA is very proven now because of what happened in COVID. I look at what we're doing in systems.
We expect our systems are going to get standardized into cell and gene therapy and in mRNA. We expect that our hollow fiber is absolutely, and then ATF, TFDF, they're the probably the key products. OPUS as a service, people like something that's fast and consistent, and I think we can provide that as well. We have lots of shots at goal in terms of having platform standard technology in these processes.
Wonderful. In addition to cell and gene, biosimilars obviously, another promising growth driver here. Can you talk about your positioning? I know, you know, Repligen's products not necessarily, you know, correspond at one-to-one to specific drugs, but how do you think about your positioning with the large biosimilar manufacturers, and what's your degree of visibility into the upcoming biosimilar scale-up?
O n the biosimilar side, a lot of the customers that are working on biosimilars, they don't tell you that, "Hey, this is a biosimilar drug that we're doing development work on." Because for the most part, it's monoclonal antibody, we are very involved with all the players that have mAb-based processes. We've got our fair share of business in the biosimilar world, or for the biosimilars. Harder for Repligen to do that back in 2017, 2018, 2019. Easier for us to do that now. I look at what we've done honestly over the last two or three years, where there's at least 3 or 4 next-generation , they're not biosimilars, but next-generation , blockbuster drugs that we've been able to get into.
I expect that if we can do that for next-generation drugs that didn't have us in the original molecule, that we can absolutely do that in the biosimilar world.
Great. Our last end market dynamic is, you know, onshoring. How meaningful a tailwind do you expect that to be for Repligen in the near or medium term? Do you feel like your geographic footprint is pretty well hedged across the?
I think our geographic footprint is in good shape, right? I mean, the only region where we don't have manufacturing today is in Asia, and I do think that if we go out over the next three to five years, I would expect that we will start to do manufacturing in that region as well, but I think we're pretty balanced.
Okay, got it. Moving on to the product perspective. Systems, right? You highlighted, the addition to your portfolio with the recent acquisitions. How has, you know, customer reception been to your systems offerings? If there's any color you can share on kind of, you know, how your customers are comparing your systems offerings versus maybe competitive solutions. Overall, how do you see your system versus consumable mix evolving going forward?
Yeah. I'll maybe start with the last part of the question. I think the systems are gonna be a driver of consumables in two ways. One will be the flow paths, because if you look at what we've done with the ARTeSYN portfolio, we've taken it from a customized system portfolio to a standard system portfolio that you can configure. What we're trying to do is further differentiate the systems through analytics and then bring new consumable streams onto the platform. When you typically think about a system, the consumable should be the chromatography column, or the consumable should be the hollow fiber Flat Sheet sets, and that's absolutely correct. It's also now, because of what we've done in fluid management, it's the flow paths, and those flow paths are a recurring consumable stream.
Expect that, you know, our system strategy will be a driver of consumables for us for the foreseeable future and will allow us to differentiate. If we can differentiate ourselves more upfront in terms of how our systems perform, then I think there's a higher probability that our systems will get adopted. I think the pivot that the systems team at Repligen's done, moving from a custom to a standardized, has really played out well for us. I think the adoption rate has been really good. We just launched seven systems in the last year and a half. It's early days, but the products are doing well in the field. They're differentiated versus the competition. We probably don't do the what's better about our system versus competition.
We're just really happy when the customer decides they wanna move forward. We're getting plenty of wins.
Great. I know there's a lot of exciting opportunity for you to integrate the systems portfolio with the process analytics portfolio to push towards, you know, true Industry 4.0, right, for bioprocessing. What kind of timeframe should we be thinking about for that vision?
It's already here. You know, the system we launched in Q4 is the first integrated benchtop system for process analytics. When I talk about process analytics, I'm talking about advanced analytics. I'd say within the next 12 months or so, we will have that ported over to the larger systems. I think every customer we speak to, they want to be able to do drug concentration measurement. If we can now take the Daylight technology, mid-IR technology, and start to address second-order protein structure, that brings a new dimension and another level of differentiation for us. I think it's a great strategy. We just have to execute.
Excellent. In the remaining minute, I wanna ask a question that got in from the audience. As you look at Repligen's portfolio today, where do you see remaining gaps, and how should we think about your M&A pace or deal size going forward?
I think the M&A pace, is not gonna be that different over the next five years as it has been over the last five. Expect that we'll do, you know, one deal per year, that type of level, maybe two. Every franchise has gaps. Not gonna give the list of gaps, guys. Every franchise has gaps, and we know what we need to do, and either we'll do it in R&D or we'll do it through M&A. M&A is an important part of the, of the go-forward strategy, expect to see more deals.
We're definitely looking forward to seeing more exciting stuff coming out of Repligen.
Great.
All right. Thank you for your time. Thank you, everyone.
Thanks, Julia.