Proteome Sciences (LSE:PRM) — Full Year Results for the Year Ended 31 December 2020

0:01 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the PROTEOME SCIENCES PLC Full Year Results Presentation for the Year Ended December 20 Questions are encouraged and could be submitted at any time by the Q and A tab situated in the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your question and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. Hello. Hi, Stefan. However, the company review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. These will be available via our investor meet company dashboard. You'll be notified by email once they're ready for your review. I'd also like to remind you that this presentation is being recorded. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to doctor Mario Ozwungin, CEO doctor Ian Pike, chief scientific officer Richard Dennis, Chief Commercial Officer and Stephane Fuhrman, Finance Director. Good morning.

1:00 Good morning. My name is Mario Lazuengen. I'm the CEO of PROTEOME SCIENCES, and I'm very pleased to welcome you to this investor meeting and to update you about PROTEOME SCIENCES' financial results for 2020. I will also share information regarding our operations, the key performance indicators plus give you an outlook where we are heading.

1:26 Now for those of you that might not be that familiar with the company, here is a short introduction, what we are doing at all. So PROTEOME SCIENCES PLC is an AIM listed London headquartered company, and we are a leading provider of contract research services for the identification, validation and application of protein biomarkers. To identify such biomarkers, we are using tandem mass text, and not only us, obviously. Tandem mass text sounds complicated is, well, a family of molecules that you need to label proteins and then identify and measure them with analytical methods.

2:13 Tandem Mastex, also called TMT, are owned by us, have been invented by the company. And we produce these molecules, which are then these products are then exclusively distributed by our long term partner, Thermo Scientific. Now our clients are primarily pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, but we are also serving, for example, academic research. We have established very robust workflows to meet the needs of our customers. And our contract services to, well, measure basically these biomarkers are centred on mass spectrometry based proteomics. Sounds awfully complicated. It's pretty simple, at least by the principle.

3:00 And the answer, what proteomics really is, is partly given by the next bullet. So pharmaceutical industry seeks to expand biological knowledge beyond genomics. Many of you might recall that, well, a decade ago, genomics was really the name of the game in our industry. Everybody tried to identify and detect the genetic information behind, for example, a certain disease like a tumour. That is very important information if you have actually identified the relevant gene or genes. However, it does not give you the full answer, as it's more and more appreciated these days. Because a certain gene will not code for just one specific protein, but actually for a full number of proteins, which subsequently can still undergo further changes once they are expressed in the cell.

4:00 So actually, a patient with a gene can have a certain protein, and another patient with the same gene could have a completely different protein. One could be bad, one could be good. So actually, genomics is not the full answer. You definitely need the proteomics answer to these questions. So with these capabilities and services, we are a very integral party and part of our customers' drug development process. We support their clinical trials and in vitro diagnostics. And then one important thing, by doing this, by doing these analysis and offering these services, we generate a whole lot of data.

4:47 And this well, these data needs to be not only analysed and calculated, but you also need to interpret them. And this is being done by our proprietary bioinformatics capabilities, And we have a full team doing this. So by all this, we want to retain our science led business focus and, to a large extent, also by developing new analytical methods and data analysis tools. Here's a short introduction to the team that you have on board today. So it's the executive directors. I'll start with Ian Pike. He is our Chief Scientific Officer and such, our scientific brain, has been active in his career of over twenty years in the industry in numerous U. K. Companies and institutions and also has deep knowledge and intellectual property.

5:48 So it's no surprise that he is also responsible for our patent estate. And Richard Dennis, our chief commercial officer, our commercial brain. Same here, very broad knowledge, over thirty years experience in our industry, has been operational and active and working for companies in The UK and US, obviously, the commercial side, building sales teams, leading sales teams and supervising these activities. And last but not least, myself, Mariola Zuerngen. I'm a physician by training. And next to my expertise in drug development, my main expertise is in general management with a focus on fundraising, corporate and strategy development.

6:38 And I've been active in the over the last thirty years in all major markets, EU, U. S. And Asia. So coming to the 2020 summary of our financials. Total revenues were at 4,750,000. If you look at the 2019 number, this includes a milestone we have received from Thermo Scientific of GBP 750,000. The TMT sales and royalties in 2020 amounted to €3,270,000 So when you exclude the TMT milestone from the 2019 figure, these sales and royalties show a continued strong growth of 11%. Service revenues increased by an impressive 55% at 1.44.

7:30 And operating costs were at 4.2. So it's a little bit down compared to 2019 by 3.7%, which is a sign of further consolidated cost containment. Now operating profit after tax was at EUR 290,000. And this is now our second year with a profit after tax. Year end cash reserves increased to EUR 2,210,000. The operational summary. A significant number of orders was carried forward into 2021. So the situation is pretty similar to the good baseline that we had at the start 2020 with also a significant number of orders having been forwarded to 2020.

8:23 We maintained, and I cannot stress this enough, we have maintained a fully operational facility in Frankfurt despite the pandemic.

8:31 We are a service business where we are a producing business. So we are 100% dependent on our team being and remaining operational, and that could be maintained throughout the last year and the last months. We grew the group's commercial sales in 2020, again, despite the effects of the pandemic at our customer side. Obviously, some projects and samples came in somewhat delayed, but they came in. So very satisfied with this. And we have adapted the sales and marketing approach to a fully virtual model.

9:12 Obviously, direct customer contacts were not possible. Yeah. And then finally, I joined the company as chief executive officer end of last year in September, and I'm located in Frankfurt, Germany.

9:32 Some key performance indicators. We have talked about the revenues at €4,750,000 Also, the profit after tax, 290,000. The net cash inflow was EUR 1,410,000. And the percent revenue from services was 30%, so somewhat up from EUR $219,000,000, where it was 24%.

10:01 Now coming to the outlook. Where are we heading, actually? In 2021, we have started on the basis of a strong Q4 and a strong order book that we could carry forward into this year. So always a good baseline to have. Furthermore, we have experienced a reassuring number of repeat customers in 2020. And you know, it's one name of the game to find new customers, but to make customers come back is not only a sign of trust and,

10:36 yes, acknowledging our abilities, but there is a certain dynamics in customers. So customers in our industry very often start with a smaller project in order to test their respective vendor. And then if they are satisfied, they are coming back with bigger orders, which obviously is the much more attractive part of the business. And we are seeing this. Well, as the speed and impact of the COVID-nineteen vaccinations is still unclear, and obviously, this has to be looked at on an international basis, at least the first half of this year might be affected by the pandemic. We don't know it for sure, but there is a certain likelihood.

11:21 So obviously, we'll continue to work with e marketing methods that has proven to be very successful last year and also in the first months this year as we will not be able to meet customers face to face due to the travel restrictions. And we also expect some customer laboratories not being fully operational due to the pandemic. So that might have a certain effect on the TMT orders and the continued demand for biomarker services.

11:56 However, in sum, we expect the markets to return to normal in the second half of this year. And the overall effect on our company performance is expected to show further progress when compared to last year.

12:11 Regarding the strategic steps and how to develop our company, we have initiated an internal strategic evaluation process late last year. And there are certain dynamics that I would like to share with you, and many of you might be aware of them already. The international proteomics market is really dynamic and hot. Especially in The U. S, when we look at our peer group there, companies are showing, well, not only good progress, but they have taken some bold steps, for example, with going public, having undergone and initiated major financing rounds, having initiated M and A activities and so on and so forth. So investor appetite, not only in The U. S, but primarily in The U. S, seems to be high and should be a good basis for our corporate development.

13:05 Next to evaluating such, well, external options, as we call it, we are also concentrating, obviously, on our organic growth. We do very a very specific business, and we want to improve that even more. So an analysis is ongoing, which additional services and products we might offer in the future.

13:28 So to sum up, we have specialist expertise, and the market for our niche services has the potential to grow substantially, as just mentioned, as proteomics plays an increasingly vital role in not only in drug discovery and development but also in the response to current and future medical challenges. So with this, I would like to thank you for your attention and interest. Would invite questions and would like to hand back to our moderator. Thank you very much. Marianna, thank you very indeed for the presentation. As Maria

14:15 submitted already, I'd like to remind you that recording of the presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can be accessed via your investor dashboard on the investment company platform. I'd also like to remind you that your feedback is important to the company, and immediately after the presentation has ended, you'll be redirected for the opportunity to provide feedback in order the company can better understand your views and expectations. We did receive a number of pre submitted questions from investors, and the PROTEOME team have very kindly answered those. And I'd like to remind all investors and attendees today that you'll be notified once all the q and a from today's session, along with those pre submitted questions, are available for your review.

14:56 Ian, perhaps if I could just hand back to you, if you could just click on that q and a tab and address some of the questions we're having through, that'd be great. Absolutely. Thank you, Paul. And, thanks to, shareholders for submitting or investors, for, sharing their questions with us. Please continue to do so. In the first case, one for you, Mariola, I think which follows on nicely from the presentation. Just asking, given your credible career to date, what were the key drivers for your decision to join PRMITIUM? And what do you see as the greatest risks and opportunities for the company? Yes. Thank you very much, Iain, and thanks to Simon for the question. Very happy to give you some insight.

15:40 Well, after an already quite long standing career, I felt very honored to have been offered the position of the CEO in this company. And as I'm not strictly from this industry segment, I've done a very deep due diligence to really evaluate the risks and opportunities, well, obviously.

16:02 Well, my analysis and the results were positive. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here. So I see a great potential for PROTEOME SCIENCES in the segment for various reasons. Well, first of all, if we look at the financial numbers and just review the last three, four, five years, we can see that the company

16:26 is really doing great. And the last two years are starting to be profitable. So it is a well, a slow start, if you want, but there is good dynamics as we see also, particularly in the Service business. So that looks very good. Where the company is located, I mean, with regard to the industry segment, PROTEOMEX, is really the logical next step after the genomics, as I've explained. So here, we see how the demand is

17:00 yeah, maybe skyrocketing is a little bit over exaggerated, but it's coming close to that. The demand is growing and growing. We see that the number of proteomics companies is increasing or they are increasing in size. So it looks like a very sound market, good to enter. And then obviously, it already started last year when I was doing my due diligence, that companies from this segment really did these bold steps. And you don't go IPO in The U. S. If you don't think that your proteomics business has really good prospects. So taking this all together, I think we are in the right spot.

17:47 And maybe one thing that should not be underestimated. We are one of the few businesses that are already revenue generating and, as we said, now starting to be profit making.

18:03 Many of our peers are still in the yes, let's call it development phase. Very often, they have just prototypes of, for example, machines they are offering ourselves. So they are not even commercializing their products. So I think we have really a good head start here.

18:25 Okay. Thank you very much, Mario. Excellent stuff. Right. Next, we have a few questions along similar topics relating to the size and scale of our sales and marketing activities. And perhaps, Richard, you could address those for us.

18:46 Okay. So, Ian, will you read out one of the questions, or should I just go through them on the list? I can do. There was one posted about how we decide on the number of sales agents we have, but more specifically, questions about how do we scale revenues and sell into our clients, and what's the limit to growth, And what visibility do we have of revenue opportunities? And then another question about our expanded marketing efforts and is this all directed to growing the services business? So maybe you can address those. Thanks, Richard. Okay. Thank you. So yes, we continually monitor the size of our services business. I should remind investors that my main responsibility is with the PROTEOMECI services that we offer because obviously the TMT part is handled exclusively with Thermo Scientific.

19:45 So we continually monitor our selling activities and how we reach out to our customers and new prospects. And as you read in our annual report, we've had an additional salesperson join about eighteen months ago to cover the more European side, and we're pleased to see growth in the European market now with him being on board. So he covers the European side, and both Ian and myself largely spend our time working with American contacts. And again, due to the COVID issue, the big issue with all of our customers is how do we maintain contact with them.

20:31 Up until COVID hit, we had a very much face to face type interaction that was either done at a technical meeting or a scientific exhibition or just face to face visiting customer accounts. And obviously, with travel restrictions, that's entirely stopped. So we quickly had to revert to sort of email marketing campaigns and virtual meetings. And, you know, the virtual meeting is a challenge because obviously you don't have the face to face interaction. But we've been quite selective in what we've done and we've had very good interaction from that. And one of the key performance indicators from that is that we did bring on new clients in 2020, which at the beginning of the year, you might have thought that our only customers in 2020 would have been existing customers. And as Mariola said already, we've rolled over a lot of business orders that end from 2019 to 2020.

21:43 And one might have expected just having continued orders from our current customers. But as I said, we did bring in new customers as well, which is very good.

21:51 So as Mariella indicated, customers will come to us with a relatively small project, I guess, at the beginning just to test us to see the quality of our data and the quality of our bioinformatics. And then if that works well, we get the repeat business, which could be an expanded study or a study that might involve a larger cohort of patients perhaps going into a clinical trial. And we do see progression of customers with starting with small orders going into larger orders. So clearly then to answer one of the questions, there's a tracking that we have to do with larger samples coming in just to make sure that we have capacity at that particular time so that we can handle those samples in an acceptable time format so that we can create delivery schedules that meet customer expectations.

22:48 And so that's one of the ways of how we control that business. And of course, it becomes increasingly a forecasting exercise with a lot of contact with the customer to ensure that we have capacity available at the time they need it so that we can deliver the data on time. So I see another question is coming on academic institutions we have strong relationships with. As in the past, we spend a lot of time with key academic groups and that continues. But the academic sector isn't as well financed of course from the biopharmaceutical. So most of our business has come from biopharmaceutical and I'd expect that trend to continue through 2021.

23:42 So Ian, is there anything else I can say there? Thank you, Richard. That's excellent. And just picking up on that question about academic institutions. We do collaborate with a few, still, in a more r and d context. Particularly, we have strong links with, the Harvard community, particularly the laboratory professor Steve Geege, who's one of the key opinion leaders in the proteomic space. And we work with colleagues in academic centers in Finland and Germany around different neurodegenerative and oncology projects, and details of those are normally visible through publications that come out of those activities. So I think that that covers off that one.

24:28 The next question we'll field, I will take. It's about our patent families or patent estate and progress on, particularly, the diagnostics patents. So as long term shareholders will know and and for those that who don't know us so well, we have quite an extensive portfolio of patents, something around 200 plus individual cases, in all different countries. And they broadly split into patents that cover the tandem mass tag technologies, which we've, exclusively licensed through Thermo Scientific for sales and marketing activities. And then we have a legacy portfolio of biomarkers around diagnostics for neurodegenerative and some oncology indications.

25:19 So we are continually reviewing the economic viability of some of these patents and due to changes in patent law and patent prosecution practice in different territories. Some of these may or may not, have longer term economic viability. So for example, cases like the very broad liver and pancreatic cancer cases were too complex and too difficult to prosecute, and so we we defined that they were economically nonviolent, though we retain interest in some of the subpanels that come out of that. The more visible of our IP estate beyond TMT is certainly around stroke and biomarkers for stroke.

26:05 And there, we do have two licensees. One is Randox Laboratories in The UK, and the other is a small startup from The US, Galaxy CTRO. And both are working to bring assays into the market for either early detection of stroke or the triage of stroke patients to increase the levels of treatment with thrombolysis. And recently, Randox have announced that they've now expanded the repertoire on their multistat machine to include a stroke panel, which incorporates biomarkers covered by our IP, and there were questions posted yesterday about the royalties that would be due on those. And as normal, any products that are in the marketplace that are using our intellectual property there through our licensees will attract a royalty. So the multistat device in as far as it's using biomarkers from PROTEOME SCIENCES IP will require royalties to be paid to PROTEOME SCIENCES.

27:06 Okay. So that's coverage of the patent portfolio. Another question, I think, Mariola, for you about how we retain staff in an increasingly competitive environment in the proteomics area. Yeah, very good question, actually. The situation, I would say, in particularly in Germany, where our operations are, is not as heated as it is in The US. So if I were with a company on the West Coast now, I would probably have sleepless nights. So it's it's still it's still better over here.

27:51 But, yeah, definitely, I mean, there is international demand for for experienced staff, experts in the field. And, you know, part of our staff and experts might even be hired on an international basis, for example, by West Coast. Now it's the usual mixture of, well, attractive salaries, participation in stock option programs. But I think what is maybe most important, and I would really like to stress that, is to create an atmosphere in the company where our colleagues really function as a team and really like to come to work in the morning.

28:37 That is super important. And I believe, and this is my experience over many years in the industry, that then there is well, maybe not a complete immunity, but at least a partial immunity to a slightly better offer. You always have to weigh, you know, I know the company. I know what I'm doing. A new field is always a challenge that not everybody might want to take. So really, a good atmosphere and team atmosphere in the company is something very important. Yes. Thank you, Mariel. And I would highlight that after eighteen years with the company, we do have a remarkably low turnover rate compared to the industry norms, and that's because people, really are invested in what the company is doing, and we provide a very good working environment for them, and we'll continue to do that. Mhmm. Okay.

29:30 Next set of questions, around the theme of forecast, specific question on TMT market growth, other questions about share price performance and about revenues for 2021. I will start with answering on the TMT front, and then, Mariola, maybe you can, comment more widely. But, it is not our practice to provide specific forecasts on this. And I think in the current climate of a a continuing pandemic, although the indicators are very positive that vaccination is having a a good impact on, the ability to return life to normal in in most developed economies, we do, have to proceed with a degree of caution. So in terms of TMT, as we showed, there was, in spite of COVID, a good level of growth for TMT sales over the year of 2020.

30:32 We do expect more labs to be coming back online, so we expect those sales to continue at at least that level and probably growing, but we can't give you any sort of firm views on what we think that growth will be. Perhaps by midyear, we'll we'll know a bit more. In terms of the, bigger picture and our services revenues, I think, Mariola, you might want to just express a view on that and how that feeds into some of our our sort of strategic planning and thinking. Yes, definitely. I'm just looking at a number of questions now. So the actually, the next in line would be maybe regarding our expectations of our cash position during the year.

31:20 So yes, well, of course, we expect that our cash will increase this year. But as Iain already explained and alluded to, this all will be, dependent, on really the dynamics of of the pandemic. I mean, if things, go according to plan and the vaccination rates will continue to increase internationally, wonderful, then we have a good baseline. If for whatever reason, new mutations or so, everything goes back to zero, then obviously, the situation will be very different. What are our plans for cash investments? Well, would just cite two bigger areas. One is obviously internally to improve our setup and expand our services.

32:05 That always requires investment. And while the other area is the investment in our corporate development. So this all centers around the strategy. And that comes very close to the next question, how we see the share price performance in 2021. Well, obviously, our expectation is that we will see a good development upwards. And this will be triggered by all the activities that we will be taking, particularly on the strategic side and when and where and what we will be able to communicate to the market. So as a public company, you know, there are very heavy restrictions, also with regards to forecasting in that area. But, the market knows that, we are in a strategic, evaluation phase, so that should lead to result, and, these should, definitely positively influence, the share price.

33:05 Excellent. Thank you, Mariola. Very good. Now there are a couple of comments that that are somewhat related and looking more across the pond at things that are happening there. So one question is, these new companies coming to market with significant funding, are they competitors or or potentially potentially partners? And secondly, would the company consider listing on New York Stock Exchange? So I think, Mariola, you might want to start that discussion. I'll happily join in on the competitor collaborator part in terms of the technologies. Yes, absolutely. I will only touch upon the competitors or collaborators more on a general or just give a more general view.

33:53 So it's both, obviously. I mean, our peer group is quite big. And we can really pick and choose if we have the right rationale to cooperate with the company or decide not to cooperate. It's it's good to have competition in the market. So we believe that in in many aspects, we offer really superior services to what our competitors do. So it's good to have these competitors and show the market that we are much better. On the collaboration side, yes, not organic growth or external growth is something that you always have to consider. And we are very carefully looking into this market.

34:43 Obviously, you always talk with your peer group. So, you know, we are evaluating, does it make sense to cooperate with certain players? And, you know, when you can create win win situations, that's that is always a winner, obviously. Yeah. Thanks, Mariola. And then sort of from a from a broader technical perspective, it's really quite interesting that that most of the money going in at the moment in The US is around people developing new products and platforms for doing proteomics. It's not clear that many of them will provide direct service offerings like we provide in terms of data generation.

35:31 There are a number of informatics based businesses being formed that, require high quality data generation, and they're certainly potential partners for us moving forwards. But, again, as we look at developing our own bioinformatics capabilities and moving beyond just purely proteomics data analysis, then they could also provide some degree of competition. So I think it's a very dynamic and a very involving marketplace, and we're certainly very well positioned as one of the longest serving companies in the proteomics space to provide good opportunities for collaboration to those organizations, and similarly for us to, look at what's new in the environment and and judge which ones we think are the most valuable prospects for us to to manage, either through collaboration or or with our, defensive strategies against those potential competitors so that we're always ahead of the curve.

36:35 And I think the team we have within PROTEOME SCIENCES is about the best you can find globally to be able to do that sort of scoping and understanding where these new entrants are gonna fit in and and potentially disrupt the marketplace. Okay. Moving through. I think oh, there was one, last question we haven't really covered yet, which is around the, level of brokerage and and financial firm coverage. And, Mariola, you might choose to answer that one. Yes. Happy to do so. Right now, we have no coverage.

37:22 And while we obviously evaluate when and how to re enter such coverage, the point is that I would really see it as a prerequisite that we are able to define our strategy going forward. I mean, right now, for a for a company or a broker providing coverage, we couldn't really say more than we are saying in in this meeting here. And I think that is not sufficient to give correct guidance. So please bear with us, you know, a little bit. At at some point in time, we will be able to communicate where the company is heading more specifically than we are doing today.

38:10 There was also the question when will the strategic process come to, well, an end. Well, I guess, it never ends. You need to keep moving and continue to develop your company, but I know what you mean. It's when can the market expect more guidance? Also difficult to say because all these factors are connected. And again, I don't want to overstress the pandemia, but it has a strong influence because things move slower sometimes, you would expect. So I hope that, well, during the course of the year, and I hope we don't have to wait until Christmas, we'll have more guidance out there.

38:57 Hopefully, much much quicker than that. But, I I would like to be cautious and and conservative here. Thank you, Maria. They're very good. Good question here for you, Richard. Talking about our social media presence, things like Twitter, I guess, if we're if we're on there, and, the website. Maybe you can talk to, your thoughts around the value of some of those channels in our market, and, the sort of evolving strategy around that. Yep. Okay. Thank you, Ian. It is certainly, you know, the the social media is something internally we talk about at length and how much or how little do we wish to participate in that.

39:49 Would obviously, most of our revenue right now comes from TMT and that is covered by Thermo. But from the services side, as I've explained already and indicated earlier, the marketing approach we take and we've put most of our marketing investment into that is touching base with scientists and vice presidents of research and development of biopharmaceutical companies, ideally face to face. But as we've said, via targeted e mail campaigns and telephone calls, telemarketing and where we can, attendance of virtual meetings. So we're going direct to the customer and talking direct to the customer via e mail or via a telephone.

40:38 And that model is working particularly well. We have looked at social media and we have some ideas on maybe with banner advertising, etcetera, we could approach that. But in those situations, you're covering everybody. And we have a very targeted specific customer base that we do that we've identified that we want to target. And we feel that what we're doing at the moment is delivering better returns than having a big presence on Facebook. And my own skepticism there would be would the director of research at a pharma company spend a lot of time during his working day on Facebook? I suspect not.

41:29 We do post when we do exhibitions, we post on LinkedIn and where interesting articles come out, for instance, proteomics early proteomic studies based on COVID, identifying potential drugs that could interfere with the signaling pathways of COVID as it infects humans. I did post that on LinkedIn a while ago and I actually got a lot of hits from that. Certainly, people who found it interesting, I'm not sure we managed to get any business from that. So we do look at it. But as I said, in summary, we have a targeted method to speak to the customers who are buying from us.

42:18 And that is where we're putting our effort. And rest assured investors that that side of things is paying off very well. Thanks, Tricia. I I think it is a valid point that, we were, relatively early into, joining things like Twitter at a corporate level, to see how it went. And it is pretty clear that, actually, the the direct business to business activities and, using LinkedIn as a communication tool are much more effective than than, say, things like Twitter and Facebook, but, we'll certainly keep that under under review. So another question, coming in talking about investment in new products, and and can we give any specific examples of areas of interest?

43:05 I'll start with that and then invite others to chip in. We're certainly not going to provide too much information about where we're looking just because that might alert other people to look there too. But I think the common trends we've seen around these startups in The US and the funding going in points to the value of what we have in our bioinformatics space. And certainly, I see there's plenty of scope for significant development of services around data analysis, which probably don't need too much investment in terms of infrastructure at least, but would give us the flexibility to serve a wider range of clients outside of just purely protein expression space.

43:52 But what's really important there is understanding that, as drug developers particularly have focused on using genomic and transcriptomic data to try and, drive their, processes, what they're realizing is the inevitable that because their molecules are interacting with proteins, because how proteins interact with each other defines health and disease, They need to know more about the proteomics but probably overlaid with the context of genetic background. So there, I do see some synergies in in, being able to combine multiomics datasets, and as a generator of probably the highest quality protein data you can get, I think we're ideally placed to do that. Other areas, of course, we monitor, the requirement for multiplexing labeling tags and the TMT, TMT Pro portfolio.

44:47 So we'll keep a weather eye out for that. And then, you know, depending on what happens with some of these other startups, there may be, different strategies to follow going forward. But that's very much an internal discussion that we're having, and it wouldn't be appropriate to share any of that in a public domain at the moment. Mario or Richard, I don't know if you have other comments on that. No. Thank you. No. I think you covered it well, Ian. Thanks. Very good. Thank you. And then we have an observation, saying that, we haven't really been talking about tau and Alzheimer's disease. And and then the question, is this still the focus?

45:32 Well, it depends how you look at it. So in terms of our ability to do, pure research and development around the the tau and a d space, particularly, we we just don't have the bandwidth right now. We're so busy with customer work, that, we, certainly see some value in trying to do some of this work for ourselves. But, actually, our expertise in, being able to monitor tau, both in tissues and body fluids, and broader AD biomarker space has brought us a lot, and I do mean an absolute lot of customers and a lot of business over the last three or four years. And I think that's much more important for us right now as a business to grow our revenue portfolio, our our revenue profile through the recognition of that expertise.

46:23 Yes. We do have some ongoing collaborations in that space with with academic partners as we referred to earlier. So it's something that we will be doing. You'll see, ProteOME SCIENCES on publications, from some of those groups, and indeed one of our clients, Cognition Therapeutics, recently published a nice study from their clinical trial of their AD drug where we mapped the changes in tau phosphorylation in CSF for them and they got very nice results with that. So yes, that does continue to be something we're interested in. Then we have another question about establishing royalty streams from the assays we develop from our biomarker services.

47:10 That varies contract by contract, and we're not at liberty to disclose any individual contractual arrangement, and I don't think we can really be expected to say any more than that. And therein, I think we're pretty much dried up. If there are any further questions, if I can go back to Paul. Thanks. Thank thank you, Ian. Thank thank you all so much for your your questions. It's it's a lot through there, and you've covered them all off. And I think if there are any further questions, of course, the company will review all questions that have submitted, and we'll publish those back out on the investor.me company platform. Just before we go and and get some feedback for you guys, Mario, may I perhaps just ask you for a few words just to wrap up, please?

47:59 Yes. Thanks very much, for for your interest, participation and and staying with us for for nearly one hour now. I I hope you have seen that, Proteome Sciences is, not not only has a good baseline, but is on a good way further up. Also, really difficult and demanding situation during the pandemic shows that we have performed well. So let's all hope that the pandemic and the underlying problems will improve and the challenges go so that we can well, we and the market can again freely develop. As I said before, I hope we will be able to give you well, for sure, with regard to the H1 results, but then also, in addition, regarding any strategic directions we are taking, give you more update during the year. And, yeah, thanks again for your interest and hope to be in touch soon.

49:02 Maria, thank you very much, and thank you to the rest of the team as well for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session? It should be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback. If you've accessed the meeting from our website, the feedback page will appear in front of you. If you've accessed the meeting via the link sent to you in the email, simply just click on that, and you'll just be asked to log back in. Do please do take a few moments to do so. It'd be greatly appreciated by the company. On behalf of the management team of PROTEOME SCIENCES PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That concludes the session.