Aptamer Group (LSE:APTA) — Final Results

0:01 Good afternoon, and welcome to the APTAMER GROUP PLC full year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q and A tab situated in the right corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it received during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand you over to Aaron Tolley, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.

0:31 Hello. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to APTAMER GROUP's full year results presentation for the financial year '23. I'd like to start off with the presentation overview. So the today's presentation has three parts. So for those who are new who are new to the story, we'll give an introduction to the team, an overview of the company and of the market, and of the technology. The second part will be a review of last year's results. And finally, we will have a reflective look at the past year and look at post period activities and explain what changes we're making to ensure success within the business. So I'll start out. So I'm Aaron. I'm cofounder and and currently due to the restructure of the business, CTO and CCO of APTAMER GROUP. I have a background in structural biology and biophysics specifically related to APTAMER technology.

1:23 I'm currently focused on working with the team on reshaping the commercial offering of APTAMER GROUP and converting these commercial offerings into a steady, predictable revenue stream with upside from licensing.

1:37 David. Hi, everyone. Yeah. I'm David Bunker. I'm the chief scientific officer and one of the other cofounders of APTAMER GROUP. As I said, my my current role is chief scientific officer. And in that position, I'll be focusing on process developments, process improvements, and efficiencies as as well as, generation of marketing data to support our sales and marketing activities and supporting customers in their, application integrations, so helping APTAMERs get into their working platforms.

2:10 Andrew? Thanks, David. Good afternoon, everybody. My name's Andrew Rappson. I'm the CFO of APTAMER. I'm a chartered accountant by training, and I've worked as an accountant now for twenty years. I joined APTAMER last year in August, and I've worked in the AIM listed environment since 2015.

2:30 Okay. So just a quick recap on APTAMER GROUP. So David and myself founded the company in 2008 based on the emerging need for alternative affinity ligands, which Dave will explain a bit more about in the next few slides. The company is a contract research based company based in the North Of England, and we solve complex problems for our life sciences partners. We do this using our proprietary automated platform supplying molecules called APTAMER. We started to trade in 2012

3:03 with a focus on lean business operation and revenue growth. We grew the business organically to a point at which we listed on the AIM market in December 21 with a change of board of directors. Currently, as a business, we are working with 15 of the top 20 pharma companies, and we have 36 staff, 70% of whom are masters and PhD qualified. We have 42 partners across 12 countries, so we have a pretty much global reach in terms of the different territories and regions that we're working with. So I'll pass over to Dave now to talk a bit about the the technology. Thanks, Aaron. Yeah. As Aaron said, over the next couple of slides, I'm just going to introduce, any new people to the business. Gonna tell you a little bit about what it is that we do, how and why we do it, and some of the USPs of the company before we hand over.

3:54 So first of all, what is, an APTAMA? So an APTAMA is an affinity ligand. Now an affinity ligand is just a a posh scientific way of saying a binder molecule. It's a molecule that sticks to another one. Now as you can imagine, with such a broad description, of an affinity ligand, you can imagine that their applications are equally broad, and that's quite right. So affinity ligands are used right throughout the life sciences. So everything from diagnostics, you know, the COVID test that everyone was familiar with relied on an affinity ligand. Many other diagnostics do as well. Therapeutics do. Research tools do. You know, they're absolutely everywhere in the life sciences. Now our offering is, as Aaron said, an APTAMER.

4:41 That is a synthetic DNA based, affinity ligand. So that word synthetic is really, really important because it gives us a lot of control. So we isolate these in a laboratory environment. There's no plants or animals or anything like that involved at any stage of the process when we're developing them or characterizing them. So that gives us a lot of control over the condition. So we can make our binders fit a customer's end application because we can control it. We have different processes that allow us to address several different target types. So that's everything from proteins and peptides down to small molecules and all the way up to much more complicated systems like whole cells, tissues, viruses, so on and so forth.

5:29 Our development process is, as I said, it's very tunable. So we can take either one of those three processes and then adapt it further to give the optimum development process to really make sure that we, isolate binders that are fit for an end application. And as I mentioned, one of the advantages of our platform is the fact that they are totally synthetic. So this means that once you have your binder, it's much more cost effective and much more reliable to scale up and manufacture. So there's limited,

6:02 batch to batch variability. It's much more reliable to outsource the manufacture on very large scales, so up to kilogram scales if you need it. One of the other advantages of, APTAMERs over other affinity ligands is the stability and solubility of these molecules. So an APTAMER can be stored dry, means there's no need for cold chain storage, cold chain shipping, or anything like that. Once you get it to the other side, they're very, very soluble. You don't lose any function through this drying down and resolubilizing process. So they're a lot easier to handle. So that's a little bit about the the platform itself. So where do we fit in? So we see ourselves as an enabler of technologies. And what I mean by that is we use our platform to solve intractable problems for our collaborators, customers, etcetera.

6:55 So, essentially, customers come to us with a a target molecule, something that they're interested in. So you can see that on the left hand side of the slide. Now as I said, that could fall into one of three broad categories. So it could be a a small molecule, something like a a food additive, an environmental contaminant, a drug of abuse, something

7:14 of that nature. It could be a protein that could be something that's disease associated, something they want to research, something they want to purify, so on and so forth. Or it could be a more complicated system like a cell, you know, a cancerous cell, for example. It could be a virus like COVID, or it could be a a tissue like in, IHC, for example, which is an example I'll come back to later. So they have a target on the left hand side. They have an application on the right hand side. So something they want to do with that target. That could be to detect it, to purify it, to diagnose it, to deliver a drug to it. You know? The applications are almost boundless. The issue here is customers generally come to us with this target, with this application, but no way of making the two sides marry up. So that's where we come in.

8:03 We use our APTAMER platform through one of the three different processes to marry up their target and their application to give them an affinity ligand that helps them do their job. So some of the, USBs of our process. So I've personally worked with the APTAMER technology for, about twenty three years now, so I've seen them apply to all sorts of things. So over that time frame, we've developed and adapted our process to the state that it's in today, and a lot of that is centered around the automation of this process. Now it may sound obvious, but automation obviously removes the human error that may be involved in any process. So, you know, with the best will in the world, people make mistakes, whereas robots, once you program them, don't do that. So we've got a more reliable process, but it also gives us a process that can handle a lot more targets at once. It gives us a lot bigger bandwidth and higher capacity.

9:00 It also reduces, project delivery times because robots are quite happy, in inverted commas, to work twenty four hours a day where people can't do that. The platform and the process, as I said, is quite unique to APTAMER GROUP. It's difficult and would be very expensive for others to replicate because it's not just the automation. It's all the the programs that go with that. It's all the background knowledge and the processes, all the developments that we've made over the years to fit into that. So it's very difficult for others to replicate, but it's very good and easy for us to replicate. So when the capacity requires it, we can replicate our automated platform, train up a new team to use that platform, which is obviously a lot easier than training them to do a whole process, and then they can scale up, and we can get going. So it's it allows us to scale up very, very rapidly.

9:52 So that's the summary on the the platform itself. So I'll hand over now to, Aaron to give you, an operational overview.

10:05 Thank you, David. So key highlights for the year financial, the financial year '23. So just as a brief reminder of the business model, it operates across three business units addressing three broad verticals, custom development, which is our fee for service arm, applications of APTAMERs, and optimizing diagnostics, and applications in therapeutics. As a board, we're committed to increased investor transparency after this latest fund round and this funding raise, and this is how we will move forward. Let's be honest. It's very clear that financial year '23 was not a good year for APTAMER GROUP with many learnings. We lost several important contracts that were won prior to IPO, which impacted our ability to hit the forecasted number, which I will address later.

10:52 That said, the underlying fee for service business remains strong, and the opportunity for transformational licensing deals has not gone away. So in preparation for several high volume contracts, we we actually moved the business, to a state of the art purpose built laboratory, and this move has given us a much better platform to deliver for our customers. The CRO engine has continued to provide solutions over the past twelve months to our customer base, and we have launched new platforms and new solutions for customers. Notable deals are are things like deals with a top five pharma company in the immunohistochemistry space. We've signed multiple deals supporting vaccine manufacture in areas of quality control reagents, and we've signed multiple projects with a fast moving consumer goods company looking at the direct to consumer applications of APTAMER.

11:46 In the diagnostics arena, we've launched a novel immunohistochemistry reagent platform, which received great interest this week at BioEurope, which I personally attended. We've recently filed patents to protect the technology we developed for use in Alzheimer's diagnostics, such as the strength of the data that we got. There is also great interest in APTAMER's for therapeutic use with opportunities for deals and partnerships still on the table. We continue to sign deals spanning areas such as transplant rejection technology and siRNA therapeutic delivery, So there's plenty of opportunity within the space.

12:25 So while 2223 was out of kilter with expectations, we still see a solid groundswell and need for the technology. So I'll pass on to Andrew now to discuss the finances. So, I'll now take you through the financial review for the year ended June 23. So firstly, running through the income statement. Revenue reduced to 1,800,000 in FY '23 versus 4,000,000 for FY '22. FY '22 was quite a good year for APTAMER and included revenue from two large proteomics deals, which unfortunately, we didn't see progress into FY '23. I I think this combined with a weakening of the macroeconomic environment resulted in revenue being lower than FY 2022 and significantly short of our FY 2023 target.

13:16 There's also no revenue generated from licensing, which has proved more challenging to deliver within the timeframes than we initially set at the IPO. And this has resulted in the board resetting these expectations for FY 2024. The adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $4,700,000 for the year versus $1,700,000 in FY 2022. That's largely coming from the decrease in revenue that we've just mentioned, but also as an increase in administrative costs of 700,000 mostly coming from an increase in staffing costs as we scaled up the business to meet our expectations for FY 2023, but also a slight increase in premises costs as we move to larger purpose built premises. The headcount reduced slightly to 46 at the end of the year, so down three from the prior year and has since been reduced to 36 at the end of October, all without hindering our ability to meet our revenue expectations and our development expectations for the current year.

14:19 So just moving on to the balance sheet. Cash at the end of the year was just 200,000, down from 6,700,000 in the prior year. Cash, I should say, at the end of October is up to 2,600,000 following the fundraisers and takes account of creditor payments that we had to catch up on post fundraise. The net assets at the end of the year were $300,000 That's down from 8,100,000 primarily driven by the operating losses that we incurred, but also a significant impairment recognized. And we can see that recognized across our non monetary assets. So the intangible assets, property, plant and equipment, right of use assets are all considerably down despite the spend on premises during the year. And that's because we were required to make an impairment assessment, at June as the conditions of the company

15:16 were at the end of June before any fundraise was completed. So so in in total, we we recognized 2,600,000 in impairment on the cash generating unit, plus a further 200,000 impairment on inventories.

15:33 So taking now onto the cash flow. Total cash outflow for the year was 6,500,000 The net cash outflow from operations was $4,100,000 and that reflects the EBITDA loss that we've just seen. But on top of that, there was an R and D tax credit claim inflow of 500,000, and got a further 0.5, just under 500,000 to receive in the coming year. After operations, there was a spend, as we've mentioned on the of the laboratory and office space, and that totaled 2,000,000. And further, there's another 400,000 of cost for leases, which predominantly predominantly relate to the new laboratory equipment.

16:22 And that concludes the financial review. I'll pass back, back over to Aaron to to do the post period update. Thank you, Andrew. So I'd like to talk a bit about the plan to rebuild shareholder value. There there's been a lot that's happened over the last twelve months and a lot of speculation circulating about the our future as a company in effect. And this clearly didn't help with securing contracts during that period. So we would like to set the record straight and set expectations going forward. So as I said previously,

16:59 our IPO listing was due to the signing of several significant projects that supported our original revenue forecasts, but circumstances outside of our control resulted in one of the major contracts being discontinued after part payment along along with associated licensing revenue opportunities. As we'd scaled up to meet these contracts, this left the business with a high cost base, which admittedly was not rectified soon enough. But we fixed that, and we've reduced the cost base to 3,500,000 from 6,400,000 by removing all the unnecessary overheads associated with those scaled up operations. And Andrew will talk a bit more about that later on in the presentation. We've also reset our revenue expectations. It's important to explain that the previous forecasts were a mixture of fee for service, large project income, and licensing revenue, and we didn't differentiate the revenue streams for the market. So with the loss of the fee for the project revenue and the licensing revenue, the number that was achievable quickly dropped.

18:01 And it was a mistake for us to have forecasted an unpredictable revenue stream like this and like licensing. So we've removed that from our forecasts going forward. And any

18:11 revenue that comes in from licensing will be treated as upside as we move on. After a difficult period for the company raising funding, I've essentially returned with the pre IPO chairman, Steve, and we built a board with financial acumen and experience with delivery and extensive experience in the AIM market to return the company to operating a lean business driving profitability and breakeven. So to clarify the situation around this period of uncertainty, there was a lull clearly in customer confidence around the certainty of the future of the business. But since additional capital has been raised and a new board has been engaged, we have seen the return of customer confidence with a rapid increase in pipeline activity.

19:03 So what what's our strategy for revenue generation?

19:06 So we have three broad work streams within the business that we're going to focus on to position the company for success. We're gonna divert diversify the service and product offering in order to drive higher value partnerships. We focused on improving the platform to increase develop to decrease development costs and time frames for customers, and we're focused on operating the business on a extremely tight cost base with with good cost discipline. We ultimately believe that we can add huge value to the share price and that our focus will remain on fee for services, a window to transformative licensing deals with large pharma. But for clarity, this will be viewed as upside and not put into our revenue forecasts moving forward. So we've focused over the last several months on developing a broader service offering. Previously, our service offering had four distinct phases for the development of the APTAMERs.

20:02 However, this approach often left partners optimizing the product in the end assay format. So what we've decided to do, and we've made great progress with this over over the few months that we've been in, is to offer a more validated and thereby valuable service. So we've now instigated a fifth phase of validation, including validation for tools in immunohistochemistry, APTAMER, and APTAMER pair screening, and also cross reactivity analysis. So with regards to the higher end offering where the licensing deals and the transformative deals will come from and from the therapeutics, we're well on our way to producing a suite of services validating APTAMAs as delivery vehicles across a range of therapeutic areas for a range of therapeutic targets.

20:50 So this kind of new approach allows us to offer a more complete service and a more validated and therefore valuable product for our customer.

20:59 So I'll pass on to Dave now to talk about the process improvements and give an example of the the data that we're generating for marketing to improve the offering. Thanks, Aaron. Yeah. So as Aaron mentioned, one of the areas that we've focused on quite heavily in recent months is in the immunohistochemistry space. So those of you who followed the company will have seen earlier in the year, we launched a new platform with the APTAMA Fc conjugates, and we've been, developing that process and producing some exemplification data. So just to give you a bit of background, immunohistochemistry or IHC for short is widely used in, clinical pathology. So, if you go to any hospital pathology lab, they will do this process. They will do IHC.

21:53 Essentially, when you have a biopsy taken, that is sent to a pathology lab where it is extensively processed,

22:02 cut into very fine slices, and then the pathologist will look at that tissue sample looking for signs of disease, typically cancers, things of that nature. So this process has really become the gold standard in clinical diagnosis for diseases such as cancer to the extent that this is now, approximately $2,300,000,000 market, and that's heavily dominated by antibodies.

22:28 Now antibodies as the incumbent technology do have a number of serious drawbacks, one of which is all of the processing that's required to take that biopsy sample and get it to a workable state where a pathologist can look at it. Now all of that processing often means that antibodies no longer are able to recognize their target. And as you can imagine, if you don't have an antibody, you don't have a test. So so there is an ongoing need within this IHC market space for alternative affinity ligands. And this is something that we recognized,

23:04 something is the power of the APTAMER technology to address this need. Now as I mentioned earlier in the presentation, APTAMAs can be developed against tissue sections as they're presented in the final application. So that's perfect for this platform. And as you can see on the left hand side, that's exactly what we've done. So we've developed a new process for generating our optima binders against these, proteins as they're expressed on the surface of cells in these tissues, but have then gone a stage beyond that and shown that we can conjugate

23:38 a an antibody fragment to the end of the APTAMA and allow it to function as a primary antibody replacement. So the rest of the workflow remains unchanged. Now that's really important for these to be readily integrated into these hospital pathology labs, into research facilities all around the world. The, you know, the big pharma who use these processes don't wanna be changing their processes

24:05 right down to the, the bare bones. They just wanna switch out and get a good reagent that works, and that's what we've been developing. You can see an example of that on the, images on the right hand side of the slide there, the APTAMA FC conjugate shown in brown against the background of the blue unstained cells. So this is showing that the APTAMAs are working. We've demonstrated this now with, both fixed cells. We've shown it on frozen tissue sections, which is one type of material that they use in IHC, and we've also more recently developed a process and shown it working in fixed tissues as well. And this is now, with various partners for additional external validation. We're also very grateful to have had Adam Hargreaves, who's one of our investors, also joined the board.

24:55 Adam's been really helpful in getting this process moving forward. So Adam is a consultant pathologist and IHC expert, and it's with his help that we've managed to push this forward to the extent it is today. Just moving on to some of the process improvements that we've been focusing on as well. So as I said, this is an area of, focus for me. And during the, recent months, we have introduced a new, APTAMA library to help us develop new APTAMAs for, additional customers. We've also streamlined a lot of our processes. This has allowed us to reduce the amount of protein that customers need to send us. So that's actually,

25:38 reduced one of the barriers to entry. So it's a lot easier for customers to engage with us now because they need less material. Simultaneously and happily for us, that's given us a further increase in capacity and has also allowed us to reduce some of the other expenses, so it's increased our potential margins. So there's a lot of good stuff that's come out of these process improvements, and we'll be continuing that over the coming months. So I'm just gonna hand back to Andrew now to talk about some of the other improvements that we've made. Thank you, Dave. So the the third element here was to achieve an EBITDA and cash breakeven position, and there are two key elements to this.

26:24 Firstly, as you can see from the graph in the bottom left hand corner, there's a complete reset of the cost base, and we've now got the cost base down to 3,500,000 per annum. This started pre fundraise, but was completed in September. The previous cost base had been up as high as 6,400,000, and it was key that we realigned this. Most of the decrease comes from board management and staff costs. All the board changes were completed in August, And as I mentioned earlier, the headcount has been reduced to 36 at the last count at the end of October, which is down from 46 at June. We did a complete review of the cost base, resulting in savings across all the operational areas and the commercial cost base.

27:12 The second key element was the fundraise. So we raised net proceeds of 3,500,000 during August and September. And as I mentioned at the end of October, that was down to 2,600,000. So we spent 900,000 since the raise. Much of that takes account of catching up on creditors that are accumulated between June and August. The biggest element of which related to rent, where we're going to arrears, and now got that paid up to date, and also on material suppliers. In addition to that 2,600,000, we're expecting another 500,000 of R and D tax credits to be received in the early part of the next calendar year. So with the 2,600,000, that we've already got, this gives us just over ten months of cash runway, without taking account of the margin that we'll achieve on conversion of the pipeline.

28:09 And as we've mentioned earlier this week, the pipeline now stands at 3,300,000, and the number of leads has grown encouragingly since the fundraise. So although the timing at which the pipeline unwinds and leads convert is always quite uncertain, the current pipeline of leads does give us confidence over our cash runway and outlook. As Dave has mentioned, we've made some good progress on process improvements and that will help to reduce our material requirements as well going forward and should help on our gross margin. And we've made some encouraging technical progress that we've seen on IHC and some of the gene therapy delivery and precision chemotherapy. So all combined, this gives us a reasonable outlook and and will help us in our in our aim to achieve our EBITDA and cash breakeven position.

29:02 So I'll I'll hand back now to Aaron to do the the summary. Okay. Thank you, Andrew. So if I could just leave us with a summary in an outlook and and leave on a positive note, we've relocated to new premises with state of the art laboratories. We've refreshed the board and built a more shareholder aligned team with all members being shareholders and or investors. And with the help of Steve Holt back in the chair, we're now refocused on delivery and profitability on a fully reset cost base and back to lean operational management. So since funding, we've seen strong underlying growth in the pipeline with revenue forecasting being made more transparent and realistic in terms of fee for service and licensing expectations.

29:56 And since being freed up to focus on process improvements, we've made massive increases and massive strides forward developing processes for faster delivery, lower sample requirements, lower cost. This will lead to improved margins and with increased capacity. We've also had a focus on the development of data for therapeutic applications, launched new products like the IHC tools. So, you know, through through throughout all of our work, I would just like to leave you, understanding and and like to assure you that we're, at first and foremost, and at the front of our minds is adding value to our loyal shareholder base. So that concludes the presentation, and we will now take any questions. Perfect. Aaron, Andrew, David, thank you very much.

30:41 What I'll do is I'll just bring your cameras back up now for the q and a. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the q and a tab, which is situated on the top right hand corner of your screen. I'd also like to remind you that recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can be accessed via your investor dashboard. We have received a number of questions, and I'll start off the q and a session with the first one here, which reads as follows. How can you be so confident in the trading update of fitting targets of 3 mil this year with any £700,000 booked so far? Okay. I'm happy to take that question. As I mentioned previously in the presentation, while the the company was going through a pretty difficult period and and and it was uncertain in terms of the future of the business, it was it it was not going to be easy for us to close deals with the company that that was looking, you know, likely to to to kind of hit the wall, essentially.

31:39 Now that we've refinanced the company and we've got a good runway, there there's much more engagement by customers, and we're starting to see the pipeline build and things move through the pipeline. So So we have visibility of the deals that are looking likely to close as we move forward. Perfect. Thank you very much, Aaron. Next question here reads as follows. You've gone through a heavy cost cutting exercise. Do you still have the necessary skills and expertise in house to manage the pipeline and anticipated increase in the pipeline to meet the market expectations? Yeah. So I I can take this question. So, yeah, we've we've been careful to ensure that we have retained the skills and and the capacity to ensure we could could meet our our, you know, our revenue expectations and deliver the pipeline.

32:26 The the previous staffing base was was based on our previous expectations, which were which have, you know, been reduced significantly for the current year. We've been we've been mindful to make sure that we've got cross skilling initiatives put in place to make sure that we've got the skills in house that we need, And we've also been mindful of the skills that we need to develop to complete our development projects. Perfect. Thanks very much. The next question here. It was good to see Adam, the new non exec, buy a decent amount of shares. Why didn't all the directors buy except for token amounts? Happy with the option hurdles, but did the quantum provide a disincentive to not take any risk? I I don't mind taking that one. So why did we not buy in except for token amounts? Well, the the the simple answer for myself and David, if I can speak on his behalf, is that we haven't ever had an exit, and we don't don't have that level of cash to invest.

33:26 We put in the amount of money that we could afford between between the two of us. It's probably worth mentioning as well that we did contribute in other ways by taking significant salary cuts. Yeah. Perfect. Thank you very much. What is the biggest change or changes you've made apart from cost cuts that makes you think would be more successful than the last management team? Again, I'll I'm happy to take that one. The refocus as a business on driving revenue and essentially improving the the systems and the processes within the business. There's a there's a a much a much more direct focus on on on that now with the new team.

34:16 And and if you if you consider most of the board members currently now in the business are all independently successful entrepreneurs in their own right. And so we have a really good set of skills guiding us through the next phase of the business. Perfect. Thanks for that, Aaron. I understand you're working on bread and butter deals to steer the ship back on course. The options kick in at four p and post trading at or above four p. This move in share price, one would think license deals are needed. I read I read this morning, still in the mix, but it seems like closing them is an if and when or maybe. Are any of these expected to close in the near or midterm? Okay. I can take that one again.

35:02 We we have several opportunities in the pipeline that could turn into licensing deals. But as we said earlier, we're not going to speculate on timing on that because, essentially, they that things can go wrong, and they can take a long time, particularly when lawyers get involved. Some some of the deals can take twelve months. Some of the deals can take three months. It it all depends. So that's not something that that I would be willing to to kind of put a date on at this stage. No problem. Just turning to the next question. £3,900,000 was raised since August, but you mentioned your current cash is 2,600,000. This is a significant cash burn. How long is the current runway, and how has such significant spend occurred over just a few months?

35:50 Okay. I'm happy to take this one. So the 3,900,000 was the gross proceeds that we raised after fees, after expenses that netted down to 3,500,000. I think I explained on one of my slides that we've now got 2,600,000. So the 900,000 that we've spent of the proceeds that we received, some of that was spent on catching up on creditors, particularly in the likes of rent arrears and materials from suppliers. And then since then, we've reduced the cost base and that was completed in September this year. And we're now consuming just under £300,000 a month on our fixed cost base. So that, with our 2,600,000 in our R and D tax credits to receive in the early part of next year, gives us at least ten months, more than ten months of runway without any margin from pipeline. So that gives us confidence over the runway because we've got 3,300,000 in the pipeline now. And, you know, although the timing is always uncertain, you know, we would expect to, you know, realize a significant chunk of that pipeline.

37:01 Perfect. Thanks very much, Andrew. The next question here from Piers. Following the low end customer confidence over the summer, what's the impacts of this, and are you seeing improvements? I'll take this one. So it's very clear that the low end customer conference was confidence was linked to the perception that the company would run out of money. So, you know, contracts and deals have been held off until people could see that the company was funded. So now that we've got funding and then we've got a good runway, we're seeing reengagement with customers and a massive increase in the in the kind of pipeline as we're building it. Perfect. Thank you very much, Aaron. Another question here. What performance will trigger the share options for f y twenty four? Yeah. I'm happy to take this one. So the share options are split into several tranches over the next covering each of the next three years.

37:54 For FY '24, the the share price trigger is 4p, and with the revenue needs to be in line with our market expectations. That doesn't mean that all all options vest. Only 16% of the options vest at that point. And like I say, they stay standing trenches for the for the years thereafter. Thank you very much. For the work on gene therapy, how fast will licensing deals arise from this? Okay. So I would probably look by the time that we've developed a solution and we've passed it to a customer for testing, I would probably look at around the twelve month mark for areas in gene therapy.

38:42 Perfect. Thanks very much. Another question here. You mentioned IHC. When will this data be ready to launch to the market, and how significant will the resulting deals be? This is a two part question. So I think Dave can answer the first part, and then I'll take the second part. Yeah. Sure. So as I mentioned, we we actually launched the, service offering around this, earlier in the year. So we've actually launched this already. But as I showed in the presentation, we've made significant progress on this and improved the processes. So we actually have that out with selected partners being validated at the moment. And as soon as that data comes back, which we expect to be before the end of the year, that will be put out in announcements to the to the the public. K. So to answer the question on how significant the resulting deals will be, you have to consider the the state of the immunohistochemistry market with a lot of all of the big players with their technologies coming off patent, and they're looking to they're looking basically for patentable technologies to to bring on board to give themselves new positions.

39:49 So I think it's fair to say, that there's good opportunity there in the immunohistochemistry space for companies with novel technologies that can enable the larger players to take a a better intellectual property position. Perfect. There were deals signed across the business units last year. When will you update the market on the progress of these? Yeah. I can take this one again. So the these some of these projects can take several months, and the more essentially, the bigger the the bigger the value of the project is usually linked to the complexity and the length of time that it takes to do the work in in through the labs, and then obviously negotiate the the kind of legal terms and conditions with any licensing fees or any transfer of intellectual property.

40:41 So we would hope to update the market as and when the lab work completes. So and we've we've managed to move through those phases. Perfect. Aaron, Andrew, David, thank you very much for that. I think you've addressed those questions you can from investors, and, of course, the company will review all the questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the investor meet company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Aaron, could I just ask you for a few closing comments? Yeah. I would I would just like to say thank you all for coming and listening. We're very excited about the rest of the year, and we're looking forward to updating you on all the exciting things that we're currently working on as a business. Perfect. Aaron, Andrew, David, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the management team can better understand your views and expectations.

41:34 This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of APTAMER GROUP PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.