Emv Capital (LSE:EMVC) — Virtual Meet the Portfolio - Vortex and DName-iT

0:00 Good afternoon, and welcome to the EMV CAPITAL PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and could be submitted at any time via 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 received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses when it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Ilion Ilieb, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.

0:31 Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for making time for this EMV CAPITAL virtual media portfolio company. I'll give you a few background notes on EMV CAPITAL itself. Those of you who already know us, apologies, but there's some people joining that don't yet know about EMV CAPITAL's structure. And the reason we hold these events is, you know, a number of investors asked us to look. You know, it's great hearing from you as as the PLC leadership, but we want to hear directly from the portfolio companies, and this is what the session is about. But briefly about us, so EMV CAPITAL, we have a vision to be a leading VC investment group in the deep tech and life sciences sector in The UK and internationally. We've made good progress. We started off in 2020 with 12,000,000 AUM and eight companies. And today, we have more than a 100,000,000 AUM with 70 portfolio companies.

1:27 We have a slightly different model to the classic VCs. We do a lot from in terms of direct involvement with the businesses as well as a fund management operation. And as you can see here at the bottom, 66,000,000 of managed and third party fundings and £38,000,000 worth of direct and balance sheet investments. We're quite ambitious. We want to continue growing, and we can't help but being ambitious with some of the portfolio companies that you see now. And part of what part of our model is combining somewhat of a hybrid model whereby we combine a fund management side, a corporate finance side of our business where we work with our portfolio companies to help them find funding solutions. And as you know, it's quite difficult to find funding for companies in the deep tech and life sciences nowadays, so we have a way of doing that.

2:18 We have a proactive management approach. Once we invest in a business, we care. We have an ownership mentality, and we work with the management to continue to grow value for the company's shareholders. But, also, we have what we call a venture building practice, which is where we work with a subset of companies such as and vortex, where we combine our fundraising capabilities with what we call value creation services, which is our extended team to help these businesses grow faster, stand on their own feet, and and to move on to exit. Within the broader portfolio, there's basically two sides. There's deep tech and life sciences, and I'm not gonna go through this company. There's really fascinating diversity and really interesting businesses across the future of compute, semiconductors, AI systems, robotics, drug development, digital health, and so on. You can go on our website to explore that further and to see news from these companies.

3:15 But today, wanted to focus we wanted to focus on to and showcase two companies, DNAME IT, which has developed a blood very laboratory blood verification system in Voltig's Biosciences. When we talk about our venture build program, we have a consistent focus on IP rich companies that need some help working with management and to build up management to grow these businesses, but also identifying large and growing markets. And as you'll hear from the CEOs in a second, you know, there's really an an enormous amount of opportunity out there for these types of businesses. We deploy third party money. We also deploy our funds as appropriate and a lot of support from our business as we help these companies grow.

4:02 For for just for context, you know, we denamed it. We have a 25 or 26% direct stake in the business, and we also have advised investors that have gone into it. We've seen a fair value increase of 1,700,000 since our involvement, and we expect to see more. And Vertex Biosciences where we've had longer standing involvement, we've we've seen an increase in our fair value of 2,800,000 and where we hold a 22 direct stake and other advised investors. The final thing I'll say is that people often are somewhat concerned about companies in the deep tech and life sciences space. Can they grow in a capital efficient way? How how can they compete with companies in SaaS that are much faster? So we have developed our own capital efficient investment model that provides strong upside for the director shareholders, but also enables the companies to deliver on the on their mission.

4:57 So I'll stop here and hand over to to my colleagues from two companies. I'll just say, you know, if you want to find out more about these businesses and others, there is a lot of information available on EMV CAPITAL's website. And, you know, over to over to Steve.

5:15 Great. Thanks, Ilian. Thanks everybody for joining us. My name is Steve Cook. I'm the CEO of DNAMet. So quickly about my background, I have a PhD in molecular biology. I have a fair amount of experience in monetizing intellectual property, intellectual property licensing, and commercialization, and a lot of experience in startup and scale up deep tech companies. I run a corporate venture capital group, and I have founded and run a scale up factory and chaired the board of nine scale up and start ups in the in the deep tech and cleantech space. So I'm here today to talk about Dename It and the unique value proposition that we have in the space of DNA genetic testing, reducing the risk associated with that, improving safety and quality in a very proprietary way.

6:11 So let me just start by, talking a little bit about the industry context where we are operating. So we operate in the world of clinical DNA testing. And you may or may not be aware, but this is a very high growth area. Many, many clinical tests being conducted particularly in the space of oncology, so cancer testing, and prenatal screening for all kinds of conditions. So noninvasive prenatal testing or NIPT is a is a growth area as is rare disease testing. So all of these are blood based DNA tests that get carried out by specialized laboratories using test methodology and protocols that are increasingly sophisticated.

7:01 And in particular, the technique for sequencing and testing large numbers of these sort of patient samples at scale is called next generation sequencing or NGS. And that's the particular target area for our products. These tests are done at very large scale. Thousands and thousands of patient DNA tests are handled in parallel at once. And that obviously improves the economics and the accessibility to testing for many, many people around the world. But what it also does is it increases the risk of mishandling of samples, of contamination of samples, and at worst, that can be potentially fatal where decisions or outcomes are misassigned.

7:53 But it certainly, in many cases, reduces confidence and increases costs in in the system. So with that scale comes these risks, and the the current methodology for mitigating those risks in this kind of testing scenario is with labeling of tubes. It's with protocols, rigorous protocols and cross testing, and in many cases, mistakes result in repeat testing which increases costs for everybody. What DNAMet does is it produces, patient specific molecular barcodes. So these are molecular sequences which are added to the the the test protocols in the existing workflows and are basically providing verification and assurance of these kinds of tests at the molecular level.

8:50 So, Ilian likes to likes to call this a sort of blockchain for the blood economy, and I think that summarizes it quite well. So we have a proprietary method for producing and introducing these molecular bar codes into the test, and that's what we do. So by doing this, we have a very compelling, we think, value proposition to a range of players in the supply chain. So tube manufacturers, so these are the sample tube patient sample tube manufacturers. And for them, it's an opportunity to convert what they are currently producing, which is a low cost commodity consumable and turning that into a differentiated quality enabling system, which enables them to access premium pricing.

9:43 For laboratories, carrying out these tests, it improves the quality and safety and reduces costs from repeat tests, all within existing workflows, which is very important. We're not asking people to change how they operate in laboratory. For healthcare systems and payers and funders of these kinds of tests, it reduces costs and enhances public confidence and provides traceability in the system. And finally, and not least for patients, improves safety and confidence and the speed of results. I can see a question which asks about how big a market this is. So hopefully, this next slide will address that.

10:28 So the next generation sequencing market is a rapidly growing market. It's about a $10,000,000,000 market globally, very heavy presence in Europe and The US, growing at somewhere between 1520% a year, year on year. Oncology, I. E, cancer testing accounts for about a third, of the tests carried out. And then a a big secondary component is the so called NIP test, prenatal tests. And if you look at a relatively conservative estimate for market capture, market penetration of DNAMX products into these, sequencing and testing type of, markets, you get quite rapidly to millions of tests per year.

11:17 You can see here on the slide, 3,000,000 prenatal tests are carried out each year in The US and The EU alone. And in some countries, these tests are provided by the health care system by through government funding to to every pregnant woman in the system. So getting into these spaces is increasingly a growth area and an opportunity for us.

11:47 So just talking a little bit about our routes to value. Starting from our incredibly differentiated patent portfolio, our founder, professor Harry Kuppens, is an incredible talent in this field and a prolific inventor. We are lucky to have a very robust and valuable patent portfolio. And through that and from that, we can create value in two ways, and I wanna talk briefly about those two routes. The first is the productization of the the system that I've talked about, the molecular barcoding system, introducing that into the next generation sequencing testing workflow. And as as you've seen from the market size, a huge opportunity for long term revenue growth in that space.

12:35 And I'll talk a little bit about that in a second. But secondly, there is an opportunity uniquely here, I think, for us to assert our rights that are within the patent portfolio and go after some global companies in the next generation sequencing space that we believe are infringing our patent rights and have been doing that for a little while now. And our analysis suggests there is significant revenue from patent licensing to be

13:11 chased after in this space. So those two routes are routes to value for us, both of which we are pursuing. So let me talk first about productizing the the DNAme barcoding methodology. I should emphasize that we've made quite a bit of progress to date already.

13:33 We can produce these so called DNAMS, which are what we call our barcodes, and the manufacturing process for those molecular barcodes has already been proven. We have investigated and confirmed the regulatory framework that we need to operate in a clinical environment. We have a comprehensive intellectual property position, as I've just mentioned, and we also have developed and proven out the analytical software, which laboratories need to deconvolute the the results and identify patient samples from the barcode. So all of that is in place. And how we envisage going to market here is a is a partnership between Dname It, who effectively own and control the molecular digital layer of the product, namely the software for analytics and the the the specification of the of the barcodes, and then partnership with a a physical manufacturing layer in the supply chain. And what we're targeting there is blood sample tube manufacturing

14:33 partners. So the people who produce the patient sample tubes, we think that's a great way into the system and into the supply chain and a good place for to to bundle the products and to take it to market. And that product bundle is is shown here in the middle of the slide. So it's the blood collection tubes which will contain and be sold with DNAMS inside them. So that's the barcodes inside them. It's some, additional products that are need for the laboratory workflow flows, such as enriching solution and protocols.

15:08 It's the list of, DNames unique sequences, which are required for the analysis at the back end of the process, the software, and then the license to the development patents and protocols. So that's a product bundle, and we imagine that being effectively sold through the testing to the testing laboratories through the

15:30 tube manufacturing partner that we have through a co marketing agreement. And then the revenue model on the back end that we envisage there is laboratory purchases of the of the bundle from the sample tube manufacturer and revenue split between DNAMIT and that sample tube manufacturer.

15:49 In terms of what we're focusing on for this year, the first half of this year is about designing and taking a partner to a commercial pilot. We have over 500 denamed samples ready to go, and we're already actively talking to laboratories about partnering with us to run through the entire end to end laboratory workflow to prove that out. So that's the focus of the first half of the year. Second half of the year is about analyzing the outcomes of that of that pilot, producing a comprehensive dataset, which we then can use to secure a commercial go to market partnership by the end of this year. So lastly then, talking about the patent licensing side and the route to value there. Again, this involves, in our mind, a a partnership.

16:43 We have the the knowledge of the of the patent portfolio. We have deep analysis that we've done on target licensees, how we think they're using our methods, how we think they're infringing our rights. And we what we need to do is to partner on the litigation side with an intellectual property investor, someone who has a a deep track record of delivering value from IP. He can back financially any litigation and has a recognized name in the field. And so that's what we're seeking to do. Our analysis suggests that royalty rates are between 25% of relevant company revenue is achievable. I'm not showing much detail on this slide because it's all commercially sensitive.

17:30 We're currently in live negotiation with some of the most significant intellectual property investors, and they share our belief in the analysis that we've done. They see significant value in the market, and we are expecting to get into term sheet discussions in the next few weeks around a potential transaction at this exact kind of partnership that I'm describing. But in terms of what that might be worth in the market, a relatively conservative

18:08 assumption of 2% of relevant company revenue puts the total price in excess of $150,000,000 per annum. And, you know, our analysis of a single one single target licensee suggests that could be worth $40,000,000 per annum just through that one licensee. And that's not taking into account, back royalties and damages that we might be able to achieve through litigation. So significant, value in the short to medium term, we think, this through this partnership to to litigate it around our rights. So that's our second route to value. And then finally, just to, just to highlight the team that we have in place, which I think is highly credible. I mentioned professor Harry Cuppence, our chief science officer and founder, a very deep expert in this field and continuing to develop and build the innovation pipeline and the patent portfolio and the IP position that is so strong in this company.

19:08 I've talked about myself. We have a relatively new hire, Silenor, who's highlighted here as our chief commercial officer, recent Cambridge MBA, but with deep experience in family businesses in the blood collection tube sphere. And then, we have Kevin Dean as a as a non executive director, prior CEO of D. Name it. Forty years of experience in new technology and deep experience in the health care sector. And and then we have support from from EMV CAPITAL through Ilian and Steven Crow as our fractional CFO. So I'll stop there. We could talk about questions with with Ilian. K.

19:56 Thank you very much, Steve. So a few questions from the from the audience. And as I read these these out, I'll publish them so that the audience can see them. So first question is how how big is the market size, and how big of a problem is what you were what you were describing earlier? So I know you mentioned some numbers, but maybe you can expand. Yeah. So as I mentioned, I mean, the whole NGS market is about a $10,000,000,000 market globally, growing rapidly in Asia, big big footprint already in The EU and The US. In terms of, you know, percentages of tests that have to be redone, you're talking sort of one, two, 3% of of tests that have to be redone in laboratories.

20:44 And, you know, I showed some of the numbers, 3,000,000 prenatal tests every year. That's a lot of tests that that have to be redone. And so it's a it's a very significant problem. And when we talk to the laboratories and to these companies, they recognize it as a significant pain point. Okay. And there was a great question here, which is from one of the audience members who says that they have been involved in a company looking for a similar licensing litigation focused approach. And before they had any success, they went bust. Why do you think you're different? Yeah. Well, so the way we're dealing with that question, and you're absolutely right, I too have been involved in a number of these kinds of processes, and we don't want to be spending our shareholders' money on on expensive litigation.

21:40 So this is exactly why we need a why we need the kind of commercial partnership that I that we're talking about. And so the way these deals tend to be structured is for the litigation partner to fund the litigation in exchange for an upfront payment for the for the intellectual property rights. And then we have a sort of a waterfall structure on the back end of of sharing revenue from, the results, the fruits of any, litigation on the back end where they, where they get their litigation funding back, and then we share revenues beyond that. So that's how it works. We are we are not intending to take financial risks with DNAMX funds through pursuing this litigation.

22:25 And maybe if I can add to that, again, a core part of our capital efficient investment approach is exactly that, to avoid, like the plague, open ended financial commitments to always think about the growing concern of the business and kind of

22:43 have strong ambitions, yes, but also keep in mind the where the company is in its fundraising cycle. And Steve has done it very well in in formulating an ambitious licensing strategy in the context of the resources and networks available to the name it. And perhaps a final question, which is what is your ambition? How what are the routes to exit that you see for the name it? And there any numbers you can put into it? So there's it's early days for us, obviously, as a company. What we're we're very, very focused on at the moment is getting our executing on our go to market strategy, getting the product into market, attacking that market space that that I described earlier.

23:29 You know, we believe that with a combination of licensing revenue and the and the what you would call the core business here, we can take this company to, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue over time. So we're very focused on growing it at pace to that kind of level.

23:47 There are a number, I I guess, of strategic exit opportunities along the way in terms of the supply chain and the market that exists, whether that's with an exit to a next generation sequencing company or laboratory. Some of these have very big footprints and and revenues globally. And so, you know, exiting to one of those companies strategically is definitely an option in the future as our potential players elsewhere the supply chain in the market. But

24:22 but I guess right now, we're very focused on building our building our revenue line and going to market.

24:30 Steve, thank you very much. If I can encourage the audience, if you have any any other questions or indeed if you want to get in touch with the company directly, feel free. We have a very open approach. Steve, thank you so much. And over to Paul to tell us about Vortex. Thanks again. Thanks, Steve, for a very great very good presentation. Let me quickly move on. Okay. So we are Vortex Biosciences and we're a liquid biopsy company. So we operate in the precision medicine space. And as you probably know, medicine only works if you have precise information and that's exactly what the Vortex platform is designed to deliver. The problem we address principally is that of the growing problem of cancer,

25:18 specifically metastatic cancer. Now when a cancer spreads in the body, you have circulating tumor cells. So these are cells that break off from a primary tumor, enter the bloodstream, and then they can cause secondary tumors in distant sites. So this is called metastasis.

25:35 Circulating tumor cells are a major problem for metastasis. And what we do is isolate, enrich, and characterize circulating tumor cells. And that has great value, for pharmaceutical companies, for treatment decision, for drug development, and we're planning to upgrade and complement some of the existing solutions in the liquid biopsy space with our technology. Current solutions do fall short of what's needed, and I think it's no exaggeration to say that there is a huge unmet need in this area. You may have heard of liquid biopsy. You may have heard of circulating tumor DNA. That's the current market dominant technology. But what we offer is more information than circulating tumor DNA. We offer the whole cell. The cell has a lot more information than than circulating tumor DNA. So we see this in some ways as the next generation of of precision medicine, the next generation

26:29 of liquid biopsy. And just to enumerate and illustrate what I'm talking about, we have developed a device. So it's a medical device. We call it the VTX one system. It's eScaled. It's built for the clinic. It's simple, portable, and scalable. So the operator, this could be a busy services lab, a busy clinical services lab. You, have a consumable cassette, enter your blood sample into the cassette, plug that into the machine, press the button, and walk away. We have very good performance. We've got excellent usability specifications and class leading purity. So our platform was designed indeed for a busy clinic. So it's not just a research tool. It's true home is in the busy services laboratories.

27:19 The liquid biopsy market is accelerating rapidly. You may have seen headlines earlier this year that earlier in 2025 that the NHS in fact became the first national health service to do a liquid biopsy first intervention for many cancers. So this is now lung cancer and breast cancer. The NHS will adopt a liquid first approach. So this is a blood draw instead of a tissue biopsy. So that has multiple benefits for the patient. It's less invasive. It's less painful. You can do it more frequently, and you can basically track the disease in a level of detail in real time that we've never had before. So currently, the liquid biopsy market is expanding rapidly. The circulating tumor cell market where we operate is expanding alongside that.

28:11 This aligns well with the shift in healthcare strategy across the globe, and that's still more preventative, maybe a more community based, more real time personalized experience for cancer patients. So we see ourselves embedding this technology in health care systems in order to achieve some of those aims. So as a company, we have a very strong IP portfolio. We've got patents recently granted. We've got good coverage into the mid twenty thirties. We've got strong networks, strong partnerships, and I'll I'll give you a bit more detail on that shortly. We have three clinical studies running right now across the globe. We've taken a lot of time recently to improve our supply chain. So we brought production in house.

29:04 We've optimized supply chain. We've we do we have the financial discipline that maybe, business like ours sometimes sometimes lack. So we have, in fact, relocated the business, recently to Manchester. Again, we we are now part of a a very welcoming ecosystem surrounded by the expertise, the clinics, the engineers, the academics that we need to accelerate our commercial potential. Let me just illustrate our technology with a with a use case. Okay. So the vortex vortex technology isolates circulating tumor cells from whole blood. But we do it, and this is a differentiator for our technology. We do it in a very gentle way.

29:51 Now this is actually a big deal for isolation of circulating tumor cells because previously, technologies may have used magnets or antibodies or aggressive ways of pulling up the tumor cells from the bloodstream. We do it in a purely physics based mechanism. That's why we're called vortex. Indeed, we simply vortex the blood and the cancer cells fall out at the sides and we collect them. They are, in fact, so gently collected that we can grow them, we can culture them. And that has been a very difficult challenge and something of a holy grail, for pharma companies over recent years. Circulating tumor cells are quite rare. So if you can grow them up in a in a petri dish, all of a sudden you come from a rare cell to a highly abundant cell. And now you can do classic drug discovery. You can throw compounds at them.

30:38 You can expand your studies, and this is a burgeoning area and a huge opportunity for Vortex. We've got, we've got good clinical traction, in The US, East Coast US. And this differentiating factor is making a big difference to the clinics that we that we engage with. I mentioned clinical validation. Three studies ongoing. We will report out shortly. They're all running in parallel. We need these data packages. They are they will be contemporary. They will be up to date. They will be bang on target for the for the patient populations that we wish to address. They are reading out this year. So although these are multi year studies, we should see some signal in the coming months. At the University of Maryland, they've been a great supporter of VorTeq over the years. We have a 50 patient study that is almost approaching first readout.

31:30 And we will keep you guys posted on that one. We're looking at some very exciting results. So we need the clinical validation for credibility with the pharma companies. We're going to package this data up and this will, form part of our negotiation with pharma companies who need this kind of data and they need these kinds of drug developments. In terms of go to market strategy, we're approaching a couple of pillars, I guess you could say the research institution. So early revenue. This is instrument sales and this is cartridge sales. So the cartridge is a consumable cartridge, a plastic cartridge, single use, you put the blood sample in and you run it through the machine. This is recurring revenue. We see instrument lease opportunities, as well as sales opportunities and we have an installed base which is expanding all the time. We've recently built up inventory stock.

32:22 So now we are poised to achieve the early runs on the board in terms of revenue through the research institutions. Now more importantly, I guess we are in discussions with pharma companies and with the large CRO private pathology practices. And this is where we can see, scale up opportunities. So number one, we're building a services lab in Manchester. We've recently moved to Manchester, and we are looking to operationalize our services lab this year. That's where we will engage with the pharma companies to do what they call biomarker assay development. And that means a pharma company may have a new drug in development. They need a biomarker assay to complement that drug, and that's where we would come in. And when you're in at the biomarker assay development stage, you generally get dragged into clinical trials. So that's how it usually works. Biomarker assay into early phase clinical trials, and we have a revenue model, based around that. A single phase one clinical trial with just 50 patients can easily reach the close to 1,000,000 per trial.

33:26 As I may have mentioned earlier, the workflow that we have is it's simple, it's de skilled, it's portable. So we don't need to do the work exclusively in the Manchester lab. We can take our workflow, drag and drop, and put it into partner laboratories across the world. And part of that initiative, you can see on the screen here, is with TDL. TDL, the doctor's laboratory based in Kings Cross, London. We are about to install some of our equipment in their facility, and they are part of the Sonic Healthcare network. They have operations across the world. They are one of the largest private pathology practices in the world. And we have our equipment installed and those trials should be coming on screen this year.

34:13 Secondly, we are the first participants in the expanded AstraZeneca exchange program. And what that means is it's a validation not only of our science, of our strategy, but we now have access to world class experts in in the diagnostics field, the clinical oncology field and the market access field. So we're looking to leverage our AstraZeneca connections as much as we can over the next twelve to eighteen months. And as I mentioned earlier, we are now firmly embedded in the Manchester Knowledge 0.25, one of the biggest biomedical campuses in Europe. And we're surrounded by the expertise, the hospitals, the patients that we need in order to build our customer base. I just want to dwell on the commercial pipeline and it hinges on TDL.

34:59 So TDL, if you don't know them, they are a global operation. They've got access across multiple continents. We see a large unmet need for liquid biopsy and TDL are part of that solution. We're also engaging with a global health care consulting firm in order to embed VTX technology in their global network of of oncologists and CROs, and that gives us a reach that we otherwise would not have as a company based in The UK. We're also in discussion with multiple pharma companies, of course, commercially sensitive, but we can we can delve into the details under NDA if you wish to if you wish to take it further. In terms of commercial road map, so it's as as I've just mentioned, we are installing equipment into the doctor's laboratory over in London imminently, and those trials will come online before the end of the year. We are now manufacturing instruments in in The UK, and that gives us great supply chain optimization, gives us a better financial discipline, now that we can fully control the supply chain.

36:06 Clinical studies will be reading out this year, and that will drag us into the follow-up CRO pilot discussions. As I mentioned, biomarker assay development opportunities followed by clinical trial opportunities. And post 2026, which we see as an inflection year, then we are into the scale up of the service. So exit strategy, it's a very active market right now, liquid biopsy. It's every other month you hear about an acquisition now. Some companies are really, really rapidly expanding. It's a busy space. We can see our technology being picked up by multiple different organizations. It could be the the large diagnostics or life sciences tools, manufacturers. It could be the CROs or the low the laboratory service providers.

36:54 Also, we know that pharmaceutical companies are looking to internalize this liquid biopsy capability, and that's another strategic target for us. And we're working with with EMV on elucidating and figuring out exactly the quickest and best way to achieve this. A quick mention about the, the leadership team. So I'm Paul Reeves. I'm the managing director. My background is is medical devices. I also want to highlight, Nigel Brooksby, our exec chairman, serial global leader in the pharmaceutical space, very, very well connected, built Sanofi event. He was the he was the chairman of Sanofi, and he has context across the pharmaceutical space. I mean, we have a a scientific search team, as well that complement our IP portfolio and the technology roadmap. Of course, Ilian, part of EMV. EMV for us are an extension of of the leadership team, if you will.

37:53 And, we have a lot of capability because we are part of the EMV portfolio. And let me leave you just with a quote. It really is a new era for liquid biopsy. It's already changing the standard of cancer, and we want to be part of that story. So that is where I shall leave it. Thank you very much, and I, I welcome your questions. Thank you very much, Paul. And, I wanna say what an amazing job Paul has done since he took over as MD. He first joined as CTO. And since taking over as an EMV, he's been able to both discipline the company in terms of their cash burn, but also streamline the supply chain and overall the operations as he has described, which, I mean, if there's one thing in this space is you you need time until you get to the value inflection points. And as a more capital efficient company, Vortex is now able to pursue those great strategic opportunities that he outlined.

38:51 So a a few questions. So for Vortex in particular, Paul, what does commercial what do the commercialization timelines look like? What approvals will be required for commercialization? And as a separate point, what exit options would this open up? Commercial timelines. Okay. So I've mentioned about TDL, Sonic partnership. So that's imminent. That's right now. Okay. So that could be that gives us the access to scale that we need. Multiple clinical study readouts are coming in online in 2026 and subsequent years. Also, the AstraZeneca partnership, that should that is coming online. And and about q three, we're expecting some significant developments there.

39:36 In terms of service delivery, we are operationalizing the Manchester lab this year and scaling the operation next year. In terms of regulatory pathway, what we do currently is under research use only. However, we manufacture medical our medical devices under ISO 13,485, standard for medical device manufacturers. We are working towards FDA regulatory submissions. We are in early discussions with FDA, and that could be a future opportunity for Vortex. Diagnostics is something that's further away for Vortex. So we're looking at services proposition prior to being a diagnostics proposition. Diagnostics will be more significant regulatory submissions, but they are several years away. So right now, we're working under the RUO, GCALP, ISO 13,085 pathways in terms of regulation.

40:29 Okay. A question from Freddie. What is the endpoint of the studies? And importantly, will a positive result from your tests as in identifying CTCs would it directly lead to an intervention of some type? And and I think here well, I'll let you answer, Paul, but I I think what I found fascinating here is the move away from the simplistic understanding of liquid biopsy, which is the nature of new technology coming to a market to what is now a much more multifaceted understanding of what liquid biopsy and CTCs can do. But sorry, Paul. Just to repeat the question. What is the endpoint of the studies, and will the results from your what kind of a intervention will the result of your of your study result in?

41:16 So the endpoint for the study is simply to count and characterize the CTCs that are in the patient population. Right now, in clinical practice, we don't count the CTC. We don't characterize the CTC. In fact, we look for the parts that are very easy to find. Okay? So the ctDNA story, which is a which is a rapidly accelerating market, that's easy to find. CtDNA is is easy to find. This is the next generation of liquid biopsy. So what we can enumerate and simply count the CTCs, you can tie that to disease progression. And then that is part of your discussion, not only with the oncologists, but other drug developers, pharmaceutical companies. So the endpoint is in the counting, and then we will be complementary to, not replacing the current liquid biopsy solutions, which is ctDNA.

42:05 And like I say, that that that's the easy to find part. Vortex is the more difficult to find part. So we're looking to complement. And when you have both signals, then you can do a lot with the data. So that's where we're at right now with our studies, and we hope to be reading out in the coming months. Thank you, Paul. A question by David g, which is a tough one. I recall hearing about Vortex technology more than ten years ago, and, of course, this is when the origins of the technology are from UCLA in The US. Why has it taken so long for the company to be a success? Very good question. Very good question. And in the medical devices world, you know, some of these developments site these times are hard. We've spent a long time developing this technology in The US, longer than some people would have would have preferred.

42:55 But what we have now is a very valuable technology with very good IP nodes around it. So although the development cycle times were long in The US and you can argue about strategic moves over in The US and it was an expensive place to do business in the Bay Area. Let's let's be honest. Now we are consolidated to The UK. We have a technology that is commercializable. So let's turn it around and simply commercialize as we are now. But the development time, yes, it's been a long, long time coming. Spin out from UCLA with very with a very academic mindset behind it. It's time to commercialize the technology, and that's what we're doing now that we are consolidated to The UK. I want to add to this one other point. There was a great article in the Feet yesterday, February 25, which is entitled the elusive grail of blood tests that spots cancer early.

43:45 And the article talks about the circulating tumor DNA technology. I won't mention the company, but adopted by the NHS as a pilot for mass profiling of liquid biopsy. And ctDNA is a different technology to CTCs. As Paul outlined, CTCs have a more complete, richer information, but ctDNA is easier to get to. And I would say, least from my observation of this space, that there were probably about five years taken up by the theme of ctDNA as the hype as we went through the hype and it was implemented and the results have come. What the results in our view as an investor showed that while ctDNA as an approach is important and to be part of the picture, it is circulating tumor cell based liquid biopsy amongst other liquid biopsies that will provide the rich information needed for progressing clinical trials or indeed going into personalized medicine.

44:47 So in a sense, the answer why it's taken so long, well, one, the technology took a while and there were probably some errors in the past to become mature. And secondly, the market itself perhaps wasn't as ready for the technology. If I relate this back to our venture build approach at EMV CAPITAL, we look for these immense opportunities where the technology is proven, but the market conditions weren't right and perhaps are right now, and we work with the management teams to capture these opportunities at the right time, which brings me to the next and final questions of the session, which have to do with when can we exit, what sort of value multiple can the investor expect, how much money do you need until an exit. Maybe before if I if I take this one for a second.

45:36 Over the last few years, when the company was in stealth mode, if you will, you know, you could see it we could see its website, but we weren't terribly public about it. It was backed by EMV CAPITAL and other private investors in the business. And now with the value inflection points that are coming out, the company's out on the market once again, some of the information being asked here in terms of cash burn revenues and so on, it's it's sensitive. So, you know, I would suggest if you can get in touch with the company directly, and they'll be able to find a way to share that with you as as appropriate. Okay. And, I mean, I think I think we'll we'll stop here. It's been a a I think a great and interesting session. I want to thank Steve and Paul. I'm not sure if the lights are out in your office, but we can't we can't see you. But I can assure you, Paul, is very personable in person.

46:34 But please continue to follow these companies, you know, in terms of their news flow, but also through EMV CAPITAL's news flow. If you want to have some specific information on the businesses, feel free to get in touch with EMV CAPITAL or them. And and please stay tuned for the next meet the portfolio virtual event. We try to do them once every two months with this format. Happy to take feedback if you think we can if you think we can improve something. And finally, for those of you who are and remain our investors, I want to thank you for your support. It is we very much value that. Thank you. That's great. Thank you all for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations?

47:21 This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of EMV CAPITAL PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.