Aptamer Group PLC (APTA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Aptamer Group plc Interim Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] 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 where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. And I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Arron Tolley. Good afternoon to you.

Hello. Good afternoon. Welcome to our interim results 6 months to 31st of December 2023. So the presentation we're going to give today has got 3 broad sections to it. We'll first do an introduction, as usual, about the company and our technology. We'll then move on to our H1 overview and talk about operational and financial progress. And then we'll talk about post-period updates in terms of operations and technical progress. So my name is Arron Tolley. I'm one of the co-founders of Aptamer Group. And I founded the company several years ago or many years ago now. In fact, with David, when we recognized the gap in the market for affinity ligands. We'll come on to talking about a bit later.

Hi, everyone. I'm Dave Bunka. I'm the Chief Scientific Officer and as Arron said, the other Co-Founder of Aptamer Group. I've got a background in molecular biology, but it's really in Aptamer Technologies, I've worked with this platform for very nearly 25 years, which is quite worrying for me. Andrew?

Thanks, Dave. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Andrew Rapson, I'm the CFO here at Aptamer Group. I have over 20 years of experience as a chartered accountant, joined Aptamer in August 2022, and I've worked in the [indiscernible] environment now since 2015.

So I'll start off with an introduction to Aptamer Group. So who is the Aptamer Group? So we're a biotechnology firm situated in York that David and myself founded in 2008. We are a highly specialized and unique company that solves difficult problems for our partners, most of which are large pharmaceutical companies. And we've partnered with most of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies globally where we provide our solutions. And the company is essentially set up to address a gap in the market. There's something that's called affinity ligands that we'll come on to explain later. So we started trading in 2012. After David and myself funded the company for the first 4 years, we then grew the company organically with revenue and angel investment, and we finally listed on AIM at the end of 2021. And the company and the technology is centered around our Aptamer platform, which essentially provides binder technology or affinity ligands to our partners in the life science industry. So what are affinity ligands? It's an interesting question. So affinity ligands are molecules that essentially act like small magnets, that's the best way to think of them. The magnet like particles that specifically attract certain of the molecules. So affinity ligands is a group of special high-value molecules that selectively grab onto certain proteins, cells or viruses that allow you to detect, recognize or deliver other molecules to other molecules. Where this is useful is things like pregnancy test kits, COVID tests, certain types of drugs delivered to cancers, specifically by antibodies. And affinity in its own right is a huge growing market. So what's the issue there? So why do we exist as a company. Well, antibodies have been around for decades, and they do not work or do not work well all of the time. They can take several months or even years to generate and when they've generated, they can be expensive to make. So over the past 30 years or so, the platforms have been developed to address these problems, starting with things like synthetic antibodies, all the way through to Aptamer, which is what we do as a company. And it's best to think of this affinity ligand market has been serviced by a continuum of different molecules all serving this common goal of selective detection, separation or delivery. And Optimer is unique as a technology in this area. They vary from antibodies in multiple different ways in that they're made from DNA and RNA first and foremost, and not protein. But when you compare them to antibodies, they have several advantages such as broader target range, rapid development, reduced immune-based side effects when they use these therapies and reliable and scalable manufacture when you need to scale up to make a large amount. So hopefully, that explains what we do, why we do it and where we do it. So I'll pass over to David now to give a refresher on the technology.

Thanks, Arron. Yes. So as Arron said, we use our platform to help solve challenges for our customers, collaborators and partners. So we see ourselves as an enabler of technologies. We use our platform to enable our customers and collaborators to do whatever it is they need to do. So they usually come to us with a target in mind, something that they want to work with. That's on the left-hand side of the slide here. So that could be anything from a small molecule, a drug of abuse, food additive and environmental contaminant, something like that up to a protein, something they want to study, something they want to purify or up to a really complex system like a whole cell, a virus or even a tissue. So they have something that they want to work with. They have an application, that's something they want to do with it on the right-hand side of the slide. Now that could be develop a new diagnostic, something to detect that molecule or monitor it. It could be, as Arron mentioned, a therapeutic. So something they want to treat or deliver or it could be a bioprocessing tool, so something they want to purify a high-value protein, for example. So they have a target, they have an application, but without buying the molecule sitting in between, they have no way of making those 2 sites meet up. That's where we're coming. So we use our Optimer platform to develop these binders using 1 of our 3 distinct discovery processes, and I'll come back to that in the next slide to develop these binders. So the platform or platforms that we have within the company are a good differentiator for us to help us address our customer and collaborator needs. So as I said, within the company, we've got a couple of USPs, the first one being our tailored approach. So we have 3 distinct selection methodologies depending on what the customer wants us to look at. So the way we handle small molecules is different to the way we handle proteins, and that is different again from the way we handle cells because they're all quite different beasts. So the way you handle them has to be different. So we've developed within the company 3 different methods. Now each of those in and of itself can also be tailored to fit the end goal. So the way we would develop a binder for targeted therapeutic, for example, is different from the way we would develop a binder for a research application. So we can tailor each of those 3 processes depending on the customers' end goal. The other USPs include our high-throughput automated platform. So we spent many, many years developing and refining our process and automating as much of it as possible. Now that gives us a number of advantages in and of itself. Obviously, an automated platform is less prone to error, but it's also much more readily scaled so we can scale it up or scale it down depending on the customer and client needs. It also allows us to process a lot of samples in parallel or a few samples in a lot of different conditions. So this gives us a lot more bandwidth, and it gives us a lot higher success rate. And then, of course, there's the know-how that goes along with that. So within the team, we've got well over 70 years' worth of experience in developing, characterizing and optimizing these binders to fit the end goals of our customers. So those are the USPs of the company. And now we'll hand over and we'll talk about what we do with that platform and the company goals going forward. So I'll hand you back to Arron.

Thanks, Dave. So essentially, a difficult topic to kind of to cover. But the shareholders previously for reasons that everyone is fully aware of decided to be fresh Board was needed and a new strategy for the company. The new Board took over last August, I returned to the business with the previous Chairman, Steve Hull, to refocus the company on our 3-pillar pre-IPO model, which delivered a success previously and actually is what got us to the public markets in the first place. So the first pillar is a clear focus on technical progress/innovation, improved product offering, developed and developing our high-value partnerships. Second pillar is to improve timelines for delivery, improved development costs and generate marketing data to help build our internal pipeline and give us some commercial flexibility. The third pillar is to go back to tight cost discipline as we did prior to the IPO, working with a lean cost base and a clear focus on commercial revenue delivery and pipeline expansion. I think one of the key take-homes on this slide really is just to point out that we've only been in place for 8 months at the moment. And I personally think we've made great progress so far, but we still have a lot of work to do. So the key highlights for the business. As I explained, the Board took over in August. We completed the cost base reset on time in September. And despite a highly inflationary environment and due to Andrew's diligence, we've stuck to that number. We've delivered solid technical progress in our internal processes, improving the cost of development, the speed and our efficiencies. Alongside this, we've demonstrated the potential for our platform to be used for therapeutic delivery. We're still signing deals and we're still making commercial progress. We've signed a follow-on agreement with a U.S.-based vaccine development company to produce Optimer binders for QC reagents. Contracts were signed in August '23 with a top 5 pharma company to develop multiple binders for various purposes. We've had a contract of up to GBP 150,000 circa, been signed with a U.S.-based biotech company to develop Optimer reagents for various different targets. An agreement has also been signed for up to GBP 0.6 million with a genetics medicine business to develop Optimers which allows them to target genetic medicines to specific cell types. So to give an exemplification of the internal processes and product offerings that we're developing, our normal service offering effectively focuses on assess the project feasibility of the customer to then discover their Optimer binders to develop them into the appropriate format and then test that performance, but we're now offering in-house validation in a number of different areas, which you can see over on the right-hand side in the light gray box. This gives us multiple other sources of potential income from areas such as immunohistochemistry development, enzyme activity assays, cell viability assays, which is where you would test where molecules were effectively goes onto cells, have screening, which is useful in diagnostics and also the important gene knockdown assays. So we can then validate the performance in the customers' desired end application and then support with the transfer of methods, importantly to the company. So 3 key take-homes here is the increased fee-for-service revenue for additional development work and increased potential for licensing revenue for proven binders that we generate and validate and an increased access to data to support our marketing activities. So I'll pass over to Andrew now, who will take you through the financials.

Thanks, Arron. So the financial review for the half year. So firstly, the income statement. Group revenue after the period was just GBP 0.3 million compared to GBP 1 million in the prior 6 months. This reduction in revenue was largely caused by a low in customer activity that occurred around the time of the fundraise. So the early part of the period was significantly impacted. It's taken some time to rebuild that pipeline. But we're encouraged by current pipeline levels that we've announced today as we work through the second half of the year. We also experienced a slowdown in target delivery from contracts that we signed at the end of the previous financial year and the early part of this period. What I mean by target delivery is really the when we sign a contract -- sales contracts, customer agrees to go ahead with work -- to do some work with them. We have to send those material to our laboratories first to get to work and find Optimer binders that will bind well to those targets. And in this period, we found certainly in the early part of the period were hampered by supply chain issues and customers were struggling to get some of those target materials across to us. So a combination of those 2 factors has really hampered this period. But we finished the period strongly and we announced GBP 0.8 million worth of deals in December. And I'm pleased so a good proportion of those have now arrived in terms of target materials with the laboratory, and we're starting to progress that work in the second half of the year. As we've mentioned in the announcement today, the pipeline now stands at a much more healthy level. We've got GBP 1.3 million of what we call production pipeline, and we've got GBP 2.9 million of the sales pipeline. Our production pipeline is probably worth -- we touched on this certainly from a revenue recognition point of view. And that GBP 1.3 million that's in production that number drops as we convert that pipeline into revenue. And it gets topped up again as the sales team negotiate deals out of the sales pipeline, which currently stands at GBP 2.9 million and pass that across to production. So there's a steady change up in through from the sales pipeline through to the production pipeline and then ultimately through into revenue in the income statement. So back on the income statement. The adjusted EBITDA loss for the period was GBP 1.8 million. That's down from GBP 2.5 million in the prior period. And that reduction in the loss really reflects the drop in administrative expenses, which was all part of the planned cost base reset, and we completed that reset in September 2023. So we now got the cost -- the fixed cost base down to the GBP 3.5 million. The headcount finished the period at 37, which was down from 46 at June '23, again, in line with the planned cost base reset. We're continuing to monitor the cost base, and we're pleased that we've been able to keep on track with that figure to date despite the inflationary pressures that everyone has been feeling of late. So if we move on to the balance sheet. Cash at the end of the period stood at GBP 1.8 million, up from GBP 0.2 million of June. And I'm pleased to say cash is still at GBP 1.8 million at the end of February, and that's following the receipt of the R&D tax credit payment from HMRC. That was just under GBP 0.5 million that we received in January. Net assets at the end of the period were GBP 2 million, up from GBP 0.3 million in June, which prefund raise. And the only other notable items really in the balance sheet there on the liability side, the trade and other payables and accruals are significantly down from previous periods. And again, that's just in line with the cost base reset. And in the prior period where we've moved into the new office and laboratory space. So lastly move on to the cash flow. You can see that overall, we had a cash inflow for the period of GBP 1.5 million, made of primarily of 2 key elements there. The operating outflow of GBP 1.8 million, which quite closely reflects the adjusted EBITDA loss for the period and then the GBP 3.5 million of fundraised proceeds, net proceeds that we received throughout the course of August and September. So the result at the end of the period was a cash balance of GBP 1.8 million. And like I've just mentioned on the balance sheet side, that's still at GBP 1.8 million. I guess at that point, looking further ahead, slightly and actually a key area of focus now is what our burn rate is and GBP 3.5 million fixed cost base on a gross level were sort of GBP 0.3 million spend per month. So you could see that the cash balance from the end of February takes us out another 6 months at least without contributing any sales to that balance. So that takes us to August '24. And as we've announced today, the pipeline, the production pipeline is GBP 1.3 million, and we've got another GBP 2.9 million of sales opportunities, and we'll be looking to convert that in the coming months. So this gives us a reasonable expectation that our cash balance can take us well into the next financial year. So that probably quite neatly takes us on to the post-period update. So I'll pass back to Arron.

Thank you, Andrew. So since January, we've worked really hard to overcome this kind of lull in customer confidence that it was priority due to our cash position prior to the Board reshuffle. There's no hide in it. This has affected our revenue pipeline, and we spent the past 8 months rebuilding confidence in the company and rebuilding our pipeline. So we now have around GBP 1.3 million of deals closed and passed into the production pipeline, as Andrew mentioned. And we have GBP 2.9 million in advanced stage pipeline deals. It's important to note that this is an increase of around GBP 1.5 million exemplifying in my opinion, the hard work that's been put in by the sales and marketing team over the last few months. And also, it demonstrates our strategic plan coming together. Commercially, we've developed binders for a top 5 pharma company that are currently undergoing evaluation to support their drug development pipelines. And this has a licensing potential in the short to medium term. We've developed patents with Unilever, protecting commercially valuable technology in the fast-moving consumer goods field. We've entered the second phase of development of a lateral flow diagnostic for Alzheimer's with Neuro-Bio. And we're currently manufacturing test amounts of our therapeutic delivery technology for evaluation by a top 15 pharma company, again, with a potential and realistic opportunity for licensing there. Now this all sounds great and very positive, but as we've told the numbers speak for themselves, and that is a fair point. Are we where we want to be at this point in time? The answer to that is no. No, we're not. But we are getting there, and we're working really hard to implement the strategy described previously in Slide 11. And before we move on and pass over to Dave to talk about technology and progress in that area, I'd just like to reiterate something Andrew said earlier, we can sign deals and we are signing deals, but we don't start to recognize the revenue until the customer delivers the materials. And it's a really crucial point that a low revenue number at one point in time does not indicate a lack of commercial momentum or interesting the technology as a business. It's a timing problem, which we're working really hard internally to fix. So on that note, I'll pass over to Dave to talk about the exciting technical progress we've made over the last several months.

Thanks, Arron. Yes. So I'm going to talk about 3 areas that we've been working on recently. So the first one is our novel Optimer+ platform. So hopefully, you'll recognize this slide from earlier on. This presents the continuum of affinity ligands that Arron mentioned previously with the antibodies and the protein scaffolds on the left and our Optimer platform on the right-hand side. Now what we've been working on recently is really exciting because our new platform really is the best of both worlds. And what I mean by that is we have this new platform that has the benefits of our existing Optimer platform, i.e., the small size, the flexibility, the ease of manufacture and the stability of our Optimer binders, but we've included modified nucleotides that essentially give us new building blocks that gives the ability to recognize targets in similar ways to the other molecules on the left of this continuum. So our new binders are like a hybrid, they sit in the middle of our Optimer platform and, for example, the bicycle platforms or the antibody platforms. So it really is the best of both worlds. It sits between those 2 technologies. Now this new platform allows us to address targets that maybe we haven't been able to address with our existing platform. That's not to say that the Optimer binders don't work, but these new binders we're expecting to work a whole lot better. Now that should obviously expand our share of the market. Important to note as well, these new Optimer+ binders are actually even faster to develop than our existing Optimer binders. So it gives us a faster turnaround time and that in turn leads to faster products to market. It's obviously great to see that this new platform is there. It's proprietary to Aptamer Group as well. So that's something that you're not going to be able to get anywhere else. So this platform is protected by over 30 granted patents covering everything from the building blocks themselves all the way through to the binder development processes. So this is entirely proprietary to the Aptamer Group. And obviously, any new binders that we develop using this platform will also be protectable in their own right. Now the demonstrate the data that we've been getting so far has been really well received by pharma partners and several of them are actually in conversations at the moment to trial this platform within their own needs. So again, we are enabling technologies with our new platform. So this is still in line with the business offering that we had originally. Another area that we're looking at is within the IHC space. So just to give you a little bit of background to that. So IHC is essentially a process that's carried out in pathology labs and research labs right the way across the world, including the drug discovery labs. Now to give you an example of how this works? If, for example, you go to the doctors with a suspect of having a disease maybe God forbid, that would be cancer. So normally, you would then be sent off to have a tissue biopsy, a small sample taken of that tissue. That will then be sent to one of these pathology labs, where it will be processed and essentially tested and stained to look for markers of disease, let's say, cancer, for example. So you can see with that powerful technology IHC, this immunohistochemistry has really become the gold standard in clinical diagnosis for things like cancer. And that's exemplified by the fact that the IHC market itself is valued at around $2.3 billion. So an absolutely enormous market. And like many things in the [Technical Difficulty] this has been dominated by antibodies. But IHC is an application where antibodies really do struggle. So this really comes down to all of those staining processes that I mentioned. Antibodies struggle to perform when you process these samples in all of those ways. Now our platform actually allows us to use all of those processing steps in the binder development themselves. So we have a much greater chance of success in this platform. And we were delighted to announce earlier in the year our new Optimer-Fc platform that we've patented, where we've developed our binders and then integrated them into these commercially available workflows. So you can see in the schematic on the left-hand side of the slide there, we've put our Optimer binders into this platform and demonstrated that they work very nicely. You can see some of the brown-stained images that we've used as examples on the right-hand side of the slide. So this really works really well. And as I said, we've patented that process, and we're now getting commercial traction in this space as well. The third area that is a great personal interest is in the development of targeted delivery systems for therapeutics. So as I'm sure everyone knows, a lot of drugs have what are known as off-target or side effects. Now those are the results of the drug going where it's not needed. So in the case of chemotherapeutic used to treat cancer, they go to the cancer, they do their job there, but they also have all of these off-target effects that lead to these horrible side effects, your hair falling out, your fingernails falling out, you're constantly feeling sick. Now if you can develop a drug delivery system, so a molecule that takes that drug only to, for example, the cancer, you can have a number of effects, and you can first make that drug more effective, but you also reduce the amount of off-target effects. So you make the drug more tolerable. Now this is not a new concept. Drug delivery systems have been around for a while. One well-known molecule is GalNAc. That is a drug delivery system that targets the liver. Now that's fine, but it doesn't specifically target, for example, fibrotic liver disease. Now despite that, GalNAc-associated conjugates that have been approved for market use generated revenues of over $1 billion in 2023. So you can see that there's real value to technologies of this type. Now as an exemplification we've generated Optimer binders that are selective to fibrotic liver disease. So you can see on the left-hand side of the slide there, our Optimer binders here stained with a pink flora. You can see very, very clearly, they binds to the disease cells on the top left, but they don't bind to the healthy cells. So they are selective. They will only take the drug to the cells it needs to be in. Now we've actually demonstrated this with a model gene therapy payload, and we've shown that we can deliver that. So in the data on the middle to right-hand side of the slide, what you can see is a dose dependence or a genuine therapeutic effect in the cell type that we're interested in, but no effect whatsoever in the cell type that we're not interested in. So what this is showing is that we can use our Optimer binders to specifically target the therapeutic only to the cell types that it's been needed in. Now we've actually presented this data to a number of pharma partners, who have been very interested in this data, and we're looking to take these samples forward. I've actually been involved myself over recent months preparing some of these materials, getting them ready to send out, doing all the quality control steps and send it this to our partners. So I'm now going to hand over for a summary and outlook.

Thank you, Dave. So just really to wrap up and leave you with the key points. We refreshed the Board with a clear focus on delivering shareholder value for the 3 main areas I discussed previously. We reset the cost base with ongoing tight cost discipline and this will give us a runway into financial year '25. The commercial team is working and has worked really hard and increased the pipeline by around GBP 1.5 million, and it currently stands at GBP 2.9 million of advanced stage deals. We've made process improvements and we've expanded our product offering, which have been successfully tested and trialed within the business, and we're able to now offer those as additional sources of revenue for the company. And we've also worked on increasing the capacity and improvement of project margins so that we can generate faster revenues with higher potential margins. We've made great progress, as Dave explained on our Optimer+ platform, demonstrating really good performance and suitability for it in therapeutic applications. And we've had good feedback and are actively discussing trials of this new technology with top 10 pharma partners. We formally announced our partnership with Unilever for the development of Optimers for novel applications in fast-moving consumer goods. And I believe we're in the process of submitting those patents very shortly. We've developed high performance binders for challenging targets in the immunohistochemistry space as Dave very eloquently explained earlier, and these are under evaluation with a top 5 pharma company, again, with a view to licensing revenue. And finally, just to reiterate, I have seen Dave, myself personally in the lab, manufacturing these therapeutic candidate Optimer binders for liver disease, which are going to be shipped very shortly to a top 15 pharma company for them to test internally as an alternative gene therapy delivery application. So I thank people for listening, and I'll pass over to the host to give us what I can imagine will be some very difficult questions.

Perfect. Arron, Andrew, David, thank you very much indeed for your presentation. [Operator Instructions] While the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with the copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via investor dashboard. Arron, Andrew, David, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. And if I may just start the Q&A with the first one here, which is as follows. You have released an increased pipeline value. But how much of the pipeline will you likely convert by the end of the financial year?

Good question. I can speak here historically that we've been able to close 45% to 50% of the deals that have come through the pipeline that are at an advanced stage. That was hampered previously, as we've mentioned several times in the presentation through a lack of certainty in the company's financial position, but we're beginning to see confidence build from customers in this area. It's taken us 8 months to rebuild that confidence. But we have increased the pipeline from around GBP 1.3 million, GBP 1.4 million to GBP 2.9 million and the technology is gaining traction. Aptamer, I believe, we're in the news this morning for diagnostic team motor neurone disease or ALS. And we're currently working on diagnostics for outsiders, which is kind of a parallel approach, and we patent in this technology with Neuro-Bio but these things are not an overnight turnaround, but we are getting there as a business.

Next question we've got here is, you mentioned the runway is into full year '25. But how far into the financial year, will this take you? Can you give us an indication of how long the current runway will last?

Okay. I'm happy to take that one. So I think I covered some of this off in the slides earlier. So we currently have GBP 1.8 million of cash at the end of February, and our burn rate is about GBP 0.3 million per month. So without any sales contribution, we can confidently expect to be up to August '24 based on that GBP 1.8 million. Clearly, the pipeline position has improved somewhat over recent months and with GBP 1.3 million in the production pipeline that's moving through the labs at the moment and GBP 2.9 million of sales opportunities that we're looking to convert in the near term. That gives us some confidence about extending beyond August. We'd expect to churn through that pipeline well within that period. So that gives us some confidence so we can push that out. Like I said earlier, we're continuing to monitor the cost whilst we're unwind in that pipeline. So we'll keep tight control of that throughout that period. But yes, we can confidently expect to go beyond August '24 at this stage.

A question on fundraising. Do you anticipate a fundraise in the next several months?

And we'll be very careful how I answer this question. And Andrew just explained to the runway without sales circa 6 months and what we're going to do in terms of operational costs. So we can all see what numbers are. And without a significant conversion of the pipeline, we would clearly need to seek shareholder support in the medium term. To be very clear, we're not currently planning to raise from them, while we work on converting this expanded pipeline and our existing pipeline of opportunities and delivering the work through the lab. A scenario with zero sales is highly unlikely as is a scenario with zero delivery. And while we're not forecasting licensing opportunities as a business because that was something we did previously, and it caused a lot of confusion. As I've said several times through the presentation, there are currently several discussions actively going on at the moment for licensing and for some of our successful products that we have with various different companies.

Moving on to the next question. When will the partnership with Unilever begin generating revenue or licensing revenue? How long will it take for this to convert from development?

I'll take that one again. So as I said, we're planning to submit patents imminently in this area. And until the use of the technology is public and what we're using it for. I really can't comment on what it's going to be for. What I will say is, and I think it's fair to say if our shareholders imagine a product like toothpaste or any other fast-moving consumer good product, you'd have some idea of the type of area that we're working in and the potential opportunity for that. Now in this type of situation, you're looking at several years before revenues would start to be developed and to drop in due to the length of time it takes to develop products and testing time to make sure that the products are safe and so on and so forth. So -- but as it is with all of our large partners, there's always potential for further revenue to be generated from partnerships in the meantime on other areas, other potential projects leading on from the success of this current project, as I've mentioned previously.

And the next question is, we've heard a lot about the technical progress you have made. Why are you personally so excited about the technical update section? And how will it put the company on the map? What does it mean in latter half?

This one for you, Dave.

Yes, I'll take that one. I think personally, I mean, it breaks down into the 3 areas that we've talked about. So I'll go through them in order. The platform, first of all, I mean, personally, I've spent 25 years working in the Aptamer space. It's always been of interest to me to see what an Aptamer can do and to see those boundaries pushed. But within that time, I've also seen the limitations of it. There are things that they can't do. So I've also kept my eye on things that are out there to improve that technology and see ways that we can actually push this forward. So any opportunity to make the Optimer binders able to do more is always of interest. And our new platform absolutely allows us to do that. So I'm really excited by the data that we've generated recently. And I'm happy to report that the pharma partners and so on that we've shown this data to, they're also really interested in it. So it's not just a personal excitement, there is excitement out there in the world for this technology, and they're looking to trial it. In the IHC space, again, we've known for a very long time that antibodies struggle with that sort of application in particular. And this problems like that are really why Arron and I set the company up in the first place to try and overcome some of these limitations. As I've said, we can actually apply a lot of those conditions into our selection process and make the binders do what those customers and collaborators really need it to do. And again, it was fantastic to see the patent getting submitted earlier this year around that new platform, the Optimer-Fc to solve again another problem. And personally, I think any technology that can be put out there to improve clinical diagnostics has got to be a good thing. Finally, obviously, in the drug delivery space, our platform has the ability, as I've demonstrated to improve the performance of drugs and reduce those off-target effects. And like many people, I've personally witnessed some of the horrible side effects from things like chemotherapies. And sometimes, it really does feel like the treatment can be almost as bad as the disease. So if you can get those drugs to be better targeted and go just where they need to go, you can reduce some of those side effects and make it less burdensome to have that therapy. And we've seen with our Optimer platform, the potential to actually do this. So this is why I'm really passionate about this. If we can help people having those treatments to have a better time of it, again, it's fantastic. And we've shown -- again, we've shown this data to several pharma partners, as I've mentioned, and they've been as excited by that data as we have. So as Arron said, I took the opportunity to down my lab coat, get down in the lab and push this forward because we want to get this out there. And then obviously, from a commercial point of view, these things are a massive value. So I mentioned the GalNAc conjugates that have been used clinically already generating over $1 billion in revenue in a single year. So there's clearly an advantage to make things better for patients, but also there's significant value in developing their clinical assets. One last thing that I thought was a real highlight for Aptamer technology use in general was the announcement earlier in the year about Astellas purchasing an Optimer-based company, Iveric, so over $6 billion based on the single FDA-approved Optimer-based therapeutic that those guys have developed. Again, this speaks volumes as to the value of this technology. So that's why I'm personally excited if we can develop something like that, that is going to put Aptamer Group on the map.

Another question is, have you seen an impact of the recession on your pipeline opportunities and conversion?

I'm happy to take that one. Yes, I think it's fair to say that we've seen the impact of the recession of late and certainly, the burden of proof for the larger opportunities is higher than it was. We've certainly seen that in recent discussions with customers, and they've been quite open with the restrictions that they've been placed under in terms of their budgets. Certainly, all top pharma companies seem to be relatively consistent in that. I think it's encouraging that in that environment that there's still -- we're proving there's still plenty of deals to be done, and that's evidenced, by the way, the pipeline has increased over the last couple of months in particular. And I think we're in a good place to be competitive in that environment. We're addressing this recession challenge through flexibility and contract negotiations. And then for the validation of our platform to demonstrate the potential of Optimer technology. As Dave has mentioned, we're really excited about the Optimer+ platform. We think that's going to help us gain market share and it really could be a real strong differentiator in our marketplace, which is -- we're in a proprietary position with that technology. So I think we're well placed to take advantage of the challenges in the market at present.

Perfect. And one last question here to wrap up. Affinity ligands seem to cover a large range of applications. Which sector of the market is your key focus?

Yes. It's a very good question, Dave, you can feel free to chip in. But this is one that we come across quite often and the best way to look at this, the fee-for-service arm of the business works across all sectors essentially because we have a platform technology and that means we can broadly generate revenues from multiple different areas. So the business was set up so that the fee-for-service arm can generate revenue and reduce the need for investment and give us exposure to high-value unmet needs in the pharma industry, which then leads to the potential high-value projects, licensing opportunities. I mean, for example, look at the deal we mentioned earlier with Unilever for the fast-moving consumer goods, it's got huge potential. The Alzheimer's diagnostic deal with Neuro-Bio, again, huge potential. So all of these opportunities have come from our fee-for-service arm, including the project for drug delivery that Dave has mentioned several times. All of this -- this exposure essentially possesses the genuine potential to turn into passive income streams from licensing revenue in the fullness of time, which we hope will underpin our cost base at some point in the near future. Essentially, the more scientific problems that we solve for large pharma companies, the more revenue we will generate on a fee-for-service basis, the more exposure we get to these opportunities, the more likely we are to be generating passive income through licensing, which will underpin the cost base essentially. I think the real value, though, for us as a business and the focus area and where the biggest upside is, is the application of the technology in drug delivery, where the platform has very unique USPs as Dave just explained, and lots of patent protection that stands a real chance of adding huge potential downstream value to the business.

Perfect. Thank you, Arron, David, Andrew. I believe those are all the questions we've got time for today. And of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we will publish those responses on the Investormeet Company platform. But before we direct investors to provide with their feedback, which is particularly important for the company. Arron, can I please ask you for a few closing comments.

Yes, very short and sweet. We appreciate and value all of our shareholders for supporting us listening to the update. We understand the frustration. We're a bit behind but please be patient, rest assured that we're working tirelessly as a team and as a company to deliver for us and for the scientific community at large.

Perfect. Arron, Andrew, David, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected to provide feedback in order that the Board can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Aptamer Group plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.