Aptamer Group (LSE:APTA) — Interim Results

0:01 Good afternoon, and welcome to the APTAMER GROUP PLC Interim Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and they can be submitted at any time using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question or receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, and I

0:32 would now like to hand you over to CEO, Aaron Tolley. Good afternoon to you. Hello. Good afternoon. Welcome to our interim results six months to the 12/31/2023.

0:50 So presentation that we're gonna give today has got three broad sections to it. We'll first do an introduction, as usual, about the company and our technology. We'll then move on to our h one overview and talk about operational and financial progress, and then we'll talk about post period updates in terms of operations and technical progress.

1:12 So my name's Aaron Tolley. I'm one of the cofounders of APTAMER GROUP, and I founded the company several years ago or many years ago now, in fact, with David when we recognized the gap in the market for affinity ligands, which we'll come on to talking about a bit later.

1:30 Hi, everyone. I'm Dave Bunker. I'm the chief scientific officer, and as Aaron said, the the other cofounder of APTAMER GROUP. I've got a background in molecular biology, but it's really in APTAMER technologies. I've worked with this this platform for very nearly twenty five years, which is quite worrying for me. Andrew?

1:49 Thanks, Dave. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Andrew Repson. I'm the CFO here at APTAMER GROUP. I have over twenty years experience as a chartered accountant. Joined APTAMER in August 2022, and I've worked in the AIM environment now since 2015.

2:08 So I'll start off with an introduction to APTAMER GROUP. So so who is the APTAMER GROUP? So we're a biotechnology firm situated in York that David and myself founded in 2008. We're a highly specialized and unique company that solves difficult problems for our partners, most of which are large pharmaceutical companies. And we're partnered with most of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies globally where we provide our solutions. And the company is essentially set up to address a gap in the market for something that's called affinity ligands, which we'll come on to explain later. So we started trading in 2012 after David and myself funded the company for the first four years. We then grew the company organically with revenue and angel investment, and we finally listed on AIM at the end of twenty twenty one.

2:58 And the the the company and the technology is centered around our APTAMER platform, which essentially provides binder technology or affinity ligands to our partners in the life sciences industry.

3:14 So what are affinity ligands? This is an an interesting interesting question. So affinity ligands are molecules that essentially act like small small magnets. That's the best way to to think of them. They're magnet like particles that specifically attract certain other molecules. So affinity ligands is a group of special high value molecules that selectively grab onto certain proteins, cells, or viruses that allow you to detect, recognize, or deliver other molecules to other molecules. Where this is useful is things like pregnancy test kits, COVID tests, certain types of drugs are delivered to cancers, specifically by antibodies.

4:04 And this in its own right is a huge growing market. So what's the issue there? So why do we exist as a company? Well, antibodies have been around for decades, and they do not work or do not work well all of the time. They can take several months or even years to generate. And when they've generated, they can be expensive to make.

4:23 So over the past thirty years or so, other platforms have been developed to address to address these problems, starting with things like synthetic antibodies all the way through to APTAMER, which is what we do as a company. And it's best to think of this affinity ligand market as being serviced by a continuum of different molecules all serving this common goal of selective detection, separation, or delivery. And APTAMAs are unique as a technology in this area. They vary from antibodies in multiple different ways in that they're made from DNA and RNA, first and foremost, and not protein. But when you compare them to antibodies, they have several advantages, such as broader target range, rapid development, reduced immune based side effects when they're used as therapies, and reliable and scalable manufacture when you need to scale up to make a large amount. So, hopefully, that explains what we do, why we do it, and where we do it. So I'll pass over to David now to give a refresher on the technology.

5:29 Thanks, Aaron. Yeah. So as as Aaron said, we we use our platform to help solve challenges for our customers, collaborators, and partners. We see ourselves as an enabler of technologies. We use our platform to enable our customers and collaborators to do whatever it is they need to do. So they usually come to us with a target in mind, something that they want to work with. That's on the left hand side of the slide here. So that could be anything from a a small molecule, you know, a a drug of abuse, a food additive, an environmental contaminant, something like that, up to a a protein, something they want to study, something they want to purify, or up to a a really complex system like a whole cell, a virus, or even a tissue. So they have something that they want to work with.

6:21 They have an application. That's something they want to do with it on the right hand side of the slide. Now that could be develop a new diagnostic, something to detect that molecule or monitor it. It could be, as Aaron mentioned, a therapeutics or something they want to treat or deliver. Or it could be a a bioprocessing tool, so something they want to purify, a high value protein, for example. So they have a target. They have an application. But without a binder molecule sitting in between, they have no way of making those two sides meet up. That's where we come in. So we use our APTAMER platform to develop these binders using one of our three distinct discovery processes, I'll come back to that in the the next slide, to develop these binders.

7:11 So the platform or platforms that we have within the company are a good differentiator for us to help us address our customer and collaborator needs. So as I said, within the company, we've got a couple of USPs. The first one, Bailey, being our tailored approach. So we have three distinct selection methodologies depending on what the customer wants us to look at. So the way we handle small molecules is different to the way we handle proteins, and that is different again from the way we handle cells because as it sounds, they're all quite different beasts. So the way you handle them has to be different. So we've developed within the company three different methods.

7:56 Now each of those in and of itself can also be tailored to fit the end goal. So the way we would develop a binder for a targeted therapeutic, for example, is different from the way we would develop a binder for a research application. So we can tailor each of those three processes depending on the customer's end goal. The other USPs include our high throughput automated platform. So we spent many, many years developing and refining our process and automating as much of it as possible. Now that gives us a number of advantages in and of itself. You know, obviously, an automated platform is less prone to error, but it's also much more readily scaled. So we can scale it up or scale it down depending on, customer and client needs.

8:47 It also allows us to process a lot of samples in parallel or a few samples in a lot of different conditions. So this gives us a lot more bandwidth, and it gives us a lot higher success rate. And then, of course, there's the know how that goes along with that. So within the team, we've got well over seventy years worth of experience in developing, characterizing, and optimizing these binders to fit the end goals of our customers. So those are the USPs of the company. And now we'll hand over, and we'll talk about what we do with that platform and the company goals going forward. So I'll hand you back to Aaron. Oh, thanks, Dave. So,

9:28 essentially, a difficult topic to to kind of to to to cover, but the the shareholders previously, for reasons that everyone's fully aware of, decided a refresh broad board was needed and a new strategy for the company. The new board took over last August. I returned to the business with the previous chairman, Steve Hall, to refocus the company on our our three pillar pre IPO model, which delivered us success previously and actually is what got us to the public markets in the first place. So the first pillar is a clear focus on technical progress slash innovation, improved product offering, developed and developing our high value partnerships. Second pillar is to improve timelines for delivery, improve development costs, and generate marketing data to help build our internal pipeline and give us some commercial flexibility.

10:19 The third pillar is to go back to tight cost discipline as we did prior to the IPO, working with a lean cost base and a clear focus on commercial revenue delivery and pipeline expansion. I think one of the key take homes on this slide really is is just to point out that we've only been in place for eight months at the moment, and I personally think we've made great progress so far, but we still have a lot of work to do.

10:48 So the the the key highlights for the business, as I explained, the board took over in August. We completed the cost base reset on time in September. And despite a highly inflationary environment and due to Andrew's diligence, we've stuck to that number. We've delivered solid technical progress in our internal processes, improving the cost of development, the speed, and our efficiencies. Alongside this, we've demonstrated the potential for our platform to be used for therapeutic delivery. We're still signing deals, we're still making commercial progress. We've signed a follow on agreement with a US based vaccine development company to produce Optima binders for QC reagents. Contracts were signed in August 23 with a top five pharma company to develop multiple binders for various purposes.

11:38 We've had a contract of up to 150,000 circa being signed with a US based biotech company to develop OPTIMA reagents for various different targets. An agreement has also been signed for up to naught 600,000 with the genetics medicine business to develop APTAMER, which allows them to target genetic medicines to specific cell types. So to give an exemplification of the internal processes and product offerings that we're developing, our normal service offering effectively focuses on assess the project feasibility with the customer to to to then discover their Optima binders, to develop them into the appropriate format, and then test their performance.

12:30 But we're now offering in house validation in a number of different areas, which you can see over on the right hand side in the light gray box. This gives us multiple other sources of potential income from areas such as immunohistochemistry development, enzyme activity assays, cell viability assays, which is where you would test whether molecules were effectively caused harm to cells, hair screening, which is useful in diagnostics, and also the important gene knockdown assays. So we can then validate the performance in the customer's desired end application application and then support with the transfer of methods, importantly,

13:08 to the company. So the three key take homes here is the increased fee for service revenue for additional development work and increased potential for licensing revenue for proven binders that we generate and validate, and an increased access to data to support our marketing activities. So I'll pass over to Andrew now who will take you through the financials. Thanks, Aaron. So, yeah, the financial review for the for the half year. So firstly, the income statement. Group revenue after the peer period was just not 300,000 compared to 1,000,000 in the in the prior six months. This reduction in revenue was largely caused by a a lull in customer activity that occurred around the time of the fundraise, so that the early part of the period was, significantly significantly impacted.

14:01 It's taken us some time to to rebuild that pipeline, but we're encouraged by current pipeline levels that we've announced today, as we work through the the second half of the year. We also experienced a slowdown in target delivery from contracts that we signed at the end of the previous financial year and the early part of this period. What I mean by target delivery is is really the the when we sign a contract, a sales contract, and a customer agrees to go ahead with work with for us to do some work with them, they have to send us material to our laboratories for us to, you know, get to work and find optimal binders that that will bind well to those targets. And in in this period, we found certainly in the early part of the period, we're hampered by supply chain issues, and customers were struggling to get some of those target materials across to us.

14:50 So a combination of those two factors has has really hampered hampered this period. But we finished the period strongly, and we announced £800,000 worth of deals in December,

15:02 places a good proportion of those have now arrived in terms of target materials with the laboratory, and we're starting to progress that work in the second half of the year. As we've mentioned in the announcement today, pipeline now stands at a much more healthy level. We've got 1,300,000 of what we call production pipeline, and we've got 2,900,000 of site of sales pipeline. Production pipeline is probably worth me me touching on this certainly from a revenue recognition point of view. And that 1,300,000 that's in production, that number number drops as we, convert that that pipeline into revenue, and it gets topped up again as, the sales team negotiate deals out of the sales pipeline, which currently stands at 2,900,000, and pass that across to to production.

15:53 So there's a a steady chain dropping through from the sales pipeline through to the production pipeline and then ultimately through into into revenue in the income statement. So back on the income statement, the adjusted EBITDA loss for the period was 1,800,000. That's down from 2,500,000 in the prior period. And and that that reduction in the loss really reflects the the drop in administrative expenses, which was all part of the planned cost base reset. And we completed that reset in September 2023, so we now got the the cost the fixed cost base down to 3,500,000. The headcount, finished the period at 37, which was down from 46 at June 23, again, in line with the the planned cost base reset.

16:42 Now we're continuing to monitor the the cost base, and we're pleased that we've been able to keep on on track with that figure to date despite the inflationary pressures that that everyone's been feeling of late. So if we move on to the balance sheet, cash at the end of the period stood at 1,800,000, up from 0.2 at June. And I'm pleased to say cash is still at 1,800,000 at the end of February, and that's following the receipt of the r and d tax credit payment from HMRC. That was just under 500,000 that we received in January. Net assets at the end of the period were 2,000,000, up from 0.3 at June, which prefund raised. And the the only other notable items really in the in the balance sheet there are on the liability side, the trading of the payables and accruals are significantly down from previous periods. And, again, that's just in line with the the cost base reset and in the prior period where we'd we'd moved into the new offices and and laboratory space.

17:49 So if I lastly move on to the the cash flow, you can see that overall, we had a a cash inflow for the period of 1,500,000, made of primarily of two key elements there. The operating outflow of 1,800,000, which quite closely reflects the adjusted EBITDA loss for the period. And then the 3,500,000 of fundraise proceeds, net proceeds that we received throughout the course of August and September.

18:23 So the result at the end of the period was a a cash balance of 1,800,000, and and like I've just mentioned on the on the balance sheet side, we that's still at 1,800,000. I guess at that point, looking further ahead slightly, and actually a key area of focus now is what our burn rate is, and a 3,500,000 fixed cost base, we're we're we're on a a gross level worth of 300,000 spend per month. So you could see that the cash balance from the end of February takes us out another six months at least without contributing any any sales to to that balance. So that takes us to August 24. And as we've announced today, the the pipeline the production pipeline is 1,300,000, and we've got another 2,900,000 of sales opportunities, and we'll be looking to convert that in in the coming months. So this gives us a reasonable expectation that our cash bonds can take us well into the into the next financial year.

19:23 So that probably quite neatly takes us onto the post period update. So I'll I'll pass back to Aaron.

19:31 Thank you, Andrew. So since January, we've worked really hard to overcome this kind of lulling customer confidence that was created due to our cash position prior to the board reshuffle. There's no hiding it. This has affected our revenue pipeline, and we've spent the past eight months rebuilding confidence in the company and rebuilding our pipeline. So we now have around 1,300,000 of deals closed and passed into the production pipeline, as Andrew mentioned, and we have 2,900,000 in advanced stage pipeline deals. It's important to note that this is an increase of around 1,500,000, exemplifying, in my opinion, the hard work that's been put in by the sales and marketing team over the last few months. And, also, it demonstrates our strategic plan coming together.

20:19 Commercially, we've developed binders for a top five pharma company that are currently undergoing evaluation to support their drug development pipelines. And, you know, this has a a licensing potential in the short to medium term. We've developed patents with Unilever protecting commercially valuable technology in the fast moving consumer goods field. We've entered the second phase of development of a lateral flow diagnostic for Alzheimer's with neurobio, and we're currently manufacturing test amounts of our therapeutic delivery technology for evaluation by a top 15 pharma company, again, with a potential and realistic opportunity for licensing there. Now this all sounds great and very positive, but, you know, as we're told, the numbers speak for themselves, and and that is a fair point. Are we where we want to be at this point in time? The answer to that is no. No. We're not. But we are getting there, and we're working really hard to implement the strategy described previously in slide 11.

21:22 And before we move on and pass over to Dave to talk about technology and progress in that area, I'd just like to reiterate something Andrew said earlier. We can sign deals, and we are signing deals, but we don't start to recognize the revenue until the customer delivers the materials. And it's a really crucial point that a low revenue number at one point in time does not indicate a lack of commercial momentum or interest in the technology as a business. It's a timing problem, which we're working really hard internally to fix. So on that note, I'll pass over

21:54 to Dave to talk about the exciting technical progress we've made over the last several months. Thanks, Aaron. Yes. So I'm going to talk about three areas that we've been working on recently. So the first one is our novel Optima Plus platform. So, hopefully, you'll recognize this slide from earlier on. This presents the continuum of affinity ligands that Aaron mentioned previously with the antibodies and the protein scaffolds on the left and our APTAMER platform on the right hand side. Now what we've been working on recently is really exciting because our new platform really is the best of both worlds. And what I mean by that is we have, this new platform that has the benefits of our existing APTAMA platform, I. E, the small size, the flexibility, the ease of manufacturing, the stability of our APTAMER binders.

22:53 But we've included, modified nucleotides

22:57 that essentially give us new building blocks that give the ability to recognize targets in similar ways to the other molecules on the left of this continuum. So our new binders are like a hybrid. They sit in the middle of our APTAMER platform and, for example, the bicycle platforms or the antibody platforms. So it really is the best of both worlds. It sits between those two technologies. Now this new platform allows us to address targets that maybe we haven't been able to address with our existing platform. That's not to say that the APTAMER binders don't work, but these new binders we're expecting to work a whole lot better. Now that should obviously expand our share of the market.

23:46 Important to note as well, these new APTAMER plus binders are actually even faster to develop than our existing APTAMER binders. So it gives us a a faster turnaround time, and that in turn leads to faster products to market. It's obviously great to see that this new platform is there. It's proprietary to APTAMER GROUP as well, so that's something that you're not gonna be able to get anywhere else. So this port for, this platform is protected by over 30 granted patents covering everything from the building blocks themselves all the way through to the binder development processes. So this is entirely proprietary to the APTAMER GROUP. And, obviously, any new binders that we develop using this platform will also be protectable in their own right.

24:39 Now the, demonstrated data that we've been getting so far has been really well received by pharma partners, and several of them are actually in conversations at the moment to trial this platform within their own needs. So, again, we are enabling technologies with our new platform. So this is still in line with the business offering that we had originally. Another area that we're looking at is within the, IHC space. So just to give you a little bit of background to that. So IHC is essentially a process that's carried out in pathology labs and research labs right the way across the world, including drug discovery labs. Now to give you an example of how this works, if for example you go to the doctors with a suspect of, having a disease, you know, maybe, god forbid, that will be cancer.

25:32 So normally you would then be sent off to have a a tissue biopsy, a small sample taken of that tissue, that will then be sent to one of these pathology labs where it will be processed and essentially tested and stained to look for markers of disease, let's say cancer for example. So you can see with that powerful technology, IHC, this immunohistochemistry, has really become the gold standard in clinical diagnosis for things like cancer, and that's exemplified by the fact that the IHC market itself is valued at around $2,300,000,000. So an absolutely enormous market. And like many things in the you know, this has been dominated by antibodies.

26:21 But IHC is as an application where antibodies really do struggle. So this is really comes down to all of those staining processes that I mentioned. Antibodies struggle to perform when you've processed these samples in all of those ways. Now our platform actually allows us to use all of those processing steps in the binder development themselves. So we have a much greater chance of success in this platform. And we were delighted to announce earlier in the year our new APTAMER FC platform that we've patented, where we've developed our binders and then integrated them into these commercially available workflows. So you can see in the schematic on the left hand side of the slide there, we've put our APTAMER binders into this platform and demonstrated that they work very nicely. You can see some of the brown stained images that we've used as exemplars

27:19 on the right hand side of the slide. So this really works really well. And as I said, we've patented that process, and we're now getting commercial traction in this space as well. The third area, that is of great personal interest, is in the development of targeted delivery systems for therapeutics. So as I'm sure everyone knows, you know, a lot of drugs have what are known as off target or side effects. Now those are the results of the drug going where it's not needed. So in the case of chemotherapeutic used to treat cancer, they go to the cancer, they do their job there, but they also have all of these off target effects that lead to these horrible side effects, your hair falling out, your fingernails falling out, you're constantly feeling sick.

28:12 Now if you could develop a drug delivery system, so a molecule that takes that drug only to, for example, the cancer, you can have a number of effects. So you can first make that drug more effective, but you also reduce the amount of off target effects. So you make the drug more tolerable. Now this is not a a new concept. You know, drug delivery systems have been around for a while. One well known molecule is GalNAc. That is a drug delivery system that targets the liver. Now that's fine, but it doesn't specifically target, for example, fibrotic liver disease. Now despite that, GalNAc associated conjugates that have been approved for market use, generated revenues of over $1,000,000,000 in 2023.

29:02 So you can see that there's real value to technologies of this type. Now as an exemplification, we've generated APTAMER binders that are selective to fibrotic liver disease. So you can see on the left hand side of the slide there, our APTAMER binders here stained with a, a pink fluorophore. You can see very, very clearly they bind to the diseased cells on the top left, but they don't bind to the healthy cells. So they are selective. They will only take the drug to the cells it needs to be in. Now we've actually demonstrated this with a a model gene therapy payload, and we've shown that we can deliver that. So in the data on the, middle to right hand side of the slide, what you can see is a a dose dependent, so a genuine therapeutic effect in the cell type that we're interested in, but no effect whatsoever in the cell type that we're not interested in. So what this is showing is that we can use our

30:05 APTAMER binders to specifically target to therapeutic only to the cell types that it's been needed in. Now we've actually presented this data to a number of, pharma partners who have been very interested in this data, and we're looking to, take these samples forward. I've actually been in the lab myself over recent months preparing some of these materials, getting them ready to send out, doing all the quality control steps and sending this to our partners. So I'm now gonna hand over for a summary and outlook. Cool. Thank you, Dave. So just really to wrap up and and leave you with the key points. We refreshed the board with a clear focus on delivering shareholder value for the three the three main areas that I discussed previously.

30:58 We reset the cost base with ongoing tight cost discipline, and and this will give us a runway into financial year '25. The commercial team is working and has worked really hard and increased the pipeline by around 1,500,000, and it currently stands at 2,900,000 of advanced stage deals. We've made process improvements, and we've expanded our product offering, which have been successfully tested and trialed within the business, and we're able to now offer those as additional sources of revenue for the company. And we've also worked on increasing the capacity and improvements of project margins so that we can generate faster revenues with higher potential margins. We've made great progress, as Dave explained, on our APTAMER Plus platform, demonstrating really good performance and suitability for it in therapeutic applications, and we've had good feedback and are actively discussing trials of this new technology with top 10 pharma partners.

31:59 We formally announced our partnership with Unilever for the development of APTAMER for novel applications in fast moving consumer goods, and I believe we're in the process of submitting those patents very shortly. We've developed high performance binders for challenging targets in the immunohistochemistry space, as Dave very eloquently explained earlier. And these are under evaluation with a top five pharma company, again, with a view to licensing revenue. And finally, just to reiterate, I have seen Dave myself personally in the lab manufacturing these therapeutic candidate Optima binders for liver disease, which are gonna be shipped very shortly to a top 15 pharma company for them to test internally as an alternative gene therapy delivery application.

32:47 So I thank people for listening, and I'll pass over to the hosts to give us what I can imagine will be some very difficult questions to answer. Perfect. Aaron, Andrew, David, thank you very much indeed for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q and A tab situated on the right corner of your screen. While the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q and A can be accessed via investor dashboard. Aaron, Andrew, David, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. And if I may just start the q and a with the first one here, which reads as follows. You have released an increased pipeline value, but how much of the pipeline will you likely convert by the end of the financial year?

33:37 Good question. So I can speak here historically that we've been able to close 45 to 50% of the deals that have come through the pipeline that are at an advanced stage. That was hampered previously, as we've mentioned several times in the presentation, through a lack of certainty in the company's financial position, but we're beginning to see confidence build from customers in this area. It's taken us eight months to rebuild that confidence, but we have increased the pipeline from around 1.3, 1,400,000 to 2,900,000. And, you know, the technology is gaining traction. APTAMER is a believer in the in the news this morning for diagnostics in motor neuron disease or ALS.

34:23 We're currently working on diagnostics for Alzheimer's, is, you know, kind of parallel approach, and we're patenting this technology with Unilever sorry. We patent this technology with neurobio. But these things are not an overnight turnaround, but but we are getting there as a business. Thank you, Aaron. Next question we've got here is, you mentioned the runway is into full year '25, but how far into the financial year will this take you? Can you give us an indication of how long the current runway will last? Okay. I'm happy to take that one. So I I think I covered some of this off in the slides earlier. So we we currently have 1,800,000 of cash at the end of February, and our burn rate is about naught 300,000 per month. So without any sales contribution, we can, you know, confidently expect to be up to August 24 based on that 1,800,000.

35:19 Clearly, the pipeline position has improved somewhat over recent months, and with 1,300,000 in the production pipeline that's, you know, moving through the labs at the moment and 2.9 of sales opportunities that we're looking to convert in the near term. That gives us some confidence about extending beyond August. We'd expect to churn through that pipeline well within that period. So that gives us some confidence that we can push that out. Like I said earlier, we're continuing to monitor the costs whilst we're unwinding that pipeline. So we'll take keep tight tight control of of that throughout that period. But, we can confidently expect to go beyond August 24 at this stage. Thank you, Andrew. A question on fundraising.

36:05 Do you anticipate a fundraise in the next several months? I'm gonna be very careful how I answer this question. And Andrew just explained the runway without sales circa six months and what we're gonna do in terms of operational costs. So we can all see what the numbers are. And without significant conversion of the pipeline, we would clearly need to seek shareholder support in the medium term. Be very clear, we're not currently planning to raise funding while we work on converting this expanded pipeline and exist and our existing pipeline of opportunities and deliver the work through the lab. A scenario with zero sales is highly unlikely as is a scenario with zero delivery.

36:56 And while we're not forecasting licensing opportunities as a business because that was something we did previously, and it it caused a lot of confusion, As I've said several times through the presentation, there are currently several discussions actively going on at the moment for licensing and for some of our successful products that we have with various different companies. Perfect. Thank you. Moving on to the next question. When will the partnership with Unilever begin generating revenue or licensing revenue? How long will it take for this to convert from development? I'll take that one again. So as I said, we're planning to submit patents imminently in in this area. And until the use of the technology is public and what we're using it for, I really can't comment on on on what it what it's going to be for.

37:52 What I will say is and I think it's fair to say if the if our shareholders imagine a product like toothpaste or any other fast moving consumer good product, you'd have some idea of the type of area that we're working in and the potential opportunity for that. Now in this type of a situation, you're looking at several years before revenues would start to be developed and to drop in due to the the length of time it takes to develop products and testing time to make sure that the products are safe and so on and so forth. So but as it is with all of our large partners, there's always potential for further revenue to be generated from partnerships in the meantime on other areas, other potential project, you know, leading on from the success of this current project as I as I've mentioned previously.

38:48 Thank you. And the next question is, we've heard a lot about the technical progress you have made. Why are you personally so excited about the technical update section, and how will it put the company on the map? What does it mean in late terms? Off you. Yeah. Off you, Dave. Yeah. I'll take that one. I think, personally, it I mean, it breaks down into the three areas that we've talked about, so I'll I'll go through them in order. The the platform, first of all, I mean, personally, I've spent twenty five years working in the APTAMER space. It's always been of interest to me to see what an APTAMER can do and to see those boundaries pushed. But within that time, you know, I've also seen the limitations of it. There are things that they can't do. So I've also kept my eye on things that are out there to improve that technology and see ways that we can actually push this forward. So any opportunity to make the APTAMA binders able to do more is always of interest. And our new platform absolutely allows us to do that. So, you know, I'm really excited by the data that we've generated recently, and I'm happy to report that, you know, the the pharma partners and so on that we've shown this data to, they're also really interested in it. So it's not just a personal excitement.

40:04 There is excitement out there in the world for this technology, and they're looking to trial it. In the IHC space, again, we've known for a very long time that antibodies struggle with that sort of application in particular. And this problems like that are really why Aaron and I set the company up in the first place, to try and overcome some of these limitations. You know, as I've said, we can actually apply a lot of those conditions into our selection process and make the binders do what those customers and collaborators really need it to do. And again, it was fantastic to see, you know, the patent getting submitted earlier this year around that new platform, the APTAMER FC, to solve again another problem.

40:51 And personally, you know, I think any any technology that can be put out there to improve clinical diagnostics has got to be a good thing. Yeah. And finally, obviously, in the drug delivery space, our platform has the ability, as I've demonstrated, to improve the performance of drugs and reduce those off target effects. And like many people, you know, I've personally witnessed some of the horrible side effects from things like chemotherapies. You know? And sometimes it it really does feel like the treatment can be almost as bad as the disease. So, you know, if you can get those drugs to be better targeted and go just where they need to do need to go, you can reduce some of those side effects and make it less burdensome to have that therapy.

41:41 And we've seen with our, APTAMER platform the potential to actually do this. So this is why I'm really passionate about this. You know? We if we can help people having those treatments to have a better time of it, again, it's it's fantastic. And we've shown again, we've shown this data to several pharma partners, as I've mentioned, and they've been as excited by that data as we have. So as Aaron said, you know, I took the opportunity to don my lab coat, get down in the lab, and, you know, push this forward because we want to get this out there. And, obviously, from a a commercial point of view, these things are of massive value. So I mentioned the the GalNAc conjugates that have been used clinically already, generating over a billion dollars in revenue in a single year. So there's clearly an advantage to make things better for patients, but also there's significant value in developing a clinical asset.

42:35 One last thing that I thought was a real highlight for APTAMER Technologies in general was the announcement earlier in the year about so Astellas, excuse me, Astellas purchasing an APTAMER based company, IVERIC, for over $6,000,000,000 based on the single FDA approved APTAMA based therapeutic that those guys have developed. Again, this this speaks volumes as to the value of this technology. So, you know, that's why I'm personally excited. If we can develop something like that, that is gonna put APTAMER GROUP on the map. Thank you, David, for that answer. Another question is, have you seen an impact of the recession on your pipeline opportunities and conversion?

43:22 I'm happy to take that one. Yeah. I think I think it's fair to say that the, you know, we've we've seen the impact of the recession of late. Certainly, burden of proof for the larger opportunities is higher than it was. We've we've certainly seen that in recent discussions with customers, and and and they've been quite open with the restrictions that they've been placed under in terms of their budgets. Certainly, all all the top pharma companies seem to be relatively consistent in that. I think it's encouraging then in that environment that, you know, there's still plenty we're we're proving there's still plenty of deals to be done. And, you know, that's evidenced by the way the pipeline's increased over the last couple of months in particular. And and I and I think we're in a good place to, you know, to to be competitive in that environment.

44:09 You know, we're addressing these these these recession challenge through flexibility and contract negotiations then and further validation of our of our platform to demonstrate the potential of APTAMER technology. As Dave has has mentioned, you know, we're really excited about the APTAMER Plus platform. We think that's gonna help us gain market share, And it really could be a real strong differentiator in our marketplace, you know, which is a you know, we're we're in a proprietary position with that with that technology. So I think I think we're well placed to take advantage of the challenges in the market at Perfect. Thank you, Andrew. And one last question here to wrap up. Affinity ligands seem to cover a large range of applications, but which sector of the market is your key focus?

44:57 So, yeah, it's a very good question, Dave. You can feel free to chip in, but this is one that we come across quite often. And the the the best way to look at this, the fee for service arm of the business works across all sectors, essentially, because we have a platform technology, and that means we can broadly generate revenues in multiple different areas. So the business was set up so that the fee for service arm can generate revenue reduce the need for investment and give us exposure to high value unmet needs in in the pharma industry, which then leads to the potential high value projects, licensing opportunities. I mean, for example, look at the deal we mentioned earlier with Unilever for the fast moving consumer goods. It's got huge potential.

45:43 The Alzheimer's diagnostic deal with with Neurobio, again, huge potential. So all of these opportunities have come from our fee for service arm, including the the the project for drug delivery that Dave has mentioned several times. All of this this this exposure essentially possesses the genuine potential to turn into passive income streams from licensing revenue in the fullness of time, which which we hope will underpin our cost base at some point in the near future. Mhmm. The the more the more essentially, the more scientific problems that we solve for large pharma companies, the more revenue we will generate on a fee for service basis. The more exposure we get to these opportunities, the the more likely we are to be generating passive income through licensing, which which will underpin the cost base, essentially.

46:33 I think the real value, though, for us as a business and the focus area and where the biggest upside is is the application of the technology in drug delivery, where the platform has very unique USPs, as Dave has explained, and lots of patent protection that that stands a real chance of adding huge potential downstream value to the business. Perfect. Thank you, Aaron, David, Andrew. I believe those are all the questions we've got time for today. And, of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we will publish those responses on the Investor Meet company platform. But before we direct investors to provide you with their feedback, which one is particularly important to the company, Aaron, could I please ask you for a few closing comments? Yeah. I'll keep it very, very short and sweet. We we appreciate and value all of our shareholders for supporting us, listening to the update.

47:27 We understand the frustration. We're a bit behind, but please be patient. Rest assured that we're working tirelessly as a team and as a company to deliver for us and for the scientific community at large. Perfect. Aaron, Andrew, David, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected to provide a feedback in order that the board can better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will 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. Hello?