This is Bio-Techne, and glad you all came. It's been a while since we've had standing room only. Thank you. Here we go. Safe harbor, of course. You guys all know what that is. Not gonna waste any time. Bio-Techne. I've been here about 10 years at the helm. At this point, we're roughly between a $12 billion-$13 billion market cap. We are largely a life science tools company. We're getting into diagnostics as well. It's very related to assays, which we know a lot about. You can see we're 81% consumables, 11% instruments, but a full 10% is consumables for the instruments, so the cartridges to make them work. We're roughly really a 20% instrument-based company as well.
We have these eight, more or less, platforms here that we have our businesses arranged under by technology. Proteins, which we're most known for. We're the world leader in proteins for research. We're one of the top players in antibodies. There's only 100 of us out there. We're pretty big compared to most. Immuno assays, we're the inventor and creator of the ELISA kits. We've been around 47 years as a company, which is why we have that great stock symbol, more or less, I think. We've gotten instruments that measure and proteomics-based applications and use a lot of consumables. That's a synergy. We've gotten a lot into spatial biology the last few years, off an acquisition, also related to antibodies and processes like IHC, which we're very much involved in.
Molecular diagnostics came with an acquisition. We're a leader in controls and in reagents for diagnostics and molecular. Made sense to add that. Another big new area is liquid biopsy, Exosome Diagnostics, an acquisition we made. I've got a couple slides on that. For the most part, that's it. The new thing coming off a lot is our protein, particularly cell and gene therapies. I'll talk about that as well. Diversified, not that big yet, but getting bigger. Roughly 12 different business platforms, all doing pretty well. Softening climb right now. I'm sure we'll talk about it if you have questions, but overall, it's been a pretty good growth trajectory in the last 10 years I've been here so. This is a weird clicker. It doesn't.
I wish there was a better way to do this. We finished our fiscal year last year, $1.1 billion. You can see our split. We're still about roughly half, biopharma, biotech. Definitely moving more towards biotech. 10 years ago, we were about half, academia, half biotech or biopharma, I should say. We've mitigated a lot of that risk in academia 'cause of the funding ups and downs. You can see the result. It's pretty safe zone, I think. That the pharma side is now pharma, biotech, and small biotech. We've become more or less one of the go-to players providing tools, reagent systems to small biotech, a lot of new applications like cell and gene therapy. That's, you know, that's where that still has its up and downs, as you guys know.
The split on the, on the international side, about the same it's always been. We've still really within a point or two in every area, even though we've grown a lot in all areas, but Asia's kept up. China's now roughly 9%-10% of our overall, where it was three, 10 years ago. I have mostly the same strategy as most everybody else has, you know, for running a company. We are still a products company. We're big on innovation. We have a lot of it. We launch a lot of new products a year. We are very focused on geographic expansion. China for sure, but also India now and other areas. Even Europe, we're still expanding. It's not a tactic, it's really a strategy. We do a lot of M&A.
I'll have a slide showing that, but we've done a lot of both on M&A to try and, you know, bolster synergies to our core reagents platforms, which have been the lifeblood of the company. Culture and talent, gotta have that. A lot of focus on it. We've had a lot of attrition the last couple of years like everybody else. A big story here, we've grown from 800 people to 3,000 + in the time I've been there. We've added a new pillar this year, and that's world-class customer journey. All this growth has created a need for an awful lot of integration systems, e-commerce, you know, loading up the website with images, et cetera, et cetera.
Taking care of that customer for what's called a world-class journey, really helping them understand why they're with us for what they wanna buy, able to buy more online with one visit, not going into multiple websites to buy things. You know, it's a big issue, and we're focused on it. Of course, we have ESG in our midst. We've on the social and governance, I think we've all been pretty good. It's really been more about taking credit for what things we have and have done well. You know, we're over 50% globally female. Actually, our management and above are 70% female. We're 35% actual minorities. We're about 25% Chinese as a company globally, and there's more in Minneapolis than there is in China, to be honest.
On the diversity of the board is very good as well. We're like everybody else. We're working towards the emissions side of this equation, working on our E. You know, we're doing okay in our Scope 1 and Scope 2. We're not a big polluter. Making antibodies isn't that. Not a big deal. Financial results since I've been there. Over here. The key thing to look at is the continual growth and the continual improvement. We've been laying a lot of investments and building out a strategy. You know, call it laying track for the last five years at least. Now we're seeing really the upside from that, not just COVID-related. You know, we have very little COVID sales.
I will say we certainly benefit from a COVID overhang from places like customers like vaccine makers who clearly had a booming couple years, examples like that. It's been a remarkable journey of improving visibility, improving web, you know, brands, acquisitions that made sense, strategies that have given us openings into new workflows that are scaling quick, like cell and gene therapy, et cetera. Just diving deeper on the protein sciences segment, roughly 75% of the company, that's broken down between two divisions, proteomic research reagents, and then the analytical tools. It's really just proteins and antibodies on one side, the assays and instruments on the other. They're both divisions about the same size for roughly 75% of the company.
Proteins, we pretty much created the category 40 some years ago, TGF-beta. We now have over 6,000 proteins in our catalog. We are the largest manufacturer of proteins for research. It stands to reason we should probably to go after GMP proteins for cell and gene therapies. We're doing that at a very fast clip. As I said, laying track for the last five years and working a large workflow so we can actually win big in this area. We're known for our proteins for being the highest quality, the highest bioactivity. We don't have any competitor within really almost a factor of 10 in a lot of categories of bioactivity. Pricing, usually we're more than double our nearest competitor. It just speaks to the quality and the lot- to- lot consistency.
Antibodies, very different game here. We source from about 60 different suppliers. That makes up about 30% of our volume. The other 70 is self-made. We make these antibodies off of our proteins. When you have a really high-quality grade protein and use it in an animal goat, then you can make also wonderful antibodies. We do from there to the antibody all the way to assays, and we've been doing it for a long time, so. I mentioned 6,000 proteins. We actually have a catalog of over 400,000 antibodies. The largest catalog in the world for antibodies. We're not the largest supplier, though. On the tool side, including assays, you know, we have a lot of different categories. Simple Western, the world's only automated Western blot solution.
Biologics, more than just measuring protein on the line for pharma, for protein purity, now we're getting after trying to eliminate LC, going right to mass spec with fractionation. We're known for, you know, charge and identity analysis as well as other fractionation opportunities. Simple Plex, kind of a dark horse for us as an instrument. It's a microfluidic immunoassay platform. It can multiplex as many as eight different analytes in a cartridge. The technology's as much in the cartridge as the instrument. Very low cost instrument, varying between $25,000 and $50,000. Used primarily today mostly for biomarker discovery. We did catch a few EUAs during COVID. It was used in Italy when patients were dying in hospital halls.
You could load things like, you know, D-dimer and IL-6 in these cartridges, and you could actually understand which patients were likely to go down versus up off of respiratory. Because of this, we think it has a big future in diagnostics. It's a one-hour sample to data, four logs of dynamic range, sensitivity, remarkable. It's nearly as strong sensitivity as Quanterix at 1/10 the price. Our latest acquisition here is in single cell isolation, single cell analysis, and that's for cell and gene therapy, and that's Namocell. Sold over 100 instruments of that so far. Simple Plex, we're gonna cross 1,000 instruments this quarter. Biologics, we're about 1,500. Simple Western, over 2,500. You're gonna see coming up a share position.
We're in low share positions yet still in all these categories. I mentioned, I won't go into too deeply, just, we bought these instruments and platforms for one use, they're finding more uses, more applications all the time. Our TAM is expanding. There just doesn't seem to be any end in sight of how people are using our instruments. They're just known as big bang for the buck, bench-top size, you know, pretty low cost compared to other things of their type of class, so. All this is for this. You know, we're all living in this proteomic revolution. From discovery all the way to validated assays, you know, we're in the midst of all this. We're just perfectly positioned with how proteomics has come on strong in the last few years.
We're right in the middle, and we love it. A little bit in diagnostics and genomics. Three different divisions, spatial biology, which was an acquisition in ACD, it's still our brand. Molecular diagnostics, that was Asuragen, Exosome Diagnostics, of course. The oldest business in the company, how the company was founded, was the controls and reagents business, as I mentioned. We have many brands here, but you know, we're the world leader in how hospitals take care of their equipment, you know, counting blood cells or whatever else. All strong for us. The lowest op margin business we have is 30%. We range anywhere from 30 - 50+ for an aggregate in the high 30s, and our goal is to get to 40, which we've been at many times in the past.
It's a matter of decision on investment. Our goal is to get to $2 billion in the next three or four years with 4% op margins. We're well on track, we think. A little bit on spatial biology. It's a novel in situ hybridization assay, essentially. It has single cell resolution. We have launched a new set of dyes, we call Vivid Dyes, that give us even more spatial integrity. What's beautiful about this technology is that the morphology of your tissue, which is becoming more and more precious for all researchers and hospitals, if the tissue is, remains intact, there's no...
The morphology is preserved, so we can look at anything you want, any area of tissue you want, do your analysis, and then if you wanna do IHC later or something else, you can. This has implications for pathology and for many different applications. So far, it's still used mostly in drug discovery and biomarker and cell analysis. Now over a $100 million business for us. It was an acquisition we did five years ago. The assays are kitted around probes. We have over 40,000 probes. I don't know how many species, but I know it's dozens of species. Publications are just crazy. Over 7,000 publications to date. Quickly becoming a standard. Moving further into diagnostics. You guys have all heard about liquid biopsy, and there's three categories, really.
circulating tumor cells, cell-free DNA, which most of the companies out there are involved in if they're in liquid biopsy, and then exosomes, and we're almost the only one. We find exosomes to be a better platform in general. There's many more of them. You're interrogating RNA, not DNA. It's not being destroyed by enzymes and blood and its fragments. The exosomes come out of cells at all stages of life of the cell, whereas the other two categories, by the time you get a lot of information, it's really from dying cells or cells that are already in trouble already. CTCs are so bad, by the time you have enough CTCs in the bloodstream to interrogate, it's almost the patient's not doing so well. Exosomes, we think, have a really bright future.
The RNA is perfectly preserved within the exosome. What you don't get out of technology is there's actually proteins that live on the surface of the exosome that tell you where it came from. If you wanna go after a cancer, you have to know the origin. It's also pretty important that way. We have a product on the market. The first one is a prostate test. It's Medicare approved. We've now received all the reconsiderations that we had in the original NCCN guidelines from four years ago. It was designed to be a surveillance test. It's a remarkable test. It has high sensitivity, and it's growing right now at a three-digit level. ExoTRU is the next product in the pipeline.
Both these are urine-based, and they're very non-invasive. Another real nice factor for both of these is that, you know, you can do these, you can at home. You can mail in the samples. Down below, for kidney rejection, that's always been a problem, is having to go to the transplant centers and stick around for biopsies every quarter. Whereas, you know, in kidney, in 10 years, half of all fail, and 15% fail in the first year. Biopsy and testing the integrity of that transplant is important. In here, it's really just pee in a cup, and we have incredible results. The data beats everything else on the market, so to speak, that are all more invasive. We've licensed this to Thermo, and they're actively making an LDT and working it within their map jurisdiction.
Hopefully on the market in under a year. We're not done there. We've got a large pipeline of potential products, including colorectal, kidney, almost every organ we have the ideas of a signature. These are all done with a gene sequence on the interrogation within the RNA and/or to be combined with cell-free DNA to actually add, you know, more integrity to the test. There's a good dozen things we have on the drawing board. We are actively seeking partners on many of them. Some we'll do ourselves. We can't do them all ourselves, so we're kinda seeing where it goes. A bright future. We think it's a platform. If you look out 10 years, we think it's a billion-dollar platform. Molecular products came with Asuragen.
Adds, you know, adds to our world-leading controls business. Nothing too fancy here, just a, you know, CLIA- based and a well-known brand. A nice little business. You'll notice on the left, all these, the share positions are given. I'll give a summary chart at the end, we don't have any position we have over 20% share, so. The oldest business, as I mentioned, the controls and reagents. You know, most of the strip tests out there for COVID are built with antibodies that come from us. You know, players like us. We're a leading category for that. Also controls for many... Virtually everybody doing blood-related instrumentation hospitals, we are the control of choice. Moving on to cell and gene therapy.
Again, we're trying to complete a workflow to try and be more than just relevant to cell and gene therapy as the market expands and grows. To have a winning workflow, you have to have a bioreactor. We inked a deal, I guess almost a couple of years ago now with Wilson Wolf. Last week, we just announced our first trigger, so we now own 20% of the company. It kinda culminates in a full acquisition by no later than December 31st, 2027. A very, it's not a typo on the multiple. It's a very, it's a very good deal. We're taking care of his team and his company. He's 15 minutes down the road, and he wants us to take care of it.
He's more of a KOL, the owner of this, than a widget maker, and we're good at making widgets. We're picking up more of that. That's warranted us a really wonderful deal structure for this. This too is a potential billion-dollar type of platform. They have 800 customers in cell and gene therapy. We have 180. It is arguably, after the Prodigy System from Miltenyi in cell and gene therapy, probably the only other de facto standard in the industry would be this bioreactor. Very important for T-cell and therapies involving T-cells. Many people are going after T-cells with bag technologies. T-cells don't like bags. T-cells like hard surfaces to grow on. They don't wanna be bothered with.
They're having incredible support here. What makes this technology so fabulous is that you may have all seen, you know, T-flasks and different cell factories, and they're filled with media, usually orange in color and usually about 10% of that, of flasks remain largely empty. That's because you need to feed the cells enough oxygen. John's wonderful creation was a membrane on the outside that allows you to take the oxygen in one way from the outside world, and you can fill the flask up. Completely. The yield is incredibly better, all right? The overall cost is much better, too. Our workflow is away from the ICU, away from the patient as long as possible. It'll end up being a much lower cost therapeutic solution. We also have doubled down on proteins.
We're a little late to the game, but three years ago, we put in place a facility, 61,000 sq ft. We now have had some yield improvements as of recent. We now can make the capacity as well over $400 million. In certain mix configurations, we can make as much as $1 billion or more of protein. We're ready to go. The business is growing strong double digit. You know, like I said, we have 180 customers. They're largely preclinical and phase one clinicals. Over time, we're gonna keep growing this thing as part of the overall workflow. Here it is. We're known for regenerative medicine, our proteins, but also immune cell therapy, so T-cells.
We have more places in the workflow on the T-cell down below. You can see in the bottom if you can read it. Probably can't read them. Our instruments are used in all the QC components. We're gonna have media, we have antibodies, we have the proteins, we have the bioreactor. you know, we just have almost a complete workflow. Probably still missing cryopreservation, but not too much else. We're well on our way with our own media, two different varieties, as a matter of fact. We're in the game there. On top, in stem cell therapy for regenerative, we're the world leader for that for proteins. We have about 12 or so different products in production. We'll probably double that menu in the next year.
We only have four or five with our own T-cell. It's probably all we need for a year, to be honest. Over time, we think we'll win though, because, you know, 6,000 proteins for research, our closest competitor, there's 500 of our products that they can't even make. We're the only one in the world that can even make them. We're known as the go-to for a difficult protein. We do a lot of custom work. I think over time, as the cell and gene therapy market evolves, there will be a need for more specific, unique type proteins to help people differentiate, you know, their category, their drug. We'll definitely, it'll just play to our sweet spot as a company. Our technology leadership. What do we think happens?
You know, we think we're a $2 billion company in general within five years or less, but you can tack on another $2 billion for cell and gene therapy if you look out 10 years. A lot coming here, and you can see it's all fitting. All the different things in the bottom that we have for products in our workflow that can contribute to getting there, including G-Rex, but also ELISAs, base media, cell culture. TcBuster, I didn't mention that, but we have a new platform to do gene editing that eliminates the need for viral vectors and lenti or AAV virus. It's doing really well. We have over a dozen customers, and we have 20 more talking to us to try and get in the mix for their clinicals.
You know what happens in 10 years if half of the market goes away from viral to something like this, I mean, it's another billion plus. This is a big potential home run for us. It's looking very good so far technically. We have actually millions of dollars revenue already, so it's on its way. You saw on the left all these charts, the market share, all the positions I talked about. Here's kind of a summary. We've taken the company from 10 years ago of living in about a $3 billion kind of pond, you know, working just for agents, just antibodies, proteins, and ELISA kits, to all these different platforms we've done either organically or from acquisitions. Here they all live on one sheet, and there really isn't a large share position anywhere. Lots of exciting areas.
There's lots of research, lots of interest, and we have low penetration. We have a growing and emerging brand in the space. Here's the breakdown, how we get to $2 billion. Dan always likes this one. It builds up. We are at these growth rates or better in every category. We do feel we're well on our way to reaching these kinds of targets. We do a prioritization, a zero-based bottoms-up program every year in our company. We outline, look at every work stream, where every dollar is spent, and then we look forward, and we basically pick what's the best places to put our capital, and we kill projects early if they're not working out, et cetera.
Last year, as an example, we took 400 work streams that the company is based around, not only product, but productivity, manufacturing processes as well. Had enough money to support 300 of them. We look out five years as part of the whole modeling process. That first year almost ends up being the budget for the next year if you're doing it right, it's close. We look out five years as well. We've actually looked back now, the 10 years I've been here, and seen how close were we predicting out five years, year after year. I mean, who does that, first of all? We've done it, looked at the math. We've been within 5% every year, looking out five years.
When I say we're gonna get to $2 billion, there's a 95% chance we're gonna get there. We got the data to show you if you wanna look at it. That's my 10 or 15 minutes and time for Q&A. Is there?
Yeah.
My voice holds up. I sound terrible. Sorry.
I don't know, and I have some questions, but would love the audience to get involved. Maybe how I'd ask the first question would just be, just kind of state of pharma. Chuck, you've always been pretty transparent about what's going on, and I think I've mentioned some biotech names involved early on the quarter call. Just net-net, you know, it seems like pharma is in a good spot, but some of the more instrument-related peers seem to slow down. Just, you know, kind of as we look at 2023, kind of what are you seeing from your customers, whether you wanna bucket it by.
Yeah.
more to biotech or however you wanna characterize it.
Well, we're, you're right, we're pretty transparent. We don't give guidance, but things were ugly enough last quarter. We said, this quarter will also suck. It's going to be, like we said, probably single-digit kinda growth. We first started seeing issues really in Q1, and we chalk a lot of it up to maybe purchase forwarding 'cause of pricing hitting July, one of the things. It's worse than that. I think we're really seeing good old-fashioned destocking happening now. I think there was a lot of stocking up in our area, mostly reagents and assays and things, not instruments. From supply chain risk, just old-fashioned supply chain risk that we're all talking about a year ago, not having that risk. And, you know, I know I gave the same orders. We had potential risk in our instruments.
One quarter we didn't have enough paint to paint the skins on the machines. We made it through. You know, I gave the order, let's not lose a sale on 20 instruments if we're missing a 10-cent sensor. Load up. What if everybody did that, you know, concerning reagents? I think we're living through some of that. I think also the COVID hangover is real. I think we're all not as good as we all thought we were a year or two years ago, to be honest. We all had some booming couple years and some better than others. I mean, we had 50% growth in our instrument platforms. It's kind of unheard of, you know. Those are tough comps. We're living through those tough comps right now.
I mentioned our split with pharma versus biotech. We are seeing conservatism on all fronts. It's taking an extra signature or two to get instruments, even at pharma levels. The conversion rates have slowed down. On the reagents, and there is a lot of our business is run rate, which is still strong in double-digit. No problem in run rate, no problem in pharma for reagents. On our OEM, our bigger deals, like supporting clinicals for a lot of startup or smaller biotechs in the last year, they were all swinging for the fence two years ago and last year, and they're running out of money. That next round they thought they could get, they're not getting. You know, money is tight, so we're seeing an effect from that.
We started talking about it three quarters ago. Now everyone else is talking about it finally. We thought we were alone. It's real. I think we just gotta work through it. The comps will be really easy come Q1. Markets come back. Oncology's not going, you know, cancer's not going away, and that's what we primarily provide tools for. I'm a little surprised that we're sitting here in mid to high single-digit budget, you know, for NIH coming off of COVID. I really thought they'd be stronger than that for quite a while, given we lost $8 trillion off a $40 billion budget that we weren't prepared to deal with. It is what it is. We'll see. We can survive just fine on 5%-10% NIH increases, and it's helped us.
We grow about the same level as they do, so it's very successful. Our reagents business is all we ever modeled anyway. We expect more in these sort of new things, and they're growing quickly.
What's the early look at fiscal 2024 for NIH and getting like the spending constraints? I think all these events might be one to two, but it's early in the form.
Yeah. Some of the one-on-ones, people have said there's been talk about it could be flat or whatever. We've heard this before. I mean, Trump tried making it flat and cutting it, in fact, but it's one area it seems our Congress agrees on. I expect it'll be five to ten like it always has been, especially the potential political suicide, saying you're not gonna fund research, you know, after coming out of COVID, I don't know. I think it'll end up being better than people think. It's just not that big, given the risk.
Is there any just kind of a large funnel for a moment, I mean, outside of the overage and the catch-up, and you touched on where you funnel? Is there any slowdown or pause just given like just drug pricing, with regard to we've heard from other companies that they baked in some uncertainty for 2023? I'm just wondering if you're seeing any impact on that front.
Not yet, you know, it's public information. You know, our, one of our board members is head of R&D for BMS. He's in a lot of meetings talking about the pipeline for 2028 price caps. They're all talking about effecting all the way to very soon to now. It's, you know, if it's not reversed in the next, you know, administration, there's gonna be an impact. There, it's affecting what they think they can do, what they can invest in. It's not here yet, but it's probably coming.
Right. Maybe on the front, would you think that they would just shift into the areas where they can kinda get the better pricing, or do you think it actually could lead to a kind of a contraction in spending and reallocation? Not contraction, but basically reduction from what they might expect.
I think it'll be a mixed change. They're gonna prioritize over where they think the best potential benefit and try to mitigate the risks they see. They're gonna pick the things where there might be less of a issue of a price cap and there's more margin or, you know, whatever. I'm guessing, but I'm assuming they're also... Their probability of success is probably a big factor too. What do they know they can do versus what's more of a, of a 50/50? You know, all that goes into prioritization, right?
Yeah. Maybe on Wilson Wolf, since you know, just kinda off air, just what, that's a 50% type growth opportunity? Just, I mean, it seems like it's.
Yes. Better.
Just like, what's the competitive positioning of their technology and...
Well, it's really an allogeneic bottle on steroids that you get $1,000 for. That's what the significance is. It's, it's loaded with IP. Just the fact that you can get your oxygen from the outside is huge. John's a mechanical engineer, and mechanical engineers tend to be very good at creating IP, and he's done years and years of layers of it. It looks very solid to us. It marries up well to bags for the pre-stage processes. In general, you know, if we live in a non-allogeneic world like we think we are, you know, it's single-patient type therapies. It's gonna be a, I think, a huge platform. People talk about, well, will the price be an issue? Is there enough room there to expand cell and gene therapy if we don't get the allogeneic?
John will just look at you and say, "You know what the cost of chemo is?" There's nothing cheap in any of these solutions. I think there'll be indications that do go allogeneic and, you know, major stock on the shelf for probably some blood cancers or something. In general, it's gonna be, you know, not that. He's sitting perfectly p-positioned for that, you know, basically a G-Rex per patient, you know, so.
I mean, we've done some, like, consulting work and, this idea of like we are a proteomics, a protein research over the last 20 years with genomics, so it's not that cut and dry. Even though we just said NIH funding could be a little pressure. Are you seeing, again, farmers farming, but just from maybe academia with these funding levels, like, are you seeing like a, an aggregate level of focus and attention towards being a protein company? It sounds like a, you know, a lot of the small, little, emerging, you know, kind of protein discovery companies are talking about real spending down and they're thinking about that. That is, you know.
In academia, we don't see an issue yet. If budgets go down going forward, there may be. There isn't yet. Our academic is kind of the way it's been 'cause it runs largely like a run rate business. They don't do big deals, right? They don't do custom, they don't do OEM deals. So we can measure that 'cause it's largely on the web. We might be doing better at mitigating some of that risk because we're constantly improving our website and we're buying more outward clicks and things like that to improve our, you know, our process. We're essentially getting still $8 to $1. Every dollar we put towards AdWords, you know, with Google, you know, we're getting, you know, we're getting 8 back.
It started at 30 and we just keep giving the team more money, saying, "Well, until it hasn't, let's keep spending." That might be some of it as well, trying to, you know, keeping it up. I don't... The reagents of that for all the protein antibodies you buy for research and for clinicals at those levels is still kind of a rounding error. You know? It's not really They more care about the quality and how well they work. Like, if there are cuts, they're not usually there. It's just not that big part of the workflow, so.
We're just out of time. I think anyone have any questions? I think we've done that. Nope. I think we're out. We're out. Anyways, so thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thanks, Dave. Thanks, everyone.