Ixico (LSE:IXI) — Full Year Results

0:01 Good afternoon, and welcome to the IXICO PLC final results investor presentation. Throughout the quarter presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged, they can be submitted at any time by the q and a tab situated in the right corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives in the meeting itself. However, the company can review all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll.

0:28 And I'd now like to hand you over to CEO, Brian Gordon. Good afternoon to you, sir. Thank you very much, and welcome, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to come to this webinar and and listen to our 2024 results. I should probably quickly introduce myself first. I'm a new face, I think, to quite few a few of of you you who've been following IXICO. My name is Brian Gordon. I joined IXICO over the summer, so a few months ago. If you look at my background, which for which we have a slide that I will briefly go over, I started my career in pharma at the likes of Eli Lilly and UCB, names which you may hear us mention in the future as well because they're very much active in this neurology space that we are active at as IXICO, and so those are our customers.

1:17 And I then moved to more the precision medicine area where I managed platforms not unlike the one which we are managing at IXICO to help inform biomarker research for pharma companies and and help those platforms also go public, which I did with a Swiss startup called Sofia Genetics at the Nasdaq and Foundation Medicine, which was acquired by Roche. I've been hired two weeks ago in order to obviously help the company scale further, do a trend reversal, which we will be discussing today, and also really look at other revenue areas that we believe our platform, which has been completely revamped, can access. I'm joined today by Grant Nash, who probably is a little bit more familiar to those who know IXICO as the CFO and chief operating officer also of the company, and so I'm delighted to have him be part of this.

2:14 With that, let me maybe introduce in a few slides who we are and how I see the company now a few months in. From there, Grant will take you through the financials for 2024 and especially also how the second half of twenty twenty four translates into renewed momentum, which we continue in 2025. And then I'll talk a little bit about some of the strategic drivers following a recent capital raise, which maybe some of you have been part of or have been following and which obviously now fuel this this renewed growth trajectory that we're on. So with that, let me first talk a little bit about the track record of IXICO.

3:03 As you see, fifteen year. We're actually going close on twenty year. We will be celebrating that very soon. A company that very much came out of London academia, but which, of course, now since quite a while already is operating globally as a commercial player. And you see some of the statistics there, managing 1,250 imaging centers. These are not our centers, but these are preferred sites we work with as a clinical research organization. 9,000 patients in supported trials, 250,000 imaging scans. And then I think important as well, if you look at the right of this slide, 25 studies across 18 clients, and those clients are biotechs and big pharma. So what we do is, in a nutshell, informing those clients about critical decisions they're making about their development programs.

4:00 When we talk about their development programs, we mean molecules, drugs that they are bringing to market. As they bring these drugs to market, they obviously do clinical trials. These clinical trials will start in phase one all the way to phase three and eventually, hopefully, an approval for patients. And during these trials, they look at endpoints which are going to be around safety, around clinical efficacy. But these days, luckily, we can actually go and measure in the brain what the activity is. We do that through MRI scans, with PET scans, probably some of these radiology techniques that you may have heard of in general in the hospitals. And we actually ingest data coming out of these scans to inform what is actually happening in the brain, what do we actually see in terms of effects that the drugs have or have not in specific areas of the brain. We do that specifically in disease areas such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and also Huntington's disease and rare diseases where we've got a very dominant market position.

5:01 And we'll talk a little bit more about that. And so, really, we feedback these analytics together with clinical research organizations such as ourselves to the pharma companies that then can take decisions on furthering their drugs through their pipeline. The way we do this, and this is a bit of a busy slide, is through our platform and, of course, through our organization and our team of experts. The platform basically consists of two main elements. You see this top part here, which we call our backbone TT trial tracker, of which we have just launched a brand new version, TTNx next generation. The backbone is really about ingesting those data in a manner which from a regulatory perspective, from a quality perspective, from a cybersecurity perspective, guarantees that patient data are treated in the way that clinical trials are expected to treat those data, which all goes through the cloud, as you can imagine now these days, from the sites.

6:06 The magic, if you wish, happens much more in the bottom of this slide, which is that orange box. That is where we equip our platform with algorithms, with technical plug ins as we call them, that will actually be programmed to go after specific biomarker research in specific disease areas, say, for example, going after inflammation biomarkers in Alzheimer's disease.

6:29 And so at the end of the day, to make a difference in this space, obviously, you need to be an end to end clinical research organization, which is what we are. And so we are a fee for service business. But you also need to make sure that you've got a state of the art platform, which obviously after fifteen years, we have been evolving. And I would argue in 2024, really have also been going through sort of a a big change here, leapfrogging some of the technology, and and I'll come back to that.

7:00 If you look at 2024 in a nutshell, again, we'll come back to financials in a minute. It was a slow start, which I think is the least we can say. It was an h one, which was below expectations. And so you see that here actually at the beginning of this timeline where the company made a few deals, but we could not report any material deals. But at the same time, I think the company also, with sort of a view on longer term growth, started to make some changes. And you see that at the bottom here where we've actually welcomed a new nonexecutive director with Dipti Amin, who joined us as an executive or an ex executive from IQVIA. You'll also see that under the leadership of Grant, actually, and, of course, also my predecessor, some restructuring happened and some further cost efficiencies happened, which downsized the organization slightly.

7:55 We're now, of course, back into a growth mode, and I'll show you how we are actually onboarding new people with different profiles into the company. Mark, who was already part of the board, became chairman of the board, which I think is actually a great addition for us as well. Mark, who's himself also the CEO of DeepMatter and so very much a sparing partner. You see that I myself joined sort of in the latter part of the year and also initiated the capital raise, which we will come back to. The second half of the year, though, really also presented a a change at the first place because of the fact that we did go live with this revamped backbone of our platform, TTNX, which has been a big change. It's basically onboarding new customers now on this platform, making sure that everything works and and is put in place. So this is something that has required an enormous effort. But frankly, if that had not been put in place, we would not have necessarily the platform to scale for the next coming ten, fifteen, twenty years. So I think this is really a very important driver for some of the ambitions which we have with the company as we're now turning to 2025.

9:08 As you then go further on this timeline, you see that we made some deals in order to further equip that platform. For example, IXICO, as I mentioned, is around inflammation in Alzheimer's disease. Life Molecular is about PET tracers, which actually allows our company to not only position ourselves as MRI experts, which is very much how we are seen, but also as PET experts, which is going to be important in disease areas such as Parkinson's disease, for example. And then you see that towards the end of the fiscal year, we actually landed some very important deals in the areas of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson, Huntington's disease, which is very much our bread and butter, I would say. And so that actually allowed us at the end of the day to to end with an order book of 15,300,000, which is an increase compared to 2023.

9:55 So that's a good sign. But I think more importantly, you see that it actually was a massive increase compared to where we were in the middle of the year with 12,700,000. As I mentioned, towards the end of the year, we reached out to the market for a capital raise, and we're very happy to report that this was actually a twice oversubscribed raise, which we sort of capped at the top end of what we endeavored to to collect.

10:27 Maybe one last word. I'm not going to read everything on this slide here. I already explained you what my background is. You can read it here as well. I mentioned Dipti coming from IQVIA and then Mark. So within the executive and the nonexecutive team, you've got quite a few changes there with the exception, I would say, of of Grant, who very much actually has been, I would say, the the leading man throughout 2024. And and also Robin, who's not joining today, but who is our chief scientific officer and is very much a mastermind behind the the scientific platform. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Grant to take you through some of the details of our financials. Thank you, Graham. And good afternoon, good evening, good morning to wherever you are in the world, to you all today.

11:19 For the financial results, I'm gonna present four slides. I'm gonna firstly present on the financial results, financial performance for 2024, then a slide on our financial position and the impact looking forward. And then I've got a couple of slides on our order book to give you some perspective of what how that's made up and how that positions us as we look forwards. So our first slide is on financial performance, and the headline here is that across the KPIs of revenues, gross margin, EBITDA, we outperformed the market expectation in each of those areas in the year. So that's a that's a positive reporting that.

12:05 And I think the key message is that despite some significant headwinds across 2023 and certainly the first half of twenty twenty four, We've done a good job of managing our costs. We took some difficult decisions in the first half of the year, but then made sure we were still able to execute and leverage the opportunities that arose as we went into the second half of the year, and that can be seen in these financials. To start on the left with revenues, we delivered 5,800,000 of revenues in the year. That was split 2,500,000 in the first half, but then a strong twenty seven percent increase on that in the second half with 3,300,000 of revenues being delivered.

12:49 That was driven by very strong contract bookings in the second half of the year. In total for the year, we we booked 8,900,000 in new contracts, but the bulk of that, almost 90% of that was actually signed in the second half, showing that recovery in the market and and and our opportunity to to leverage that. As you look to the middle graph for gross margin, you can see that we held our gross margin steady in the high 40% with 47% reported, again, ahead of market expectations. As a reminder, our gross margin is a function of three elements, revenues, which obviously came down a bit in the year, then trials mix. As a reminder to those who've listened to us before or for those who haven't heard us before, we have a mix of revenues that we report will drive the margins. So if we have a tendency to have an order book of earlier phase trials, they tend to have lower analysis components and tend to be lower margin.

13:51 If we have more later phase trials, they tend to have higher analysis components, which is very profitable for us and therefore tends to drive higher margins. This year, we've had mainly early phase trials, so that's something we've we've managed. But the key thing for us this year was cost management. We managed our cost very carefully. In the first half of the year, we did 40% gross margin. As revenues recovered, as we make those restructures in our cost base, that improved significantly in the second half such that by the end of the year, we're over 50% gross margin for the second half of the year. And that flows through into EBITDA, as you can see on the right. A couple of key things I want to draw out here. Firstly, our EBITDA of 1,700,000 was a couple of 100,000 better than than market expectations, which were at 1.9.

14:44 And, again, the two half years were very stark. We had losses of 1,300,000 in the first half with a loss of just 400,000 in the second, which, again, shows the impact of a slight uptick in revenues, the operational leverage that exists in the business, where much of that excess rev extra revenue flew flowed down into our our gross margin EBITDA, but also as a reflection of the fact that we made those cost savings in the first half of the year and then then came through in the second half. The sec there were also a couple of additional costs in the year when compared to previous year. Firstly, on our technology platform, we completed the investment in that platform in 2023.

15:30 What that means is that when we invest in the the platform before it goes live, a lot of that cost gets capitalized. That's part and parcel of the accounting requirements. But once that platform is complete, some of those costs go away. We don't need them anymore, but others come through actually don't get capitalized any longer. They come back into the p and l. So when you compare '23 and '24, you need to bear in mind that some of the cost that was capitalized last year is now showing in the p and l this year. There's also an element of one off costs with some the restructuring costs at the start of the year plus the fact that we had a succession in CEO, which which added some cost into the into the year. But you can see with the line graph here the impact on FTEs where across the year, we brought our FTE numbers down such that we were just over 70 FTEs at the end of the year. That represents a 12% reduction in salary costs across the year whilst keeping our non salary costs steady irrespective of the fact that there was a reasonably high inflation environment.

16:36 So moving on to my next slide, which shows the financial position of the company. And starting with cash, at the end of twenty twenty four, we had 1,800,000 of cash on our balance sheet. Again, a couple of 100,000 higher than market expectations. But then, as you know, we augmented that quite quickly in October with 3,700,000 net proceeds from the 4,000,000 capital raise, which then meant that at the end of October, our cash was back up at 5,700,000. That's obviously a strong cash position for a company of our size and gives us the strength the the cash strength to make investments to deliver on the expectations we're setting.

17:23 The middle graph shows the capital investment, and this is, if you like, is the flip side of the graph, the EBITDA graph, where you can see in the year a significant reduction in capital investment. That is because our next generation trial tracker platform is now complete, is now being used on client trials, and therefore, the capitalization of that cost has fallen right away. Some of that cost going into the p and l as you saw, and some of that cost has has gone. And why that is particularly important is because this this means that that significant investment in technology we needed to make as a company is complete. We have an absolutely cutting edge platform that is gives us huge potential going forward, which we have yet to access the value of We're only just starting to access the value of.

18:14 But and the our ability to incrementally improve that and differentiate our analytical capabilities on this platform is now low cost, tens of thousands of pounds rather than hundreds of thousands. So we're in a strong position here to go forward having made the big investment that we needed to make. And then for completeness on the right, we show our net asset position, 9,500,000 net assets at the end of the year, made up of the 6,700,000 of the asset value of our platform, our technology and scientific platform, plus working capital of 2,800,000, which then immediately after the year end, we augmented with that 3,700,000 of net proceeds from the raise. Again, just to highlight, we are debt free with very low long term liabilities of just 200,000.

19:00 So a strong balance sheet for a company of our size and a robust position from which to to move the company back to growth. And then to talk about the opportunities for growth and specifically how the order book reflects that, this slide, again, is one that we show regularly at these presentations. And the the the good news here is that the order book increased in the year from 14,800,000 at the end of the prior year up to 15,300,000. As Bram already mentioned, that was actually even starker an increase from the half year where we're at 12.7 20% increase since then, bringing us back up to 15,300,000 of order book, which reflects those strong contract bookings in the second half of the year.

19:48 Also, as we look forward, in terms of the market expectation for revenues for this year currently in the market, over 75% of those revenues are already contracted in our order book at the end of the last year. So we are we are well positioned to deliver on those expectations. With a fair win, we will we'll hit those and and surpass them. So that's obviously what we're looking to do. On the right of this slide, we have the the movement between the order book at the end of the prior year, 14,800,000, and the end of this year, 15.3. You can see the 5,800,000 of revenues that we recognized. You can see the 8,900,000 of new contracts that we won. Those contracts made up of new contracts with 11 clients and also contract extensions with 15 clients. And it's worth pointing out that that shows that when we sign a contract, there is still opportunity for that contract to increase in value. That is often the case as clients have protocol changes or they want to do some more analysis.

20:47 So we might sign a contract for a million pounds, but by the time we've delivered that contract, it might be worth $1.21300000 because of change or it's because of contract extensions. And then the flip side of that is that in the year, we did see 2,600,000 of client trial descopes. That's where, for whatever reason, the the drug has been shown not to be sufficiently efficacious or there might be a safety issue, which means a trial has been descoped or even canceled. And in our space in in clinical trials, we have to be cognizant that that happens, so we need to to to bear that in mind when we look at our order book. And and in doing so, and turning to my my final slide, this again shows the analysis of our order book. Each of these graphs are summarizing the 15,300,000 of our order book and giving you a different profile on that. The bar chart on the left is that 15,300,000 split by project. So we had 25 projects across 18 clients in our order book.

21:47 As you can see, a very nicely diversified order book. The top project is 13% of the value. So what that means is that compared to a few years ago, we've been successful in diversifying our order book. We have no single project that we're so heavily reliant on that should that particular trial fail or have to be stopped for safety reasons that it would undermine the company. We have a good level of resilience now built into our order book, which is a much stronger risk profile than we had previously.

22:20 Positively as well, in the middle graph here, the middle the pie chart in the middle, you can see that 15,300,000 order book split by the phase of trial that we are supporting. So you can see from this that over 60% about 65% of our order book is made up of phase ones and phase twos, 5,200,000 in phase one, four point eight million in phase two. And that gives us a portfolio of opportunities within our order book. And the reason for that is where and if those phase ones and phase twos are successful, there is a good likelihood that they would then become phase twos and phase threes. If we do a good job and we've we've and because we provide the analysis, that puts us in a strong position to follow those trials through to phase two and phase three. So there is essentially a pipeline of opportunity in our order book, in our contracted order book to win further trials that are likely to be larger in value and higher in margin.

23:24 So from a risk profile and from an opportunity profile, we have a strong order book that gives us confidence in looking forward to and returning the organization to growth. And then finally, for completeness on the right, we show, again, the order book of 15,300,000 split by projects in therapeutic indication. As you'd expect, bearing in mind our reputation, still over 50% of that order book is focused on Huntington's Huntington's disease with about 25% of it focused on rare diseases, which is shown as other in in this pie chart. But importantly importantly, and and Bram will again talk about this, part of our very clear strategy and focus in the coming periods and the basis for raising money is to expand our market share in the larger therapeutic indications of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. And you can see we're starting this from a good place. 20% of our order book is already in AD, and we're gaining traction. We won a really important contract in 2024 with the global Alzheimer's platform.

24:33 A lot of profile that gives us with large pharma, and that's an important project for us to build from. We've also got a foothold in PD in there as as well. So with that, I'm gonna pass back to to Bram who who summarize some investments. Thanks, Grant. And I think you hopefully answered some of the questions that I saw come up in the in the q and a. I invite you to to take a look at them, Grant. But one of the questions was how the the orders actually inform revenue. As you saw in one of the slides, we have a view on 75% of revenues already. Yes. Those deals are usually multiyear, and so there's a very clear forecast there. Grant can provide some more feedback if needed. I think another question which I want to answer now as well is that there is a 10,000,000 British pound top line ambition in the near term and whether we can achieve that based on Huntington's disease or whether we should expect other disease areas.

25:40 I think by now, and I will actually expand on that a little bit, you will have heard that it is indeed about expanding into other disease areas, which is very much ongoing already. And I'll show you actually on the slide with some numbers also why that is so important.

25:56 So when we went into the capital raise, the strategy that I laid out together with the team is innovate, lead, scale. And I think, hopefully, this is clear, and and I'll just highlight a few elements there. Innovate is very much around equipping that platform, which as I mentioned, has gone live now in its next generation. So the big capital investments to the platform do not need to happen anymore. They have happened, and I'm very glad that the team actually

26:29 held the fort, if you wish, and did that despite the fact that they went through some rough times from a revenue perspective. Because if we hadn't had that platform ready for scale now, those investments still have to be made. So the platform is there, but we need to make sure that it's equipped, especially in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. And on the next slide, I'll show you that we actually picked some very specific scientific themes where we know we will be able to differentiate ourselves, and they're based on proof of concept work that was already done by the team, but that was slightly put on hold. And so it's very much around accelerating some of that algorithm development, which I will show you in a minute. So innovate is around accelerating algorithm development, making sure that there is differentiation, of course, always in Huntington's and rare diseases, but also now in some of these bigger disease areas, especially Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

27:16 I And should maybe add to that that we've made some choices because it would be easy to say we go into all these big disease areas, and that's where the money is. One of the bigger disease areas, for example, is also multiple sclerosis where very much through MRI and PET technology, you you can make an impact, but we also think that it's a bit of a heavier lift for our platform to really make that differentiation. So we've chosen Alzheimer's and Parkinson's specifically because we know they're very adjacent, and we already have a foothold there. Lead has to do with the fact that we very much want to continue to be part of the conversation with thought leaders, and that it's also got a geographic component. When we say thought leaders, a lot of them are in North America. So And we're actually in the process of hiring some medical affairs personnel to help Robin, our CSO, CMO, our chief medical officer, to really make sure that we're on stage, that we can further also talk about those algorithms and that we're part of the development of the next generation biomarkers.

28:14 And then scale has to do with the fact that as a UK based analytics company, we are very much operating globally. It has always been part of the trials that we supported. But especially as we move into Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, also want to make sure that from an operations perspective and from a commercial perspective, we're very close to the decision makers. And, again, there's an element there of making sure that we increase that footprint slightly in The US in North America, and I'll come back to that. And so at the end of the day, it is about accelerating growth based on our current business model, but also increasing value for the company. And I saw that there was a question there, which I will try to answer maybe based on this slide as well regarding licensing of data. It's not so much maybe licensing of data.

28:59 Obviously, those data are patient data even if they're anonymized. These are not data which we are in a position to commercialize as such, but we can license our platform in collaboration with bigger data providers or with bigger organizations that actually inform clinical decision making as in a platform that could actually work in the hospitals as well closer to patients. And so there is indeed an ambition as we've laid out also in our capital raise to look at TTNx as a platform that is not only, I would say, sort of the black box that informs the clinical research organization activities, which is fee for service, but that we actually go out with that platform and look at how it can access other revenue areas. And that indeed would mean that there would be licensing revenues coming there.

29:45 That that's at least the vision of of those partnerships that we are pursuing. So this slide is sort of the, I would say, the most scientific slide that you will find in our deck, but I found it important to share this with you. You basically see these three orange boxes here, and those are these three scientific teams that I alluded to before that we have chosen because we know that this is what customers care about today when they do research specifically in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. So if you look at this table here, you basically see Huntington's disease, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis. I already mentioned that multiple sclerosis is an area which we have slightly descoped where we are opportunistic. We do have a small pipeline there, and, obviously, we also will continue to serve some of these customers. But we're really going to be honing in on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

30:37 And why is that so important? If you look at the right hand side in this table, you there you see the estimated market potential. So one of the question was, can you grow with Huntington's disease? The simple answer is, we can grow, but we cannot grow as fast as we want to because the market on an annual basis is around 12,000,000, and we already own around 80. That is 80% of that market. And so you see that also translate there in the pipeline, which we have for the upcoming twelve months or eighteen months, sorry, of 8,000,000. But, of course, if we now go into Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, you see that these market sizes become much more considerable. And you also see, as Grant already mentioned, that we do have a pipeline there of existing opportunities. Some of them are based on the order book because we have landed, especially Alzheimer's disease projects. Some of them are opportunities in the pipeline.

31:31 And as I mentioned before, I think the pipeline at the moment consists for forty five percent of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's opportunities, of which fifty percent is considered mid to late stage. And, hopefully, that answers a bit the question of when can we sort of see the next deals coming in. I obviously intend to to bring this to market as soon as we've got signatures on the dotted line. But what I can tell you is at the moment that we've got this sort of couple of dozen material opportunities where we're around half of them are Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. This is a way to sort of describe maybe a little bit more visually why it is so important that we expand into these other markets. And I should actually mention probably for those that know IXICO a little bit longer that this is not new for us. IXICO actually started as a company that made a difference in Alzheimer's disease, but this was almost twenty years ago. And twenty years ago, pharma wasn't very active and fertile when it came to developing assets and molecules in Alzheimer's disease, which is when actually the Huntington's disease opportunity came to IXICO with a with a massive contract. It was the biggest phase three trial ever done globally.

32:50 But at that moment, that's where I think IXICO became a little bit vulnerable being dependent on that opportunity. So going back into Alzheimer's into Parkinson's, diversifying is not such a heavy lift for the company because it was thought in that manner from the start with the platform. Anyway, what you see on this slide here is how important it is to go there. You see the number of trials, a 139 for Parkinson's, a 164 for Alzheimer's disease, and you also see how they're distributed around phase one, phase two, phase three, where we know that phase two, which is really our sweet spot, but definitely also phase three, are high value and high margin opportunities. So as we now have started to execute on the post capital raise strategy of innovate lead scale, I just wanted to share with you some of the things that we are measuring some of the elements that we find important to keep an eye on and that we also want to start to report back to the market. So as we come back to you in the next coming months, hopefully, with clear deals that will support the strategy, but then later on also with the results, the first results for 2025, you will see us present also how are we actually doing on the development of that differentiation.

34:08 We've given ourselves six to twelve months to turn that from proof to concept into a commercial offering, which is short, but which is feasible. So we want to make sure that we also show for that as we bring that algorithms or those algorithms on on the platform. And then, obviously, the ultimate proof is some of the awards, some of the deals that we will actually win in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, thanks to that differentiation. Lead has to do with bringing medical folks on board, but it also means that we want to be visible. And so we want to be measuring that through publications, congress attendance, presentations, basically having that share of voice as we call it from a thought leader perspective. And then scale, obviously, will be the financials where you will see also a clear geographic split. Today, our revenues are largely or around 40% coming from The US.

35:02 And our expectation is that as we move forward, probably more of the opportunities will will be coming from that geography as well. I did wanna take a moment. I will probably not be sharing my org chart with you every time. It is a bit maybe our internal kitchen. But I think this time, it's an important one because those are some of the key things for which we were capital raising. Right? So I think there was a question actually around you've saved 12% on FTEs. Could you save further and get your breakeven to less than even an 8,000,000 revenue. Maybe, Grant, you you can respond to that later in a in a bit more detail. But I I would maybe sort of a bit provocatively say that's not necessarily our our objective. Right? We want to sure make that we actually now bring the right talent on board, that we invest in the right skills in order to actually accelerate that revenue.

36:01 Because, otherwise, I think the the way I put it internally, we will have an organization that is a little bit trying to sort of speed forward with hand break on, which I don't think would be the right strategy. So what you're looking at here in this org chart, at the one hand, is a confirmation very much of Grant's organization as a CFO and COO, and so also really overseeing that TTNX, that novel platform, rollout to our customers where, as I mentioned before, we're largely on track. And then very importantly, also, Robin is chief scientific and medical officer strengthening that medical group, especially in North America, where we are making progress now with onboarding some of these folks and and hopefully having that organization in place early in 2025.

36:48 What is, I think, the biggest change for those that have been close to our organization is that I have really carved out that commercial role into a separate department where I will be recruiting a chief commercial officer. But the first priority was to bring in some US leadership and to have some senior recruits on on the North American soil, and that has happened. I'm I'm actually glad that we managed to do that before the end of the the year, so quite shortly after after the capital raise. So those people are coming on board, especially one one senior person that will be overseeing all these efforts from the Boston area. And then maybe the last thing to highlight here is the the little red box below my my box, which is corporate development, that has everything to do with strengthening those partnerships, those efforts of going out and looking at other ways to maximize our platform outside of the CRO space and looking especially at those licensing deals that someone already asked about.

37:59 So to conclude, this is very much the thesis which we brought forward a few months ago as we went into the capital raise, which we believe, of course, very much holds and which we are now actually full steam executing upon. We do have a market leading technology. As I came onboard this company, obviously, I knew the reputation of IXICO already, but I've really now seen it also being confirmed by customers and and and actually competitors, I should say, as well. So the fact that we have now revamped that platform is important. I would argue that as a company, we are undervalued because I think the platform itself already presents an enormous value. And then, obviously, we've got the revenues linked to that. A clear strategy to increase the market. Hopefully, we've made that clear again today as well as we now move into 2025.

38:50 And then leveraging the existing technology for new markets, which has to do with the fact that we can actually very easily equip our platform with novel algorithms. Those are not heavy investments. Those are not as heavy investments as we did for the backbone of the the system, we can really bring new algorithms on board. I think there was actually a question that I saw earlier around more biomarkers, new disease areas. Yes. Absolutely. Now we will not disperse ourselves too much. Obviously, we could start to think oncology, for example, which I think would be a bridge too far. We are very much seen as leading in neurodegenerative diseases. This is a market which is growing. And I think as we expand, especially in some of these bigger disease areas such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, we're in very good shape. And and and there, indeed, you will see us bring novel biomarkers also in the future on board.

39:42 And so the last thing I would say is innovate, lead, scale. I would say keep that in mind. We're going to beat that drum, continue to report out on the progress there. And so to conclude, 2024 was a transition year. It was a year that started in in a difficult fashion, but we're really I think we managed to to turn around things, which obviously also resulted in in in deals that are at the end of the day, I guess, to prove in the pudding. So we very much endeavor to continue to report out some of these successes. And in the meantime, I hope that today you also saw that we have the strategy in place and the organization in place now to continue on that trend. I think with that, we're going to end the presentation part. Grant, I will maybe invite you to pick out a few questions that you may have picked up already as well, and I'll take a look as well.

40:33 Yeah. Thank you, Graham. I'll I'll perhaps take a couple and then hand on to you and then and then and then we can move between us. But first question to take, I think, from from Sam m. Grant, I've heard you say that when revenues reach 8,000,000 to 8,500,000, IXICO should be profitable. Can you clarify, is this EBITDA before tax, etcetera? So thanks, Sam. Yeah. I'm referring to EBITDA. So, you know, that's that's the metric that we use internally. That's the KPI that we report to the market. So it's EBITDA that I'd expect to see move from negative to positive around about that level. And, again, just to highlight the operating leverage that exists in the business. So once we start to see revenues above that, we should see our EBITDA number increase quite quickly because, essentially, we are operating slightly subscale at the moment. Our rent to fixed costs are higher than they would be possibly for for another organization.

41:33 But as we see those revenue volumes come back through, a significant portion of of those extra revenues falls through gross margins, falls to EBITDA, and that's why we have confidence in in that number. Second question from from Sam. You mentioned that there is upside from existing phase two trials potentially becoming phase three. Slide 12, which I can go back to just so I can see it, showed 2,900,000 of the order book is from five phase three projects. What sort of contracts are these with such low average values? So the key thing to remember here is this is an order book at a point in time. So we are these are ongoing long term projects that we're delivering. So the value of 2.9 is the what's left, if you like, of those three phase three projects in the order book. It's not the original total value of those phase three projects.

42:29 So it's it's a time set. It's a it's a a point in time where we are on those particular projects. But also, it's an element of the fact that some of those phase threes are in rare indications, which due to the number of patients available means that they tend to be smaller than in some of the bigger areas, Huntington's, and then even bigger areas of a d, p d, etcetera. So that's hopefully explain why why you see that. Brown, maybe one for for you. There's one from Ian m here. You're operating in a relatively small market segment. What is the plan for for gaining such significant scale? Would you be better as part of a larger group rather than rather than independent? Yeah. No. That's a that's a very good question. I think we should always sort of keep something like that in mind. Right? Obviously, we aspire to become the next Google, so to speak, and we think we've got a platform that can do that. But at the same time, we also want to make sure that we capitalize on synergies. I think the first step for us to do is to actually open our platform and maybe our organization up a little bit more to collaborations and actually really look at plug ins for our platform, but also to be open to contribute.

43:42 So in the the midterm, as we've laid it out in the capital raise, we definitely want to be reaching out more into sort of our ecosystem of providers. And, of course, if at at some stage, that means that there's actually a true synergy and some m and a elements might make sense, we will we will pursue that. And, frankly, that can go in both directions. I mean, obviously, I'm I'm realistic with the capital raise and the valuation which we have now, But we we also know that we've got some highly motivated institutional investors who are willing to listen to to further opportunity there, I think. Maybe suffice to say as well that a bit closer to home, we are, in any case, already part of always a bigger project. Right? So, obviously, we're contracting with big pharma and with biotech, but we're often working with the IXIMS, the IQVIA, the Fortrayas for those who know sort of these big clinical research organizations in the world. And so getting good agreements and getting preferred vendor relations with them will already be a big boost as well. So I think the mantra is definitely more collaboration, more synergies, whether that will pan out at some stage at sort of a a bigger collaboration, that that remains to be seen. I think it is very early to say that. I will maybe, if I can, take some of the can I call them fun questions? I don't know if they're fun, but there is I think the first question was around whether the

45:12 Trump presidency will have an impact. I think another one was about UK budget. I'll be quite short, of course, but I think without going into politics, I I lived in The US during the first Trump presidency, and I know that it didn't have any negative impact on pharma research. Traditionally, pharma actually supports a republican government, and a republican government often is somewhat better for pharma budgets, I I would say. But but I think sort of keeping sort of these generalities apart, we are very much operating in an area if I was, for example, a vaccine business today, I would maybe be a little bit more worried. But as we're operating the CNS space, I've seen sort of the moonshot program from the White House survive for several decades now regardless of the presidency.

46:09 So I I'm I'm very confident that we will see continued growth. In terms of The UK budget, I'm not sure if that question was towards sort of the a market and investment or whether it's the health care budget. I'll maybe take the latter as I think that's an important one. There is an element of who is going to fund Alzheimer treatments, Parkinson's treatments as they gain momentum now. I mean, you may have seen indeed that, thankfully, there are approvals of drugs in Alzheimer's disease, specifically from companies such as Biogen and Lilly, for example. And so the MHRA has approved those drugs, which is actually a bold decision. Europe isn't at that stage yet. But NICE hasn't decided to reimburse those yet because, obviously, there is an fear that there will be a tsunami of of expenses there for patients who might not necessarily all benefit. But I think that's where we come in again.

47:08 When you talk about post marketing surveillance, which is an additional market that I'm sure will be created now, which very much exists already in the oncology space, for example, We're talking about identifying patients based on biomarkers that will be eligible for reimbursement or that have to be monitored for safety and efficacy parameters. And that will, at the end, actually also inform whether whether a reimbursed product can come to market. Maybe maybe I can add to that as well, Brad, in terms of The UK budget because what obviously, one other thing that came up with UK budget was the increase in employer NI. That, of course, will impact us like like every company. We expect that about a 100,000 of extra cost will come into the business a year off the back of that because we are a an an employee based business, people based business.

48:02 So we expect to see that. And, you know, of course, there's also the the fact that the AI market, as Bram, you mentioned, now it does attract some some long term IHT tax, you know, but I think the market itself was fearing that it might be worse. So in in many ways, I think AIM was slightly was relatively pleased that it wasn't worse than it than it than it turned out to be. I think this kind of covers the questions. I don't know, Grant. If you see there's anything else there that we might not have or if anyone else wants to type a question or repeat something that we may not have covered, please feel free to to do so. There's still a bit of time left. Otherwise, we'll be happy, of course, to give you guys some time back as well.

48:51 I might just jump in then. Thank you for answering those questions from investors. Course, the company can review all the questions submitted today, and we will publish out the responses on the investor meet company platform. But just before redirecting investors to provide you their feedback, which is particularly important to the company, Bram, could I just ask you for a few closing comments? Sure. Thanks very much, Alessandro. Hopefully, we've been very clear today that what happened at the end of twenty twenty four is very much a first signal of what we expect to continue in 2025 and to accelerate, and that's also why we did the capital raise. The capital raise was not to fill our coffers, but was very much to invest in areas where we know that that acceleration needs to happen. It's expanding the size of the market in which we play, which has which is vital, and then you've seen that.

49:40 But we're building on something that we already have. So I think in the short term, we very much built on a trend that has already started. In the midterm, I'm excited to say that we are really going to explore what our platform can do in other areas as well, and I think that is a new area for the company. It is not new for me, which is why I feel very confident that this can be done. And, obviously, we will make sure that we continue to report out to you, and and and you'll be the judges of that progress. So with that, thank you very much both from Grant and myself to everyone who dialed in and listened to us, and we look forward to reporting to you in the future. Take care. Brown, Graham, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the management team can better understand your views and expectations?

50:34 This will only take a few moments to complete, but some should be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of IXICO PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.