International Biotechnology Trust (LSE:IBT) — Full Year Results

0:01 INTERNATIONAL BIOTECHNOLOGY TRUST PLC Full Year Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q and A tab that's just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and we'll publish those responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we would just like to submit the following poll and if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to the team from the INTERNATIONAL BIOTECHNOLOGY TRUST. Lucy, good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you, Jake.

0:47 So welcome to INTERNATIONAL BIOTECHNOLOGY TRUST full year results presentation for the year ended the 08/31/2024. I'm joined today by Elsa Craig and Marek Pocicinski, your portfolio managers from the trust.

1:02 I'm Lucy Costerfouart. I'm the investment director for the trust, and I work alongside Elsa and Merck. So without further ado, I'll hand over to Elsa and Merck. Thank you, Lucy, and thank you, InvestoMeet, for allowing us to present our final results today. So the presentation will take about half an hour, and then as you've heard, can come in with questions after that. Kicking off, just as a reminder, some of you may know that it's now thirty years since this investment trust started in 1994, and it's also three years, well just over three years, since Marek and I have taken over as co lead fund managers. This is the third full fiscal year of us running the trust. And we're proud to say that every year we have outperformed our benchmark and different types of markets. So year one, we had a down market, then a flat market. And this year, we've had a nice recovery.

1:59 So just as a little introduction for those of you who haven't heard us before. My name is Elsa Craig, and I've been working on this trust since 2006. Prior to that I worked at Bearing Asset Management, Rothschild and INSIGHT, all focused on investment in biotechnology stocks. My tenure started in 2001, so I've been covering these stocks for over twenty years. Marek, would you like to? Yeah, thank you. I joined IBT in 2013. Prior to that I've been working within the industry in biotech, within licensing, out licensed sale projects, companies and M and A. Great. So you may have known or be aware rather that we moved the trust from our previous umbrella firm SV Health Investors, which was a predominantly venture firm over to Schroders back in November 23. So basically we're almost at our first year anniversary being at Schroders.

2:57 And this slide depicts the advantage that Schroders gained by having the trust over with them. And then I'll talk a bit about the benefits to the trust. So at the time the healthcare product offering at Schroders extended from a venture life sciences group on the left and a public large cap healthcare funds on the right. And they had a sort of gap in the middle which they were keen to fill with a biotech fund such as ours. Over 20 interested parties put their hats in the ring for our fund. The board of directors managed the process and Schroders won the mandate primarily because they felt that they had the big strength on sales and distribution. Performance wise for the trust, I've touched on that already, trust has outperformed on one, three, five and ten year basis to August 2024.

3:50 Volatility historically has been lower than the benchmark. And the yields, now this is something that's relatively unusual. We pay out 4% of the NAV of the fund to our shareholders in two instalments, 2%, 2% each year. Backed by the expert team and now we sit within Schroders Unit Trust. And also just as an aside, we have had some external awards that you can see bottom right of this slide that recognize various attributes of the trust. So the summary, this is the annual results presentation and here we have various different factors from the results, but you can find our annual report on the website if you want to go into more detail. Suffice to say the NAV rose just shy of 16% in the year, the fiscal year, versus our benchmark just over 15% in the twelve months to August 24.

4:45 The share price returned 10%, the discount widened from 6.3% to 11.3% during the period and we bought back just under 2,500,000 shares in order to try and bring this discount in. We've had four M and A transactions which is about average for a year in the fund. Two came out of the venture part of the portfolio and two came out of the quoted part of the portfolio. We're very sad to see Caroline Gulliver leave the board at the end of her she's completed her tenure but excited to welcome Alexa Henderson who will join the board at the beginning of next year, so 2025. So here in tabular form you can see the performance that I've referred to a number of times now.

5:35 This presentation will be available on the website if you want to look at these numbers in more detail.

5:41 Please obviously do look at the disclaimers slide as well. Okay, so this slide shows the M and A transactions that have happened in the fund since May 2020. And above the x axis you can see all the quoted companies that have been acquired with the acquirer name above the company that was acquired below. It's been a good hit rate. Below the x axis you can see deals that have happened from the venture side of the portfolio and this financial year we've had four deals like I mentioned. So on the right hand side, MARATi, KARONA, IBIO and EDWARDS Life Sciences. Of note, you will notice there's a gap towards the fiscal year end on the right hand side of the slide. And we think that this is probably due to people sitting on their hands waiting for the election outcome in The US before they step up and make M and A deals.

6:39 So we hope that post election when we have clarity on who the president is, we might see more mergers and acquisitions return. This slide shows why we have so much M and A in this sector. So the histogram here shows the value of IP expiries, so patent expiries for large pharma sales over in these the big pharma guys. And as you can see years '27 and '28 are large numbers. So these guys have their backs against the wall. They really need to either develop drugs internally or acquire in new assets to offset the void of the sales coming off patent. The way we think about the dividend, we don't invest in companies that have a natural income.

7:28 However, we do get cash inflows as and when we have these M and A transactions. And the way we see it is we give some of that cash in back to our shareholders in the form of a dividend. I must note that the dividend is pegged to the size of the fund. So, the NAV was to rise in a year, obviously the dividend payment would then rise. And if the NAV would fall, the dividend payment would fall on an absolute basis. I'm now going to hand over to Marek to talk about the long term sector drivers. Thank you, Alsop. So looking at this slide, you can see that the demographic in the world, the population above the age of 65 will move up 200% over the coming generations.

8:15 Why is it so? You may ask, why do we become older? And one of the reasons is we have had medical progress. We are now able to live longer, probably the evolutionary wise we shouldn't be get older than 50, but medical progress has made us made it possible to live much longer than previously. And if you look at the next slide, you can see that heart disease usually occurs in the when we reach the age of 50. Historically, that was a big issue in the Western world with the diet, etcetera, but with new medical progress, we have also seen that this culprit is now not the major cause of death in the Western world. And once we live through the heart disease problems, unfortunately other diseases start to occur like cancer.

9:06 And one thing you can see on the right hand side that cancer is also a disease of the elderly, usually tends to increase when you reach the age of 60. What's interesting fact nowadays, which I think is very, very positive, is that approximately seventy percent of people who get this diagnosis actually live and survive that disease. And we are getting better and better. May so be it's incremental, but it's getting, we're getting there. One thing that last frontier or next frontier for the industry to crack is probably Alzheimer's disease and then the other CNS or central nervous system diseases.

9:45 But in general, we are very positive that the industry has put in a lot of effort to make the quality of life of us better, and thus we can live longer with a better quality of life. And one aspect of that, if you look at this slide is that the richer a country gets, the higher proportion of the GDP they spend on healthcare, which bodes well for the world. As we know, the Western world constitutes of approximately 1,000,000,000 in population, whereas the rest of the world is approximately seven to eight billion, which should bode well for the long term tailwind for the sector and the growth thereof. And how has the industry responded then? If you look at the left hand side, you can see the number of ongoing clinical trials have doubled during the last decade and seems like 2024 will not be an exception. The 2024 you see year to date data indicates that we will reach a new all time high.

10:44 On the right hand side, you can see that slowly but surely we get more and more drugs approved over the years. There is obviously a lag time from a clinical start to a drug being approved and back on the envelope usually we're talking about approximately ten years. Therefore, we are very positive that the trials on the left hand side will translate to more drugs on the market in the coming years. So when me and Asa started in this industry, the drugs were tablets and there were monoclonal antibodies, which at that time was considered a novelty. But what has happened during the last decade is we have seen a branching out what a therapeutic treatment is nowadays. So one of the avenues is cell based therapies.

11:33 A patient that has advanced blood cancer for example comes into the hospital, they draw the patient's blood, modify their cells, expand them and put them back into the patient as a treatment. So the cells basically are doing the work as a medicine and they are killing the cancer cells. Sounds very much science fiction, but it's nowadays a reality and the cure rate is fascinatingly high. We have some avenues left to explore in that sense because at the moment we only can address hematological malignancies, meaning blood cancers, but when solid tumors will be in the next frontier, but also if you can take cells from the shelf from other patients, not only the patients that are sick, you should just take whatever cells from the shelf.

12:26 Gene therapies very much affecting children which are born with inborn errors. And what you can do, you can insert a functioning gene and basically cure patients from their ailments. RNA therapies, the Moderna vaccine was developed through this technology. It's an intermediate between the DNA and the proteins that collaborates in the biological system in the body. And the latest addition is gene editing when you basically just modify one base pair in the genome and makes the one gene dysfunctional or kicks in and start to make it functioning again. So this is what is going on and we see alterations and iteration of these modalities and we are only in the beginning of what we see as a kind of a revolution in therapeutics.

13:20 Coming back to, we see a lot of expansion in the scientific field, but also there is there needs to be someone paying for these drugs. And as you can see on this slide, the global pharmaceutical sales increase approximately 5% a year. What is very interesting to see is that irrespective of the economical backdrop, this is the last thing you cut down in a recession, but also when you have a boom you tend not to increase that too much. And what this slide does not convey is that Elsas pointed out a couple of slides ago that we have patent expiries that also take off approximately the same amount as the growth here. So approximately double digit growth of pharma sales on annual basis and we see this as a very very positive for the biotech industry knowingly that 60 to 80% of all new drugs approved on the market nowadays emanate from biotech or academia.

14:17 And that's a source where we operate and we find these companies. Great, thank you, Marek. This slide here, we try and describe what we've recognised over the over twenty years that Marek and I have been following the biotech sector. And what we've seen is that as and when there's a new, just exciting discovery for people to kind of get their teeth into, and often meaning a new market, the capital markets, so biotech companies tend to get into a more euphoric stage. And I've got a chart that shows this next. Then what tends to happen is there's a correction and then we have sort of despair stage and a recovery and then equilibrium. We think we're in the equilibrium stage and why do we think that? That's because the IPO window, so new public offerings, has started up again, whereas they stopped completely during the kind of despair stage.

15:14 We're seeing a steady stream of M and A and high quality companies are raising money. What we saw coming out of the correction, driven by the big boom during the COVID pandemic, was another hit to the sector driven by interest rates. And again, I'll come back to that point. So on this slide, this shows the fundraising environment over in The US for biotech companies. The dark blue blocks on the histogram indicate the IPO money raised and you can see that that pretty much dried up during 2022 and now it's just reopening again. The green bars show the secondary offerings. So companies that are already listed and raising more money. And that never went away completely during the 2022, Nadir, which goes to show that good qualities can still raise good quality companies can still raise money.

16:07 This chart here shows the relationship between the NASDAQ Biotech Index, which is the white line, versus the healthcare market, which is the yellow line, and the S and P 500, so the broader market, which is the orange line. Historically, the normal relationship is that biotech tends to outperform the broader health care market and the health care market tends to outperform the broader market. However, that relationship, as you can see, has broken down in the last couple of years. What we've recognized in the past is there tends to be a boom and then a consolidation and then another boom and a consolidation within the sector. We obviously had the boom in twenty eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. We've had a boom in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one and in the periods in between consolidation.

16:56 Now it's our view, we have seen a slight recovery in recent months, but it's our view that we're quite positive going forward on the sector on an absolute basis. The next slide is a slightly shorter time horizon that shows again how the broader market, the S and P has outperformed biotech. We think that's an interesting time to look at the sector again. I mentioned the relationship with interest rates. This slide shows the biotech market in green, sorry, rates in green and the biotech market is dark blue. Bottomed in October 23 when interest rates in The US peaked at 5%. Why is that? That's because most of these companies don't expect cash flows for another say ten years and therefore when you value the companies and use a higher discount rate, the net present value today will be lower when rates are higher. It's a very sort of simple relationship and when rates started to rise and biotech was already coming out of the heady days of twenty twenty-twenty twenty one, it was hit again. I think that's why the consolidation period was quite so protected this time round.

18:10 So what we're doing in the fund is with we've I mentioned at the beginning presentation that we managed to outperform in a down market when we first took over our first fiscal year and then flat market and now we've had a positive market. And what we've done is we've stepped out of the more defensive larger companies and moved into the earlier stage companies that we think would benefit from a recovery in biotech market.

18:36 And instead of having large positions in smaller companies, which we think is too risky, we've done a basket approach. So we've taken various disease areas, met with lots of different companies with their different approaches. And in that way we are in our view mitigating the risk of owning some of these smaller names. Here's some examples of the baskets that we have in the fund at the moment. We've got central nervous system companies. So this would involve companies dealing with things like schizophrenia or depression, some mental health. We've got emerging oncology. So this would be cutting edge new science trying to tackle the problem of cancer. We have an M and A target basket. So names that we think would be attractive to pharma companies to pick up.

19:23 And we have an obesity basket, So obesity, at the moment you'll be aware that there are two companies that dominate the market at the moment with approved drugs GLP-1s for obesity. So Novo Nordisk and Lilly. Both of those companies have done incredibly well as they've managed to capture the huge demand for these drugs globally.

20:00 Moving on to the next slide. There are I think over 70 companies now that are hot on the heels of this could be very large market that is obesity. Some name examples on the bottom right here. As you know, we have a basket approach. We can't disclose what's in that basket at the moment. Suffice to say, positions until we gradually learn more about their approach and get receive more data. We'll get more confident on those names and maybe add to those positions and sell the losers. At the moment, at the end of August twenty twenty four, the obesity basket made up just shy of ten percent of NAV. So ten percent of the whole of the trust. So moving on to portfolio analysis. This slide just shows how we do try and tilt the fund to larger caps or smaller caps depending on where we see we are in that cycle.

20:53 So that wheel I spoke about earlier in the presentation. On the top down basis, the things that we consider are interest rate environment, the stage of the business cycle generally, and on the left hand side these are the characteristics in no particular order that we look for in companies when we select them. As we're going more into the SMID cap end of the market, things like financial strength is more important. So we want our companies to have at least two years cash. Management is incredibly important as well.

21:24 And then other areas like monopoly position, you're not going to find that out really until they get to the market. So idea generation, Merrick and I attend medical and investor conferences over in The US. That's predominantly where most of the investments reside. We have access to key opinion leaders, have regular calls with our companies, especially the ones that we own most of. We have a risk mitigation approach whereby we reduce our exposure to some of our holdings going into clinical readouts. That way we can preserve capital.

21:58 We're very valuation sensitive, so if we feel that the science might be great but the valuation doesn't stack up, then we will step aside and reinvest elsewhere. As I've mentioned, we have one eye on interest rates and what's going on there. And we can use our gearing facility. This is a closed ended fund. So we're allowed to gear when we see short term opportunities rather than having to sell a company to buy something else. And we certainly did that in October last year when yields peaked. We maxed out on our gearing to something like fourteen-fifteen percent, which is where we're kind of comfortable to peak at,

22:34 to exploit that nadir in biotech market driven by interest rates. So this slide shows the distribution of companies in terms of size in the trust and also stage. And by stage I mean companies that are early stage, this is top right, are those that haven't launched a product. So 40% in early stage, 42% in companies that have launched a profit but not yet turned have launched a product but not turned profitable yet, And 19% in companies that are profitable. And this used to be more a third, a third, a third. But as I've been saying, we've tilted out of the profitable names and more into this mid cap names because we're a bit more positive on the direction of travel for the biotech sector at the moment.

23:20 Top left, can also, this sort of backed up by size. Large and mega cap companies now make up 23% of the trust. Twelve months ago, that would have been a much bigger number. Bottom left, another change in the trust if you're following us over the longer term is that we're invested in CNS is our largest position. This isn't something that we do on a top down basis, this falls out from company selection. CNS stands for central nervous system, so like I mentioned earlier, health, schizophrenia, depression. Rare diseases is a close second. This is if you remember Maric's chart showing the high growth of the rare disease segment of the market. And oncology has dropped to third place now at 14%.

24:05 And then bottom right, just to show 85% of our investments are situated based in The US. Here's a snapshot of our top 10 at the end of August. We announce our top 10 every month on the fact sheet which you can find on the website. One thing to point out on this slide, the positions are much smaller than they used to be. If you looked at our fund twelve months ago, you'd have seen high single digit positions and that reflects the risk profile of these investments. So the Gilead's and the Amgen's, the large mega cap profitable companies, we were quite comfortable having larger positions in. But as you go down the market cap spectrum, we cut down that position. So we don't have big elephants in the fund. The board have disclosed, this has gone on since 2016, that they would like to have five to 15% of the trust in venture funds.

25:02 And currently we have two venture funds, SV Fund six and BCOF. BCOF is the latest investment and SV Fund six is now maturing. BCOF has had two acquisitions, iBio was acquired by Merck and Limbus by Takeda, so the returns on that fund have been really strong. This is our discount. So at the moment we're trading at a low double digit discount. This is something that's happening across most of the closed ended funds out there right now. So we're no different in that sense. It is wide and we are buying back stock as directed by the board. So thank you very much Elsa Marek for the presentation. We'll turn to questions. Thank you to all of you who've been watching and submitted some really interesting questions.

25:50 So I'm going to start with one. This is something that we're asked about quite often actually, AI in biotech. And so I think Marik's normally the person that takes that question. So do we have plans to invest in AI driven biotech companies or to collaborate with AI focused investment funds? It's a really good question. I think what is important to kind of go step back is that pharma industry have always used AI or predecessors to AI when it comes to developing drugs. Why you might ask is because it's so extremely expensive to develop drugs and a failure later stage is extremely costly. Thus, you introduce a lot of AI in the beginning of the process of developing drugs.

26:35 So for just a matter of interest is that this year's Nobel Laureate received Nobel prize for the structure of proteins, how they fold in three dimensions, which just shows you how much AI is used in pharmaceutical development. But coming back to that, we have used AI or a lot of computer power when it comes to screening drugs for future, meaning trying to find new ways of developing drugs. But what I often come up to is that when it comes to developing drugs, you're so much depending on serendipity findings in science, etc. And with AI, you base everything on what is knowledge out there and serendipity findings might be a problem. We don't know that yet, but it might become an issue in the future if everyone uses the same algorithms, you will not find anything new.

27:35 Thank you, Marek. Business point of view, we sit on a cross section of thematics and investment trusts. So we get the benefits of being both part of the thematics department and all the expertise there that Elsra alluded to about the other health care offering. And on the investment trust side, we have the advantage of being part of the investment trust business at Schroders. We have all the marketing and sales that that that comes with that, and obviously the administrative side. So, yes, it was a bit of a strange point to make, but just to explain that.

28:22 Just on unquoted investments within the portfolio, are there plans to expand our exposure to private equity or other venture opportunities to provide more stability and long term growth? I can take that one. So this is a board decision and the range of between 515% has been going on for a very long period of time. There's no noises at the moment that that will change. As and when the fund, the latest fund investment BCOF and SV Fund six exit however, that percentage will drop.

28:53 Equally if the quoted portfolio recovers, which we've seen in recent months, then the the unquoted position will fall passively. So the board meet once a year and they decide during that meeting what they want to do on various aspects of the trust, not just the waiting in unquoted. And they can make a decision on investing in the new funds, if you like. And it must be noted that although historically we've invested in SV Health investor funds, they're not wedded to SV Health investors. Obviously the relationship is there but they don't have to invest in that firm. Suffice to say any changes to any new investments going forward or any changes to that threshold you'll hear about directly from the board.

29:39 We have to, I think one thing to take into consideration is that we are trading at a discount and some of the private equity trusts tend to trade at wider discounts than the fully quoted ones. So that's one thing to just bear in mind. I think the board would consider that as well. Thank you. Given that US healthcare policy changes could impact biotech valuations, what steps are being taken to hedge against potential policy risks such as drug pricing reforms? So that legislation has already been passed and will come into effect in 2026. The way we view the Inflation Reduction Act or the section that discusses price negotiations for Medicare is that this puts more pressure on the large cap companies. So the big companies Merck, Pfizer, AbbVie.

30:28 And what it's doing is basically bringing forward the IP cliff that they were already facing.

30:33 And it doesn't really affect the biotech companies. And therefore we think it's putting more pressure on pharma companies to do M and A. So like I said in the presentation, I think once the election is out the way, we might see a resurgence of M and A with the clarity of who's president, clarity on the competition commission, the FTC, but equally this huge IP wall of IPs coming up on the original slide that I showed. Thank you, Iasna. When you develop a drug, you often become the only drug available for these patients.

31:22 And these diseases in majority of cases are very severe. So it's the only one and often affecting very few just by the definition rare diseases. So you can, you really have a good pricing as a profitability will be good. Clinical trials tend to be a bit shorter in general, but also you get regulatory protection from the agencies, because you get incentive to develop drugs that normally would have not been developed, because it's too costly to develop them. And in this environment, also specifically when you think about the Inflation Reduction Act, these drugs when it goes to all firms, they are exempt from the IRA, which also is a one way of the previous question was how do we mitigate? This is one way of mitigating that.

32:10 Thank you. Do we have plans to retain this for the longer term and do we have a view on why more growth trusts aren't also offering this? I think actually since we introduced it, the board introduced it in 2016, and more trusts are introduced, have this dividend out of capital approach. Within our space, you know, that stayed the same. There's one other fund that does that. The board have, like I said, made no noises to change the dividend policy whatsoever. One of the strong feedback messages from our top shareholders when the fund was moved was to keep the dividend.

33:00 Yeah, and that's voted on every year. So

33:05 we've got quite a few questions that all sort of relate to obesity. So I'll try and sort of group them together. The first one, what proportion of the fund sits in the obesity space? I think we answered that in the presentation. It was ten percent. Yeah. I didn't understand fully from the obesity section if you invest in bigger companies like Eli Lilly or just the smaller emerging companies. We can't disclose unfortunately the names, the individual names of the companies. We can invest in whatever we want. So we can invest in big pharma or teeny tiny biotech but yeah we are valuation sensitive that's something just to be aware of and we do want to invest in the next generation of obesity assets rather than that sort of our philosophy. But we may invest in them if you choose to. Cancer, heart disease, CNS.

34:07 It's very difficult to say that it was a direct result of that lifestyle behavior, but I think there are many diseases that are linked with lifestyle. Obesity for sure, sure. I mean heart disease is one. Definitely. Yeah. Okay. This one's topical for today, and I think will be the last question, actually. So have you made any changes to help the trust mitigate the risks of the unknown outcome of the US election? Sorry, could you Have you made any changes to help the trust mitigate the risks of the unknown outcome of the US election? Well, be honest, this election for health care is pretty benign. The legislation for drug pricing has gone through under the Dems. If Trump were to bring it up, the Dems could just waive the fact that they had actually introduced something about drug pricing. And it's been generally quite a neutral impact on the sector.

34:58 They haven't really talked about it that much either in debates. So we've gone into this election with a view that it would be nice to have clarity behind us, but there hasn't been much sort of hedging of anything going into it. And we have taken some steps when it comes to potential moves, depending on the candidate. Thank you. I think that's it from the Q and A. Perfect. Elsa, Marek, Luci, if I may just jump back in there. And thank you very much indeed for being so generous for your time there and addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this afternoon. And of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended just for you to review to then add any additional responses, of course, when it's appropriate to do so. And we'll publish all those responses out on the platform.

35:49 But Elsa, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you

35:53 with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, if I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that'd be great. Yeah, no thank you and thank you very much. It's really great to hear some people dialling in to listen to our annual results. And like I said, the presentation can be found on our website, the Schroders website. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Perfect, guys. That's great. And thank you once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of the INTERNATIONAL BIOTECHNOLOGY TRUST PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation.

36:41 That now concludes today's session. So good afternoon to you all.