Bio-Techne Corporation (TECH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, while we're waiting a minute or 2, I'll just kind of start babbling a little bit. This is our fourth -- at least my fourth investor conference, in fact, it will be our fourth business. We didn't do anything 10 years ago externally, earnings calls, anything. So they've all been fun and they've all grown every time we've done it. And we always are pretty transparent, and we're known for that. We try to be authentic. We're more or less a Midwestern culture still and we try to live by those values. You guys have all given us credit for that. So today, we're going to talk about a lot of stuff. It is definitely a death march slide deck, sorry about that, but a lot in it. But it will be a good reference if nothing else. We are going to give our usual update on the 5 years, but we're going to actually talk about looking out 10 years even. So some of the new markets we're going into are -- they're going to be massive markets, but they take time to develop, things like liquid biopsy and selling gene therapy, and we want to give you a good sense for even though we've been laying track for 5, 6 years, what's the next 5 to 10 years look like? Because we're very committed. And we are going to definitely win big in it. So what do you think? Can we start? Looking at boss back there. All right. Let's go. All right. First and foremost, safe harbor, of course, and I won't spend much time on this. You guys all know they get online and do the reconciliations. We'll be talking about forward comments et cetera. Here's the agenda today. It's a long morning, but we'll try and keep it as fun as we can. And you definitely know who I am. Out of presenters today, starting with me for 42 more minutes and then we'll go move to towards presidents. We have Will, and we have Kim and Jim will -- we will put Jim at the end because that's where the numbers are. Oh, I'm on the wrong slide. Okay. I think it goes this way, never mind. We don't want you to leave in early, so we put the numbers at the end. So I've been -- this is my 11th year. I'm sure we'll get to talking about succession, that's been out there a while, and we've got news on that. The 3 internal candidates are all pictured on the slide there. I'll be presenting today. Feel free to take them for any test drive you want question-wise. So I'm in my 11th here. Jim is in his tenth here, but Jim has been with me like 14 years. And yes, we all did time at Thermo Fisher. So like many in this industry. Mark has been a good mentor and Mark, helping set up our first banking 10 years ago, all kinds of stuff, and it's been good. And we still tap them regularly for talent, which is also good. Our newest guy here as well is just under 2 years, also thermal, but also Quanterix also for Minnesota, a lot of domain knowledge in the balance sheet space. And I'll talk a little over themselves later. So our company, our products, has been hovering between $12 billion and $14 billion for the last year, at least. We are still largely a consumables-based company, which means we're very profitable, and we focus on that. You'll hear a lot about that today. We are still roughly 10% instruments. And about another 10% of that 81% is consumables that make the instruments to work. So it's really 20% when you think about businesses around instruments and, of course, the other stuff. Now when you break it down to what platforms. We're not a one-trick pony company. We've got a lot of platforms, and it's a portfolio-based company and we did that by design. We'll talk a lot about it, but these are the other products. The proteins, antibodies, the assays and the diagnostics on the bottom there. That's kind of the core of the company, the history of the company. We're 47 years old now. We're 37 years old when I joined, and those were the 4 platforms then. So we've gone into new things and adjacencies that make sense. We have a mission, and we want to focus on improving the quality of life by catalyzing advances in science and medicine. And we are all about the science. We'll talk about employee base later, but about 12% of this company are actually PhDs. It is a pretty big number. Think about it. Where it all began? When I joined 10 years ago -- 10.5 it was largely just a reagent-based company, a little over $300 million, contracting, wildly profitable. But there weren't many investments made. We probably made more changes in my first year than the next 9 altogether. But a few fun facts back then there weren't any computers in 2013. I bought the company's very first laptop is one example. There were 5 people in IT. There were 12 people in finance. There were 2 people in HR. We today have 200 people in digital with IT. We have 150 in finance. We have -- QC back then probably a dozen people. We were always known for quality, and we had -- we did -- definitely did been testing a lot of quality back then. We're much more sophisticated now. But now we've got QA/QC and a lot of regulatory for diagnostics. Our organization is now 250 people in quality and regulatory. And you'll see a picture of Qi later. She reports directly to me, needs to be independent to work and it's done well. So 10 years later, we have all that and more, but we've also looked into different acquisitions. We'll talk about, but different platforms, but they're all platforms that have synergies back to the content. And that's very, very key. The science, the juice is all about the content. So another reason we didn't make big changes 10 years ago, we just want to sell antibodies and proteins for a living. They're not very big ponds. Very small market growth back then, not a lot of funding back then and I mean roughly $3 billion. We got about a $2 billion market cap. We're public. Probably the best thing about us back then was our stock symbol, still a good one. And then today, it's, of course, much, much bigger, roughly $27 billion. You'll see all the same categories, but new ones, right, selling cell culture, gene therapy, tissue pathology, liquid biopsy. We've gone much broader in proteomic research in general, with our instruments are already proteomic based machines. So -- and drawing down further, those 7 categories return into 5 markets and the core being the top one, now roughly $6 billion. But you'll see the bottom ones, proteomic instruments, $3 billion, spatial, $5 billion, liquid biopsy, $9 billion drawing, and gene -- cell and gene therapy, $4 billion and growing fast. On the right, you see the growth rates. On the far right, you see our share position. So we got a lot of runway left to go on these markets, even the core, lots of diversity, lots of different innovation today. We will talk about the golden age of proteomics, but it's been good to us as well, all the way to the core of the company. End results are pretty hard to dismiss. So we've had about a 14% CAGR for 10-year number on the revenue line. Very, very solid operating income. We always made a lot of money, but we did like miss the '90s and dimming and a lot of approaches. So we're using SPC now, and we're using different things to actually create more EBITDA. So even though we've invested more. So we have always new people in the staff positions to make a real company, a real company. We haven't lost our ability to focus on the bottom line and we've created a lot of value. We used to test every product we made every month, whether it's sold or not, some are being tested after 10 years and never sold a single vial as an example. So we decided, well, maybe it's -- we should use statistical process thinking or maybe test when we get an order. And so there's been a lot of things like that over the years and a lot of cash to go with it. And we've used that cash, we'll talk about acquisitions, but that's been a very key component of our growth as well as the M&A side. We're going to talk today a lot even though we've got competitors online, and I think we're very transparent. We're going to talk about the magic and the secret sauce that makes our company work. And it's worked well for 10 years, and it's going to keep working well for another 10 or 20, I think. We follow -- we're all big company people, multinational backgrounds. This is my sixth business in my career over $1 billion P&L and the guys are about the same. So we're used to this, and we follow a subsidiary model approach. So I wanted to be able to divide and grow. We're going to talk about our segments and our divisions later, but each business unit has a division structure and a regional structure. And essentially, the divisions have a global P&L responsibility, and they're responsible for the strategy for the headcount, the capital and decisions like that. And then we work together with our regions and our channels to execute those plans. They also have their own pro forma P&L. So Europe will have a pro forma P&L. But you need to think of Europe or APAC as a smaller pie of the company that reported the bids by business to the divisions as well. And then we share, of course, resources and the staff functions across HR, finance report directly up no matter where they are in the global -- in the world. Very common model. If you have an MBA or took organizational design, you'll know that they all work. It's always about the people. You have to design organizations around the people you have, and you have to look for people to fit in the model that you're running. And we've done a good job with that. We'll talk later, but we have all been around pretty well in this industry and networks are very good, and we know how to attract people and the -- more success we've had as a company, we attract even better people. I for one on my level here, the CEO for my direct ports tenures, I've never used search once, never use a recruiter. So it's all been through network or through finding the right people. They can really come to us. Here is the magic that makes our process work. We call it the Bio-Techne business process. But every company has to have at least 2 rhythms a year. You'd always have your strategic planning process, and you'll have your budgeting process coming off of that, at least that. You have to do that. We have another one in the middle. So we spend a lot of time prioritizing. So after we set our directions of strategic needs and such, we actually 0 base every value stream we have in the company every year. So we break the company down every year. We're always trying to actually stop stupid stuff early and cheap and focuses much of our resources on new products, new directions, new investments for growth every year. If you don't do that, all you have to work with every year is just the money that comes out of your growth. And after you pay merit raises and everything else, you're not much left to work with. And this is a trap that a lot of companies fall into. They don't make the tough decisions to stop doing things they shouldn't be doing. Sometimes a big project should be killed just because it's a bad project. Just because it's big, doesn't mean it's good. There are always pet projects. There's always things. Doing this process last year, we broke it down the company with 400 work streams. That means every fraction of every Tom, Sally and Harry, they're in the company no matter what they're doing. There's a core, but there's R&D, there's every function realized. And then we break it down and we prioritize when we come out [indiscernible]. And then when that's done, we do a 5-year look ahead with that. Year 0 essentially is the year you're in. So you know you've done it right when it matches your P&L currently. You found all your resources. That means year 1, looking 1 year ahead should be pretty close. And guess what? The budgeting plan becomes pretty easy then because you decided most of the hard work. I'm going to talk about that. And here's how we do it. And I've talked about this in the past, but this is the use that makes our company work. We -- every work that we have, we break down into a triangle. There's a cost on the X-axis. And on the right side is the Y-axis is the benefits list. And you see the filter. So we evaluate everything we do by these benefits versus the cost. And on the right, you see this curve. Those are all the 400 projects, value streams in the company. And they're all little triangles. And all you're doing is stacking slopes. The higher the slope, the better the project because you've got better benefits versus smaller cost. It's not perfect. It's an 80-20 rule, but it does a few things for you. It gets everybody talking. It's a bottoms-up process. So we don't hand down targets and try to beat people up saying they've got to hit these numbers. They roll bottom up to us and telling us what they can do and then where the resources run out, we all decide together. The divisions, I'll do this individually first, and [indiscernible] prioritized it in the division, and then we use software, and we actually run the whole company against each other. And so the -- think of it as towers of prioritized projects and then they run out of room at some point resourcing. We always want to have more to do than we are currently doing. We have ideas. There's things we want to change to. That's the way we run the process. But everybody knows what's going on. So if Will loses some projects, the Kim, you'll know why. And we can sit as a management team and go, well, that project is out now. Does it need to remain out or should we bring it back in? Well, we got to bring it back in because if we don't do that project, the $3 billion you have in, they'll never happen. That kind of stuff occurs. Well, then we bring it in, but then something else has to come out. So we actually know exactly where our resources are, so we're never over-constraining people. This is key to innovation. If you want to have a bunch of people that won't innovate, give them more work to do what they can do. If you don't have free time, if you don't have the ability to actually sit back and think once in a while and you're always under the gun, you're not going to be very creative or innovative. So it's important. It's also a common language. Everybody talks. Everybody works it up together, guess what, we have very little politics in this company. There's not a lot of dog eat dog or competition division. People know why they lost versus somewhere else. They know it's for the best of the company. And it's a process where the truth will set you free. If you want your project in, tell the truth. If you're too risk averse and you don't put the numbers down, you won't get the money. If you're too courageous and too bold and overpromising, you're going to get the money and you better deliver. So you're measured on it. So we have a core dev team that works cross the whole company, making sure we're all doing this in parallel for speed safe, but also there's no gaming, right? So it's all done kind of in the right kind of context. This has worked for us. It's worked so well. You won't see many companies have a slide like this. This is not a year-on-year comparison. This is a year-on-year comparison, 5 years ahead. This is when we got done with the plan. And looking at that plan, what we predicted to be 5 years from now, now looking back, how did we do? How did we predict 5 years away? And that's here you see on the prediction versus how the results were within 5% more or less every year for the last 5 years. Now we have 10 years together, we can go back and start measuring to see how we did. I think this is pretty phenomenal data because it's important to know that. So we're doing this now. We'll tell you about the next 5 years and 10 years. I'm telling you that we're going to be close to we're telling you because we've got history to prove it. Now a little bit on the company. We are broken down by 2 segments, and we have 5 divisions. So in the Protein Sciences segment is about 3/4 of the company really. We have our research reagents and then we have our analytical instruments, okay? And the brands are across the bottom. And the antibodies and proteins in the reagent side mainly. But on the analytical tools, we have really our assays are -- assay kind of proteomic-based analysis tools are all there and all work together. On the right side, we have the diagnostic reagents, another core of the company. But we've gone into liquid biopsy and we've gone in the carrier screening. So we have the diagnostics division, then we have Spatial Biology with the AV acquisition and now Lunaphore. We will talk more about that later. So we have a lot of new things. Another way to look at it and internally kind of call this the legs in our stool. We have our core products, and we like to think of our company this way because we want to always be leveraging our reagents into the new things we're getting into. We didn't just buy instrumentation for Western blotting because we wanted to be in Western blotting. It's because Western blotting depends on antibodies, and we're a world leader in antibody. So we wanted to know if there's going to be a directional move that way. We want to be part of it. So that's the same thing for Spatial Biology, cell culture and gene therapy, liquid biopsy as well as proteomic and analytics. These are all big spaces. We talked about that earlier, but they're all growing well. We have a low share positions. We have innovation IP we'll talk about, but we also have synergies back to the core. We have 6,000 proteins in our catalog. We have 40,000 antibodies that we make in our catalog, another 0.5 million that we source. We have over 20,000 assays. We are the inventor of the ELISA Kit 40 years ago. We have a brand-new platform that's now 13485 approved for multi-omics new assays with our Ella platform to really take ELISA the next level. And you'll hear more about that later from Will. So now are we done? Not done yet, another 10 years to think about it. So I used to talk 10 years ago that -- and I have a lot of M&A experience. So we talked about our growth to be largely 75% M&A-based and 25% in organic internal and some of you remember those days. And now it's kind of reversed. So we're still going to be big in M&A. It's important to us, but we've got a lot of horses in the stable here that we can drive right now, so they are growing. And we're going to drive all the cell and gene therapy, it's going to be a massive market. We've been laying track for 5 years. We're going to be a big winner. We were the company that was able to land Wilson Wolf. Everyone tried. We did it. Proteomics, our instruments are productivity tools. They're not overly expensive but they were creating tremendous value and they have lots of flexibility. We're going to talk today about the extensions and applications these instruments can do. Look at biopsy and no one's going to tell you it's not going to be a major winner long term. And eventually, when some of these companies track solid tumors, it's going to be even bigger. But we think we have the best platform out there, better than circulating DNA, cell-free DNA, we have exosomes, and we have 250 patents protecting it. And it's Spatial Biology. We're really in 2 camps. We're in the discovery camp, but we're also in the analysis camp and single cell something is on everyone's minds. And we're very big in single cell analysis, and now we can automate that whole process too with our Lunaphore acquisition, another asset everybody has been trying to get. So our strategies overall, you could probably look at 90% of everybody's strategic plan, you'll have these categories probably. It's more what's in them that makes sense. We are definitely going to drive innovation. We talked about how just a little a while ago with our prioritization process, but we have to be a product company and an innovation company, first and foremost. We're not done expanding. We've got $100 million of business in China. It's 10% of the company. It was 3% when I joined. It's definitely in a low right now. We'll talk about that, but it's going to -- it's coming back, and it will come back strong, I think. And we're just not that big yet. So we'll be one of the first come out, I think, everybody. M&A is still a strategy for us. We make a lot of cash. We're going to put it to work. I don't think we'll be doing $4 billion or $5 billion a year, but I think you can still count on a couple of years for us for a long time. We're not known for doing big deals. We're not knowing for going after public processes too well, but we do -- we have become more or less a benevolent kind of an acquirer. And if -- and this is a climate where their funding is tighter, IPOs are nonexistent, and it's a target-rich environment. So expect more M&A. We have focused a lot on the customer the last few years. We've talked about that in the past, to win in antibodies, you've already got to have a great search engine capability. We're going to talk about that and our investments there. They're big investments, and we're still doing them. And you cannot do this about a team. So we have a new Head of HR, came from Apple. We're focused a lot on culture. We always have been. We're focused on talent. We're going to talk about EPIC in a second, but we've done a really good job, I think, of finding people to think alike that want to be part of this mission together. So, we are product based. We leave with quality. R&D Systems brand, as you know, is a gold standard brand. We don't have to worry about that. So it's about building on top of that. So we do invest roughly 8% to 10% back into our business. it varies between reagents instruments, of course, but that's kind of a number. I'm not going to go too deep just to show you before all gets up, that our instruments are synergistic with our content. And antibodies really go everywhere. It's kind of the thread across the whole company, but we have more than that. We are the world leader in proteins. It's a proteomics world right now, and we're doing well with it. IP wise, when I joined, we had -- well, first of all, I want to understand how could we be probably 80% market share in proteins, 54% op margins back then and have no IP. We weren't growing anymore. Even today, we're still very profitable. We've invested in the business, but we have focused -- and we had 0 patents 10 years ago, not a single patent in this company. And today, we're knocking on 1,000. So most through acquisition, but we're actually doing quite a few now internally, organically as well. Not a lot in this presentation, but another process that I brought in and I grew up on a 3M was the tech console concept. So we have all our top technical people who meet every month and really focus on what else can we do together? If we marry platform A to platform B, and we're the only ones in the world that have these platforms, what does that give us for a differentiation for a competitive value. And guess what? It creates a lot of new programs to evaluate every year in this prioritization process. So we have lots of innovation now and lots of IP forming. Exosomes are great carriers for a lot of things, including antibodies. So there's lots of stuff we can -- we're focused on. So expect more organic growth of this company. We are global. Everybody and me included, have done a lot of global work. I lived 3 years in Europe, I think, I did a count recently. I've been at China 75 times in 25 years. We're all the same that way. It's -- we're not U.S.-centric. But we've a long way to go, APAC is just getting there. India, this will be a big year for India, we think. Korea is really coming back on the March. Japan is having a good year, knock on wood. They only have 1 of the 3 good usually. But this is one of them. In Europe, we've got a lot of synergies left of drive in Europe. We have now 4 full subsidiaries in Europe, and there's more to do, but there's plenty of growth there as well. We have 35 sites. You saw that in the first slide. That's a lot for the sized company. We could focus on saving nickels and integrating and giving you a KPI scorecard, that's how we're doing that. I'd much rather focus on growth. A lot of these are due to acquisitions. And if we focused on integration, they're removing their site, we'd lose the people, the very reason we bought the company in the first place. So we have a lot of small companies with the sites are based on that. We don't have -- we're not overly saturated or full of inventory warehouses or things or distribution centers or things like that. We're doing fine there, and we have great operations people. But we are very global now, and we're proud of it, and we've got sites of excellence all around the world at this point, centers of excellence. We've come a long way, headcount wise in a very short time really. I mentioned some fun facts before. I'll mention some more, but very proud of some of the areas we've grown in. Very proud we've done digitally, very proud of we've done with the regulatory side. We've come a long way to be player in diagnostics, really, in a short time, you guys know there's a lot of bodies in the ditches and diagnostics world. So we plan to win and we're doing well. We're now roughly about 3,200 employees worldwide and about 380 or so are PhDs. So very, very science heavy. M&A will remain strong. I -- we can be choosy. We always have been. And we'll keep -- and the growth rates we've talked about and the numbers I'll talk about later, really have no M&A in them. But let's look at the scorecard, there's -- before you count, there are 22 companies on here. and they've all had a big impact. And I can genuinely say out of all these 22, there's only 2 I wouldn't do again. So it's not too bad. And they're small ones. And to be fair, we didn't probably do enough due diligence. They weren't material enough, and we -- shame on us. But the more important ones have done well. Just to bring you an example, we're talking about the value creation, but $3 billion or so of spend creating $11 billion of market cap. And you look at what ProteinSimple did for us, we bought it back in '15, $50 million business, not quite profitable. We paid $300 million for it. Today, over $250 million, a 20% grower with 35% op margins. What's that worth on the public IPO market, billions. So this -- we've got a lot of good assets. We've become pretty well known for finding assets just as they're ready to take off. It's a good reason for that. Most of these companies have come to us early in their cycle because they needed a special juice to make their machine work, their assay work, whatever, content drives everything. And so we get in very early with a lot of companies out there. And that gives us really an unfair advantage to get after them and buy them more quickly. They get to know us as well. They know that we want to bolt on, not integrate. We don't ramp a new sign down their headquarters, the first day they come on board. We more or less actually wait until they ask us, where is our sign for Bio-Techne. So it's gone well. The last 3 years, of course, a little softer due to COVID, of course, but doesn't mean we haven't been active. And we're probably may now more active than ever. There's a lot of little companies that need help right now, and we know a lot of them. I think I covered most of this, but we're looking still life sciences. We're missing a few things I wish we had. I wish we had more media as an example, for our cell and gene therapy area. We don't have cryopreservation. There's a few things to tick off. We've talked a lot about needing automation in our spatial business. Now we have it. We work with everybody out there. We know everybody out there and we pick the best one. And we can tell you exactly why it's the best one, and you might ask him later, just why that is. We try to get into a first mover type of situation. I think we're there with like Wilson Wolf, a great example. Probably outside [indiscernible], the only other de facto standard in cell and gene therapy is the GRx bioreactor, 800-plus customers in virtually every clinical going on out there today, it's going to be a big winner. But we need some time. We are customer focused. I'm going to talk about our journey, spending more and more all the time on this journey. You have to have a world-class website. We are now -- I bet we spend -- we buy probably AdWords over $10,000 a quarter. So it's a $6 million to $8 million spend. I used to be on the bottom line, but now we drive our search engines. Personnel-wise, the organization digitally, we're organized under a digital leader reporting to me. So the IT and the corporate marketing are all together under that umbrella because it really works together. You want to leverage a lot you can for corporate marketing, trade shows, the website, the branding, et cetera, product marketing in the divisions. And so they work together that level. We draw the line there. So because of that, we have been always on marketing kind of engine going at the corporate level, working with the scientists in the divisions. We try to remove the friction in the business. We have a lot of products, creating an experience with the customer to do one-stop shopping is no small feat in this company. We still don't have that yet, and we're still growing well. So there's more runway. In 2 to 3 years, we'll have complete one-stop shopping in this company, and it will create even more growth guaranteed. Quality. I mentioned 250 people now on our regulatory QA/QC function from virtually nothing 10 years ago. You might think it costs a lot of money, but -- and it does, but it also creates a lot of growth. And it's the terms you have to play by if you want to be in these spaces. [indiscernible] to be in these lucrative, high-growth areas like liquid biopsy diagnostics, LDTs in general, you've got to make these investments. And data is behind everything we do. You probably haven't gotten any presentation also putting up an AI slide lately. But here's our AI slide. We have done a remarkable job. So we -- you're a customer, you're on -- you're looking -- you kind of know what you want. You're doing research in a certain area. There's a 0.5 million antibodies out there and you're starting your search before you start buying from 100 different suppliers out there. And you find our website. We actually can, in real time, tailor the screens we give you by where your eyeballs are on the screen, honest to God. So we do that. And then we can very quickly predict what work you're doing. Based off what professors work, whatever. And we start making recommendations in real time over eye. You might want to be looking at this type of product for these experiments we think you're doing. So we kind of blow people away. They get kind of weird it out even over just seeing how fast we can get on top of what they're doing. And we're getting better and better at this, call it machine learning, call it whatever you want, but it is real-time data analysis that's not just decision-free based type of software. And we have dozens of people working on this at this point. And it's becoming a bigger and bigger portion of our website experience. And it's all about that. It's all about giving that customer, that scientist and experience that they're going to only purchase many things and one visit to come back, right, to understand, wow, these guys have a lot of stuff and they get it. They know what I want to work on. They know what I need to buy. And they have good brands. Everybody knows R&D systems. So lastly, just getting into some of the culture. We've been using EPIC forever. So of course, we measure everybody on how the results are, but we also have soft metrics as well. We try to measure people on their EPIC values. But before we get to that, we want to talk about we emphasize this. We're really focused on building the talent pipeline. We have very low attrition from manager. We're going to talk about ESG in a minute, but we've got great diversity in the company. We really fortified belonging. We actually ask everybody to try to -- everybody thinking about it, get a friend that work, have a friend at work, the reason to actually want to work at the office and not remote working for one example. And we're optimizing our systems, and we're using all the best software now and we're moving to Workday and all these types of things that everybody else has, and then it works great. So it's empowerment, it's passion, it's innovation, it's collaboration. These are the 4 leadership attributes that we try to get everybody focused on and all our leaders score well in these areas. If they don't, they don't really rise or they don't -- they're not really for our company. And we take a pretty hard line in some things. We're definitely a collaboration company. I'm not real big on work from home. We have our policies and you're allowed to with manager approval, but very rare instances where it's a complete work from home type of position. First of all, largely, we're 3/4 lab based. So the lab people have to be in and there's an equity issue. So we try to get everybody in the office and collaborating, working together, keep them safe, of course. And -- but that's our culture, and it's working for us. Here's my team as of today. There are 8 new faces in this team, all but one are due to retirement or the previous individuals. So just to focus on a few. Brenda retired our GC from the very beginning, she is a remarkable GC for us. We all know in the last couple of years. You see QI there in the middle. She has been in the company a long time. Always wanted to do the right things for quality and finally got her way. I mean she has a 250-person organization right now. And I think she could manage 1,000, to be honest, she is amazing. You see Brenda there. Her old e-mail was [email protected], just to show how long she was at Apple. She opened up all the retail globally for Apple, globally for HR. I can't go in here with her around the world, her walk into Apple and people like thinking she's a celebrity. So she used to work for jobs and she's got stories, believe me. Gary Latham came with Asuragen. We now have a CTO. It's been a while. For me, a CTO was not -- we have CSOs in the businesses, but the CTO, it's as much about process and organization skills being a leader, driving tech counsel more than just being the smartest person in the room. This guy is both. This guy is super smart. He knows all the background science of all our platforms literally, and can organize like I've never seen. So he's running tech counsel beautifully. Really thrilled the board is really thrilled to have him on the board. And they were pressuring me for a year to find a CTO to be honest. So I'm glad I could check that box. Lynne retired with Asuragen and ran MDD here at [indiscernible]. It's an internal and he took over fabulous. We just hired Dylan from Thermal. Guess who with the antibody guy was at Thermal, it's Dylan. Dylan is on our team now. And then Peter Schuler on the end, taking over for Gary, who just retired and he also thermal and brand mass spec in Europe for thermal, among other things. Another strong PhD, but very good organization skills, has been in the U.K. as well as Germany. And we all know that in our company, our biggest opportunity in Europe is Germany. Germany should be our biggest business, it's not. So he'll be focused on that. It should be low-hanging dive in. ESG, we're on it. Yes, we're doing all the things you have to do for emissions as such. We've always been good at social. We just haven't taken much credit for it and now you kind of have to in your proxy and everything. And so we're bringing all that data forward. But look at the data, we're 50% female, 35% minority, we're 25% Chinese in our headcount as an example. So diversity isn't our issue. We actually have almost 50% of all our management are female, which is a pretty high score. Due to this, we've made all the Forbes the last couple of years. So we're doing well there, I think. A diverse board as well, led by an independent chair. I'm not Chairman. After 10 years, I'm still not and they are focused on the CEO succession, and there's a [indiscernible] committee, and I get to play a part, but it's my decision. They've made me clear on that and -- but it's fine. It's been a good board. They virtually have given me everything I'd ask for. We even had at one point permission to do 3 acquisitions at once. So we've built credibility for delivering and that's going pretty well. I can't complain. So just in the last slide. We remain well positioned in growing and underpenetrated markets. It's the bottom line. We have a great team, and we're in a lot of big ponds, and we're -- we've got a lot of runway in all of them. We're focused on the culture and we're focused on being a team. Minimizing politics, working together, collaborating and growing and having fun and making good signs and taking care of our stakeholders. We are going to be one of the first to come out of this macro environment. We were one of the first to go into the soup and we wanted the first to come out. There'll be, I'm sure, questions on China. We see it in the light end of the tunnel in China already as an example. And because reagents kind of lead the way. Consumables leave the way anyway. We are not changing our strategy. We're trying to build a life sciences and diagnostics portfolio, right? We're 5 divisions today. I think in 10 years, it'll be 10 divisions. I think we're going to talk about it, but we'll be much, much larger. But organized it the same way in a continued divide and conquer subsidiary approach. It works. We have a great team now, and I'm sure it'll just even get better. Good results, attract great people. And we have the door continually gets knocked on. So we're known for integrating well. We're known for making smart moves. We haven't made too many poor decisions on the M&A front. And I think that will continue as well. We're very rigid with our methodology. We don't land a lot of public processes because we don't like doing deals under 10% ROIC in 5 years. It was just announced I think Abcam at Danaher was a 5% model. I can't get you guys excited over a 5% model. It just doesn't work. And so our portfolio because of that is positioned for high growth, and we're going to spend the rest of the day telling you just about where that's all going to come from. And it's a very -- it's plenty of detail. I'm sure somebody slides you're looking and going, oh, my God, I mean I need college credit when I leave here, but try to make it fun and ask any questions you want. We'll be very transparent. We got chairs up here for later, and I'm hoping that you'll walk away being excited as we are, okay. With that, I'll hand it over to Will.

Good morning. Thank you, Chuck. Yes. Listen, it is such a pleasure to talk to you about the Protein Sciences segment. I've been in role for a couple of years. And as we talk through the business today, there's literally no place I'd rather be in no other time, I'd rather be in this role. It's an incredible time. And with that, we'll talk about the golden age of proteomics. So we're going to start there. We're the world leader in Protein Sciences, period, right? It's a lead that we've got, and we're going to extend under Chuck's leadership and my leadership going forward. So another company is better positioned per share growth kind of during this period. So I'll start to talk today just by talking about a couple of megatrends and big drivers in Protein Sciences. I'll relate that into our strategy, and then we'll talk through some of the strategy execution piece as we go forward through the day, and then we'll conclude there with the summary. So first, I want to talk about one big driver, right? So we all know about what's happened in the genomics space over the last 20 years, right? Tremendous amount of discovery within genomics, and that's been applied in many great ways for society. If we think about proteomics, right, we're now in this phase where high-throughput proteomics and discovery is really a reality, and it's accessible, right? So in the past, we've been really limited based on the complexity of protein for what you could do and kind of how you could interrogate proteins. Yet proteins drive everything. It drives every function in your body, right? And if you think structurally, functionally, everything. So we know a lot about the blueprints, and we've done a ton of work on that over the last 20 years. We're now moving into the ability to interrogate all the proteins related to the blueprints. So as you kind of travel around, even if you just get online later today, you'll find a lot of genomic cores. They're now multi-omic scores. Sometimes there'll be multi-omic spatial cores, right? So they're deploying proteomics much more broadly. I think the reality is that they've got this huge pent-up demand to understand the role of proteins. So how do we play there, right? Chuck mentioned something about content. We've got 40 years of leading content, right, in proteins and antibodies. Our antibodies are leveraged across almost every high-profit platform that's utilized. So what does that mean for us? We'll talk about it a little bit later means when you make a discovery on any platform using our antibodies, we know to translate that and go into diagnostics. We participate all the way through, right? So we have license and commercial supply approach into that marketplace. So high-throughput proteomic is really changing and is driving much like high-throughput proteomic did over the last 20 years as having an incredible impact. The nice thing is that a lot of these systems is they're actually leveraging a massive installed base, right? They utilize genomic tools like high-throughput secret there is to count barcodes connected to proteins, right, into that detection. So there's a tremendous opportunity for growth in this space. Next, I want to kind of take us a little bit back in time, right? So we shouldn't lose sight that protein therapeutics have really been around since 1980 in the first protein therapeutic into the recombinant human insulin was launched. And what we've seen is this steady progression from simple proteins to antibodies to antibody drug conjugates, right? And so what does that mean? First of all, it's great for us to society. This is very personal. The one on the right, saved my niece, right, my niece is now, she's 25-year-old kind of kid still. She's got a couple in kids. She is checking out, right? Brentuximab saved her life. So it links into our mission as a company, but it's also incredibly personal. If we think about our role here, right? So we make all the tools that enable biologics and protein therapeutics companies, both understand mechanism of action. We worked in their development labs and in their quality control, right? So you have a tremendous impact in this space, and it's a space that continues to grow. If we think about the next modality here, we think of selling gene therapy applications, right, which are really precision protein therapeutics. We're in the early innings here. There's 13 approved therapeutics that cover 18 different indications, right? We see kind of a modest market of around $4 billion there. But if we relate that to 20 years ago with biologics, what you see is this tremendous growth potential in this space. We'll talk in more depth and detail about our participation there. So as you think about the big drivers of overall discovery linking into biologics to protein therapeutics and how that carries through the selling gene therapy. It's a tremendous time to be the world leader in protein sciences. So how does that relate back to our strategic players? So PSS is protein scientist segment. If we think about those stores, we start with our core, that's our core content where we've got this incredibly powerful and strong position. We deploy that in a couple of different ways, broadly across proteomics applications that we can -- and we'll talk about our destination of choice for Protein Sciences in a moment, but we also leverage that into cell and gene therapy and diagnostic applications. When we talk about our instruments portfolio today, we'll talk a lot about expanding kind of our opportunity or market opportunity through innovating on those platforms. And kind of more importantly, Chuck started the discussion, I'll add to that a little bit later, is the ability to go and look at 400,000 antibodies that understand kind of proteomics workflow. Nobody is better positioned to engage with our customers and deliver solutions to them, right? So we're working diligently on a best-in-class customer experience and we'll call the destination choice. So I'll hit on that, right? So -- we're going to jump in first then into the segment itself. So the segment has kind of 2 divisions within it. So we got proteomic research reagents, and we got our proteomic analytic solutions. So going back, if you start to the left to right here, it's all about world-leading best-in-class content. So we've got the most proteins. We're the market leader in proteins. We get the broadest base of antibodies on the marketplace. We have small molecules that are complementary. You'll see that later when we talk about cell and gene therapy applications. And as we move into immunoassay, as Chuck mentioned, we invented the immunoassay. We're the world leader there. We're the most cited portfolio in immunoassay. And in 2015, when we linked up or acquired protein, simple, we started deploying our content on systems that we own, right? And so that was a real difference making a catalyzer for us as a whole. So I want to go into again what makes our content special, right? So having a large broad portfolio is kind of one thing, but they're the most -- as we characterize them, they're the most bioactive proteins in the marketplace. It's incredibly important because as you're building your antibody portfolio, having the best immunogen to immunized animals and develop world-class antibodies, we're in a great position of both. They're incredibly complementary. Second, confidence, right? Chuck mentioned we've got 250 different folks in quality and quality assurance and regulatory within the company. We are laying track ahead of all of these kinds of regulated applications, right? So think one gene therapy, think our customers who want to deploy our content into diagnostic applications. We're building ahead of that, and we're building really strong core capabilities in that regard. And then finally, continued innovation. So Chuck mentioned, not a lot of patents when he first started, right, in the proteins and antibodies. There's actually still not within antibodies and proteins. There's not a really, but there's an incredible knowledge base on how to produce proteins. We have many proteins that none of our competitors can make, for example. One of the questions we get a lot is like, well, doesn't everybody have access to AI now? Can't they figure this all out? Actually, that's a part of the solution. It's not the entire solution, right? So we see that as a massive competitive advantage. The fact that we can pair our 40 years of know-how with these advanced tools around our AI and synthetic protein development, right? So we're in an incredible position there to continue to innovate. If I move over and then I'm just going to kind of conclude the content kind of related to the proteomics content related to the reagent solutions side of our business. So as you'll hear consistently today, right, we're in a really attractive market. We're growing ahead of that market, and we're not at a point of kind of being -- having too deep in the penetration, the opportunity is just tremendous there. So our content is deployed across a myriad of applications. We'll talk about some of those today. But if you were doing protein sciences, you're using our content. In a shift over then to our analytics solutions. And so here again, we've got an attractive addressable market. We've been growing ahead of that market, and we kind of got modest market share and penetration. And so you see the theme across the bottom, right? So we can characterize proteins and we deploy content on these systems. But one takeaway here is that we are simplifying and disrupting existing applications. We're not only automating. So if you think about some of these automation platforms, what they might do is they might improve through throughput, but they're not changing the application itself. And so from our perspective, this opens up a tremendous amount of potential for our customer, not just in productivity, but what they can actually do in terms of deploying these technologies. And we'll dive deeper on that now. So is this working? Is our approach having our proteomic analytical systems and business working? Well, if we look at our adoption across our platforms, it looks like it's working, right? So we've got over 3,500 Simple Western systems, over 3,000 iCE that are used in biologics research and development and quality control over 1,000 Simple Plex instruments, right? These are becoming standard tools in any group leveraging protein sciences, right? You cannot see protein sciences lab that either doesn't have one of these or doesn't want one of these systems right now, tremendous upside opportunity. I'm going to start with a little deeper dive into our Simple Western platform, but earlier on, I mentioned expanding market opportunity through innovation. So we'll start here and just give you a brief overview of this technology, but Simple OS is the only automated Western body instrument on the market. I'm almost certain that nobody in this room has ever done a simple lesson. But if you have 2 days of your lifestyle, you can go to a research lab and spend that time. You don't want to, right? So our process simplifies that into about 4 hours, right? In addition to that, it improves the quantitation and throughput. So the work that you can do. And with quantitation, right, that open and precision, that really opens up the application space. So going to that thought again of expanding our app application space. What you see here is that across different applications. So whether we're working with solid lysates, applications where size matters, which are kind of critical in protein degradation type of workflows, gene potency assays. So I'll mention again later. So Simple Western is now used as a quality release assay, an FDA-approved drug that was recently approved for gene therapy. Really, the opportunity with this system as we continue to perfect it is really exceptional. And again, it goes back to expanding application space and expanding market share or expanding market opportunity. Next, we'll move on to biologics. So earlier on, I mentioned protein therapeutics as kind of a general megatrend. So our more interest is really leveraged broadly for protein identity, charge size and characterize characterization of the space. There's really a couple of main applications for it, right? So one is this SDS approach, which is really a purity fast and everything else is related into the cartridge around protein identity are. So where this is leveraged is an analytical development and quality control and protein therapeutics applications. So we got a fantastic footprint there. But when we think about our opportunity to expand in fiscal year '23, we did a couple of things. We added a new cartridge in there that allows for fractionation, right? So kind of prior to that being available, the amount of effort and work to fractionate samples and push them into mass spectrometry was really kind of an intense process. So we really simplified that, and we've kind of expanded our opportunity by $300 million to get into the on-exchange market itself. Second thing we did was with our CE-SDS side. We went from about a 30-minute run time to a 5-minute run time. This was really a game changer for people doing any development work in the lab. So imagine a day now where you can run sample after sample in 5 minutes rather than just -- it's incredible from a productivity perspective. Lastly, we enable these systems with both the Empower and Chromeleon kind of tie-ins, right? So you can control the instruments with your existing kind of infrastructure in this biologics workflow. So I'll move on then to Namocell. So Namocell is an acquisition we made in fiscal year '23. So Namocell kind of follows through with this whole approach of simplifying existing workflows and disrupting them, right? So with Namocell, you can kind of be up and running and sorting cells within 5 or 10 minutes. We know that there's a big driver in the single cell market. We know this can also be deployed in selling gene therapy applications. So this is a really nice opportunity and it addresses about a $300 million market opportunity for us. And then I'm going to finish off with immunoassays and talk about the Ella platform. This has just incredible potential for us. So our simple Ella platform is an automated immunoassay, right? So going back to our leadership in immunoassays, this is now deploying that content in a very rapid control test. Incredible precision and sensitivity in the systems. Imagine you're thinking about deploying something you discovered more broadly, whether it's on any high throughput system and driving it into a diagnostics application, you simply want to look at several multiplex of genes consistently throughout the day. Simple Plex is really the ideal platform for that. And what we're seeing is that this is getting adopted in gene potency or assay or -- excuse me, some gene therapy potency assay applications, for example, and in diagnostics applications, right? So we've also made the investment to take this to 13485 and we've expanded our capacity in [indiscernible] for Connecticut, where we make these as well. But let's take that just a step further and think about immunoassays as a whole, right? So how does this all kind of land in, we think about the overall drivers in the marketplace. So we've got the most utilized platform in our ELISA kits, our standard ELISA with over 1,600 publications, right? We're the market leader in ELISA. So imagine if you're a customer is either done discovery, you're working in ELISA, you have a really easy pathway to get into the Simple Plex platform, where we've got over 250 kind of critical assays on 3 species. And we cover important applications like neurobiology applications, which are certainly kind of catching fire, right, with all the positive things happening in that marketplace. But we are expanding all of our applications in the cell and gene therapy space. We can also deploy our content for higher flex applications on the Luminex platform for things like multi-cancer early detection, right? So what we're finding is that customers are doing discovery work, there may be being some additional characterization work on that aspect, they might be doing high throughput discovery. But where it ultimately lands is a -- either a lower plex format like Simple Plex and the leverage at or they'll leverage Luminex. So since everybody selling Luminex assays, as a general statement, leverages our content. We're just a really nice catchment for that, and we've got a great expertise in developing those assays themselves. And I'll relate this back to the big megatrend I hit on kind of earlier, right? So we're incredibly well positioned. If you think of high-throughput discovery and protein detection, we play at every level. So if you're doing high throughput applications, you're leveraging our content through license and commercial supply agreements to drive broad discovery in those new multi-omic core. If you're in verification validation or doing clinical trials, you can deploy yourself in either Luminex or the Ella platform, again, and then finally, if you want to take this all the way through the diagnostic applications, again, depending on the number of analytes you're looking at, you can do that either in the Luminex platform with our content. And we also sell the Luminex platform or our Ella platform, right? So we're incredibly well positioned. So we go back to this golden age concept, and we know that we've got these amazing drivers in terms of discovery, nobody is better positioned because of our history and core content to drive market share and market share growth there. So I'm going to finish the analytics section just by hitting briefly on again, expanding applications, and that sometimes is menu or just the application of the space and expanding our market opportunity, in this case, by around $1 billion. Okay. We're going to shift over now into one of the applications. I think a few people are probably interested in what's going on in cell and gene therapy, right? Listening to early comments, just some hallways here. So we're going to finish the 2 areas, I'm going to hit on cell and gene therapy and then I'm going to talk about customer experience and our protein sciences destination of choice. So when we go to cell and gene therapy, right? We think it's carrying the incurable, but what really is it, right? There's really 3 areas, and this is important, I think, for you to know as analysts and certainly fast-running the business is immune cell therapy. Here, we're manipulating the immune system to clear tumors, right? In regenerative medicine, we're replacing lost or damaged cells and tissues with stem cells. And then in gene therapy, we're repairing or replacing genes, okay? And so I'm going to kind of talk through each one of those categories, and they are really uniquely different. It's, I think, helpful to understand. Before we jump into that, again, I don't want to just reiterate the tremendous kind of growth. So one of the questions we get a lot for analysis, I think things are slowing down, there's less kind of capital flowing into these applications. And what we're finding is we're still growing, we're uniquely positioned. We actually like a little bit of pressure on the market. It sounds crazy to say that. But what that's doing is it's driving people away from systems that are super expensive and will never scale into our solution. So anyway, tremendous growth opportunity. We got a couple of thousand clinical trials happening globally. The FDA is geared up to prove 20 a year by 2025. I think that's a directional estimate, but the idea is, again, the takeaway is that they're gearing up to support that. So if we think about our opportunity, we think of an addressable market for our products of are around $4 billion, growing in the upper teens. Our trailing growth has been around 50%. And again, we're uniquely positioned to participate here. And I want to talk about the investments. We've been laying track and I've used that term already, but we have been investing in ahead of this market in several ways. And I want to start with supporting cell and gene therapy development from development into the clinic, right? So first of all, we have made tremendous investments in GMP production. So both for proteins and our small molecules, right? We're incredibly well positioned to meet the near-term and long-term needs as that market kind of J curves. Second, we have GMP small molecules. This is a unique attribute that we've got that other groups don't. So we can now consolidate kind of these critical regulators in our small molecules and deploy them. Where we have GMP small molecules and we're expanding our capabilities there. And then finally, on their analytical tools, we've expanded both capacity and our regulatory certifications. So let's start out with a little deeper dive on immune cell therapy. And so first class, oh, man, you guys have a lot of products that kind of cover this whole space, right? And we really do. That's great. We can participate in a lot of different ways. I'm going to talk about kind of 3 ways we're highly differentiated in this space. The first line is an innovative aseptic immune cell culture solution that we'll talk about that leverages our proprietary technologies along with Wilson Wolf. I'll hit on our partnership with ScaleReady, which is our immune cell joint venture. And we'll finish with kind of this unique product we call TcBuster which is also kind of a game changer in the space, especially around making the genetic modifications. So starting out, we've got this really powerful strategic partnership for immune cell therapy with ScaleReady. That partnership includes Wilson Wolf, which we mentioned a couple of times already, Bio-Techne and Fresenius Kabi. This enables us to have solutions from kind of vein to vein in this space. They've got an incredible commercial presence. We've got over 800 customers. Wilson Wolf is over -- is in almost half of all clinical trials right now for immune cell therapy, right? It's incredibly powerful. If there is a conference, if there is a KOL, if there's a campfire where people are talking about cell and gene therapy, scale-ready is there, and I'm literally not kidding. These guys are everywhere. This team is everywhere. So we've got a tremendous coverage model. Let me move over then to the aseptic immune cell therapy manufacturing system, right? Right now, kind of the defacto leader in this space is a company called Miltenyi. You may be familiar with them. They're not -- they're privately held company. But then you've got a solution in the marketplace that while it works well in many ways, it's not scalable. It's incredibly expensive, and it just limits accessibility to the platform, right? So along with Wilson Wolf, we have developed an aseptic cell manufacturing system with the GRx bioreactor. And imagine this bucket or this GRx is where kind of everything happens to grow sales. So there, we will push in our GMP cytokines or protein. We'll leverage our GMP media, our T cell medias into that space. As we develop other tools that we can leverage within GRx will insert them. But what's critical about this is this takes a very cumbersome workflows, simplifies it and enables people not necessarily to automate it, but to standardize into a format that's kind of aseptic system. This is unique. And for us, this is a differentiator kind of going forward. I'll close out the immune cell section by talking about TcBuster, right? So TcBuster is a nonviral transposon system for stable gene transfer, right? So when you're making T cells are weaponizing them, right, you're inserting some genetic material. Right now, it happens with something called lentivirus. And if you cover companies that make lentivirus are characterized and you're probably really familiar with it. Lentivirus has kind of been this standard, right? But lentivirus has a couple of really significant limitations. One is the cargo side. So what heat you can insert. And why does that matter? It matters for a couple of different reasons. One, if you read about kind of these CAR-T cell therapies, durability of the treatment, right, comes up. So oftentimes, with the web folks now in the next generation of CAR-T therapy are trying to put multiple edits in so they can have a larger car that enables that kind of weaponize T cell to work more effectively, right? So it's really critical, lentivirus simply cannot do that. So this is a game changer. It's really the only product broadly available and accessible on the market. So about 7 months ago, we commercialized this to democratize the technology. Prior to that, we were offering it as a service that was really limited in terms of how many customers we could reach. So what happened in -- when I talk about that demand, right? So we've already got greater than 50 customers for this product. We have 2 already in filed INDs, approved INDs, right? So imagine this is now being broadly deployed. I talked about the general needs but it's highly differentiated. So it's another opportunity to kind of win customers over kind of in that space. I'm going to shift over to regenerative medicine. I remember early on, I mentioned regenerative medicine is really different than immune cell therapy, right? And we say every step of the way. Same thing. We have huge coverage here. But what really, really matters at a huge differentiator for us is our unique GMP proteins in our GMP small molecules. And so in this case, you're not only hearing T cells, you're going, all sorts of different stem cells. And I want to just touch base on that then, right? So if we think of the different types of cells and the different applications in this space, having an incredibly broad GMP protein portfolio matters. We are the leader in regenerative medicine right now kind of by far in terms of providing proteins into the space. And it's both because of our RUO, our RUO animal-free and our GMP proteins. We have proteins that nobody else can make and nobody else does make in GMP if they, in fact, do have kind of a bioactive protein as an RUO. So for us, it's really a huge differentiator. So in addition to this, we are launching and we already have iPS stream media that will be leveraged in the space, and those will also all be under GMP. So if we think of cell therapy then, including immune cell therapy and regenerative medicine, we're not really limited in just the reagents part of this, right? So if we think a cell therapy verification, right, and those tools, so if we think of viral vector you come to ProteinSimple. If you think about release testing, we're the de facto standard for potency assays right now. And then if you want to have in vivo analytics, after you've done treatments or in studies, you can leverage our RNA scope and our spatial portfolio, right? So we have not just highly differentiated components in kind of the reagents aspect, right, in the GRx. Think about immune cell therapy we really have a huge advantage now that we also are playing at the front end in the research side and on the quality control side. Okay. So we're going to finish up with gene therapy solutions. And so in gene therapy, we're going to focus mostly on our instrument stores. We do have other products that kind of fit into that workflow that are noted here. But we think of vector production, vector analysis and in vivo monitoring, we're in a really unique position to support this marketplace. So coming back to the ProteinSimple portfolio, right? So for gene potency, we have kind of the ideal platform in Simple Western. For vector characterization, you can use either our Maurice platform, if you're looking at peer samples or if you're looking at kind of early in development samples that are kind of come with a more dirty matrix, if you will, you can leverage our simple ester platform. And there for viral titer, you can use the Simple Plex platform. Again, imagine we've taken workflows and really simplified it. These are just basic tools in the space. And let me hit on that. So this isn't just about product positioning. If we take to gene therapy, there are critical quality attributes that every gene therapy company has to pass around. They include viral titer or viral identity, capsid protein ratios empty full ratio, stability, protein expression -- potency expression and purity, right? You can kind of see the check boxes for what we cover. So imagine doing that without an automated ultraprecise system that brings a ton of productivity in the lab. So we've already seen Simple Western adopted in gene therapy. We are becoming a de facto standard, as I mentioned earlier, in immune cell therapy, with the Simple Plex platform. And I think here, we have a huge opportunity in terms of AAV characterization, whether it's something where we've got the assay in Simple Plex or we can do that on our Simple Western or Maurice platforms. So I'm going to finish off our discussion today talking about creating a destination of choice. So I started off the conversation saying that there's no better place or no place I'd rather be than at the world leader in Protein Sciences, right? So if we think about our customers' ability to leverage our content know-how and solutions, we have the intent of becoming their ultimate destination of choice as we kind of bring together our full investment. So what does that kind of look like for us, right? So if we think of our best-in-class content, we have incredible choice, we have confidence in the choice and we're innovating, as I talked about earlier. We are expanding kind of our workflow solutions. And then if you think about the experience our customers have in finding those, if they happen to be meeting with one of our great salespeople and it's a specific application, they're grinding right through this, right? If you think much more broadly about the work that people are doing in Protein Sciences, their ability to kind of find research by our products is really critical. So when we think of protein sciences and we think of this destination of choice concept, we are well on our journey there, and we’re getting close. So I think if I look back at our presentation a couple of years ago and our other investor presentations, we talk about the incredible investments that we've been making behind the scenes, whether it's on ERP integrations, how we're leveraging CRM across our sales teams. And then how we're leveraging our manufacturing excellence systems. I'm just going to make a point, you've never seen us miss a quarter because we had a sale of ERP, right? There's good reason for that. We have great people doing this. So when I mentioned -- I don't want to scare anybody in this room. It's already been happening. You've not seen a blip in terms of our ability to deliver to this market, right? So the good news is we have this incredible foundation to leverage, but we're really at a tipping point of converging all of our websites together and enabling our customers to drive more value from our system. So what that looks like for us is really amping up our e-commerce and data sciences capabilities, our ability to promote our entire portfolio. Oftentimes, people will be leveraging one part of our portfolio, they literally not know. For example, they might be leveraging our R&D Systems branded antibiotics. They may not know that we're also Protein Simple, right? And so that story is kind of coming together here, and we're going to be driving kind of value across that whole portfolio. Second thing is cultivating kind of the brand equity that we've got. We've got these incredibly powerful brands that we bring together. If we look at kind of the search, and Chuck mentioned the amount that we invest in kind of search. Everybody is looking for solutions in this space, and they might land at different places within our ecosystem right now and the future we're going to land in one place, the destination of choice. So as we think about how does this -- how is this a game changer, right? So we've had this tremendous growth. We've got this great market leadership position, and I think we have a huge opportunity as the destination of choice come if we think about that virtual cycle of feedback. So if you're a customer over the next couple of years, the more you use our website to research, find, decide, buy whatever you're doing related to your Protein Sciences research, the more value we get over time, right? Of course, huge benefit for us and that we expand kind of our share of their wallet. And we also enable science and our mission, right? So that's the other kind of underlying piece. In addition to that, we see huge productivity gains internally as those systems are kind of more standardized across the board. So this -- I think if we go back to the left side of the strategy, and we think about we're leveraging our core content across the portfolio. But we're also making sure that car content is available to everybody and is super accessible and they're driving lots of value out of it as customers. So there's significant upside there. So I'm going to close this session and just bring us back to the golden age of proteins. So we hit here on gene therapies, protein therapeutics, high-throughput proteomics applications. And we also link that back into our incredible advantage with the core content that we've got and how that gets deployed across the active customer base. So if we think about all of the combined investments, so the track that we've laid for solid gene therapy applications and there are tremendous opportunity and penetration into that space, to the ability for our customers just to access our general content and leverage that as we get this huge drive in protein discovery that we started the conversation with. We will -- we already are the destination of choice for our customers in terms of finding the best solutions. We're going to be the destination of choice for all of the research kind of going forward as we execute on this strategy. So with that, I'll conclude, and thank you. I think we've got a break. Is that right? Yes. We've got a 15-minute break and look forward to the rest of session with Kim. Yes. We'll start at 10 a.m. Yes. [Break]

Thank you for coming today. My name is Kim Kelderman, I've manage the Diagnostics and Genomics segment now for 5-plus years, third investor conference. So it's great seeing you again. And actually, really, really excited to talk about the progress we made, substantial progress, I should say. And to talk about the strategies for our businesses going forward. Let's start with a quick overview of the segment, 3 divisions. The first division is the diagnostics reagents division. In that, we have reagents, standards and controls. And since a couple of years, we also designed assays, and we do this for our large IVD customers. So most of this business is actually an OEM relationship into the large IVD customers such as Roche and Becton Dickinson and others. In the middle, you see the molecular diagnostics division. That's actually a combo of an acquisition of ExoDx, ExosomeDx about 6 years ago and the combination for Asuragen, which is an acquisition of 2 years ago. And I'll talk more about the ingredients in this business and why it is such a perfect fit, those 2 acquisitions, and how we have evolved organically since. Last but not least, we have the Spatial Biology division. That's actually a division that looks at tissue as a sample, not liquid biopsy, but tissue and tissue is still the gold standard. So there's a lot of important information that gets processed and generated in this division. And we have 2 key units in there. One is the 6 years ago ACD acquisition with a beautiful portfolio of RNA reagents. And then since 2 months, we have Lunaphore into the fold, which is a company that brought us or brings us automation as well as proteomic content. So if I dive into the first business unit being DRD here on the left, Here, Bio-Techne has a real long track record of collaboration. We make these standards, controls and the agents from basically any chemical -- any chemistry. We have a broad portfolio of raw materials, some come out of wheels business. And of course, we produce and put those standards and controls together under stringent quality as well as regulatory regulations. Two years ago, I showed you that we are in this market of clinical controls, which is about $1.1 billion. And I told you that we were going to go into the adjacent space of assays. And we have done so successfully. So we are now delivering assays to our customers, and it's been a real nice driver. So you can see that market also grows a little bit faster. And the nice thing is it has the exact same customer base that we were already serving. So there's a true synergy there. Now how did we become a provider of these assays? Well, that's because our core was capabilities really to make those standards and controls. And in order to make those, you really need to understand how the assays get designed, right? And very often, we tell our customers, listen, the standard control is not optimized because your assay is not optimal. So this is what you should be doing. And at some point, these customers go like, "Hey, can you maybe design those assays for us?" So we did, and we do and we have design coded assays and many other important assays for those large companies. We do this for a fee. And of course, while we design those assays, we design in our own materials, right, our antibodies, proteins, and other proprietary materials that we design in, we hand over the design. And the moment this customer are running this assay, we get pull-through. And it's nice to get the pull-through because it's more sticky revenue than you would get with those large onetime projects. So we love the sticky revenue. Now in summary, this business, of course, is focused on being a first-choice partner, right? Because it takes decades to develop these relationships with these IVD companies, and we want to make sure we maintain that. Secondly, we want to pull through our reagents because we have such a big portfolio of it. And we do that now even better through delivering those assays I talked about. We want to continue our journey in operational excellence. Integrate more of the IVD materials that Will has been talking about, and we want to increase the portion of our third-party controls. That's basically products under our own Bio-Techne brand. Sometimes customers are, for example, a Siemens machine do not like to run the Siemens controls because they think there's maybe some benefit at the same manufacturer. So in that case, you can go to a third party, which would be us. And we like that instance because we sell directly to our customers our standards mutuals. The second business that is in my segment is the Molecular Diagnostics segment. As I mentioned, it's the combination of surges and exosomes. And I'm going to explain to you why this is such an excited -- exciting vision because we basically brought the best of those 2 companies together. First of all, we believe that exosomes have the best position in liquid biopsy. I'll tell you a little bit later why we believe that. And it's really important for early detection. And I think everybody understands why early detection of a disease is important, right? So that's basically the fundamental benefit from this exosomes division. And then later on, we added Asuragen, which -- whose capability really is to make kits, very high sensitivity gets with a full workflow, including software that then eventually gives you an answer. So in the middle here, you see that all organs continuously release exosomes and those exosomes sit in the biofluids. Those are easily obtained in the sample. We call that a liquid biopsy sample. And then you could use that sample in the workflow where you have a kit, you have in your laboratory. You use widely available implementation such as a qPCR box and then you use our software for a really easy readout, and you get a high-precision answer. And that's, of course, is a tremendous competitive advantage and a perfect fit of those 2 divisions. Now if you think about those capabilities I just mentioned, combined with the current product offering we have, and you layer on top of that the global mega trends, and you see a couple of bubbles with global mega trends that we are and have been taken into consideration, we have fine-tuned our strategy. And the strategy sits here in the 4 buckets. First bucket is to continue to build out the disease signatures based upon exosomes based upon liquid biopsy samples. The second bucket is to build out our oncology monitoring kids. And that's something that Asuragen already has a stronghold in the BCR-able marker, very important marker, and we want to continue bringing out menu on that easy workflow I mentioned earlier. The productive health is important for us, too. We have a nice genetics portfolio, and we have a strong hold in the fragile X market, horrible disease but we have great products there, and we want to build that out and utilize our technologies for that menu. Last but not least, very fast growing. Here is a [ gamma ] controls, but these are molecular controls and use those molecular controls for our own testing, but we also sell those to third parties, other testing, and it's a very neat business on the site, makes us more independent and an important part of our strategic pillars. Now these strategies have, of course, informed our product portfolio, right? I'll talk about the current products in the development programs pretty soon, but in the top you see 3 bottles. And those are very important because we are really focused on screening products. And screening products is if you have something going on and you go to a physician and they usually come up with a screening a white test, which means there's a lot of patients coming into the funnel, and therefore, there is a high volume of these tests necessary. Now in the middle there, once you get screened and there's something off, you get a diagnosis. And at the back end, when there's a treatment plan and people want to see whether your disease is progressing or not? And how the medication is working, that's when you have monitoring. So the monitoring part is where people would repeat testing put a patient and see how the progression of the disease is. Also a bucket where the volume sits. So therefore, you'll see R&D funnel is a little cooled to those 2 buckets where the volumes sit and also our technology is strongest. Now the current product on the market are 12 products. Two of them are ID approved. And of course, you see in both the ExoDx prostate test, I'll double-click on that one. That's the one we've talked a lot about, in that we have tremendous success with. And for us, it's basically a proof of principle that this exosome-based testing is really, really working. Now if you look then at the R&D funnel, you see that we have 3 other projects here on both that I will double click on. And on the right-hand side, a solid tumor testing. That's really a testing that goes into the monitoring bucket as well and is something that I will talk about more. And then last but not least, where you see a little checkmark there you see the transparejection testing. That's the test that we've generated data for, very powerful data. We've got several partners interested in this. Eventually, we signed the deal with Thermo Fisher Scientific. They are now producing the test and running clinical studies, and they will go to market with the test. So the little red box indicates the transplant center markets. We do not have a channel in there. That's why we partnered and some official will serve that channel and utilize their might there. You see the 2 blocks -- blue boxes to the bottom, which are our channels. We have -- we do have a urology channel in North America, and we do have a laboratory channel in America as well as in Europe. And then for other channels, if we ever needed one, we will sign an agreement. We will partner with people that do have that channel, and we will then utilize signature and our exosome benefit and our testing to then do good deals across the industry. Now why do we believe that we have such a competitive advantage to start working on these tests? And that's because we have the exosomes, right, exosome-based testing. The exosomes are basically little vesicle that comes out of the cell -- out of living cells that pop out and they are actually designed to transfer information to other cells. That means the quality in those little exosomes of the information, the quality of the information in the exosomes is really high quality because it's protected. Think of bubble that you've come out of the lava lamp, right? So they pop out of the bigger bubble. Other companies actually use cell-free DNA as a market or they look at circulating tumor cells. We believe that looking at exosomes as a much better solution. And if you look at the key properties here in the middle of the slide, you see collating tumor cells compared with cell-free DNA compared with exosomes. And yes, exosomes do carry all the analytics you would want to look at, RNA and DNA. They are abundant in the early stages of a disease, right, which is very important for the detection of the disease because that's a major advantage if the disease gets detected earlier. You have the ability to enrich, as I mentioned, very high-quality information in there. And yes, the outside of the exosome at the same proteomic fingerprint as the originating tissue, so you can actually see where these exosomes came from while you're testing, and that's also how we enrich them, right, you can fish them out. On the right-hand side, you can actually see data. On the Y-axis, you see that there is a cell-free DNA plus exosomes used. And on the bottom line, you see cell-free DNA only. If those would be of equal power, those data points would all be on the dotted line in the center. What you see there are significantly crude upwards, meaning if you look at exosomes in addition, it will give you a significantly better signal up to 4x as sensitive as we see DNA alone. And that totally makes sense because if you read the bottom part there, that one cell create tens of thousands of exosomes per day, that cell secretes 0 cell-free DNA up until they die. And when they die, it only sets 2 copies. So it's not a lot. It's hard to find. And that's why we know and believe that our access home platform is going to be so powerful. Now first test that we brought to market and is our proof of principle is ExoDx Prostate test. You know the test and how it works. So I'll jump to the key points. The important part of this test is that unlike some of our competitors, we get the urologist to score, and he takes other data such as the PSA score and the family history into consideration like they always do. Competitive tests mingle that again into a score, which makes those scores kind of funky. Our score is really helpful. And the moment the urologist uses this score is going to make much better decisions. In order to obtain the sample, which is a urine sample, easy to obtain, you do not need a digital vector exam like with some of our competitors. And that really made it possible for us, and you see the top right to make at-home collection kit. And we thought this was going to be important during the dynamic that a patient can take their sample at continues of the house. But it's still very, very popular. We see 40%, 50% of our volume still going to at-home collection. So it's a competitive advantage and lasting competitive advantage. As you can see in the third bullet, we have obviously validated this test significantly size of population of over 1,000. And we have been added to the NCCN Guidelines. Medicare coverage was in 2019. We got a renewed coverage this last -- this year. Several changes into our advantage, one big chain into our advance change into our advantage was that the testing was covered for once in the lifetime of the man, but now it's covered for an annual test which is obviously enlarging our addressable market significantly. We also have 2 different publications. One was around a 2.5 year follow-up, very powerful data. It basically shows that the physician makes much better decisions, meaning man that do not need a biopsy and do not have a risk for high-grade prostate cancer gets to continue to be monitored. And the ones that have a high risk get pushed into the standard of care and therewith, the decisions are much better. Urologist was a little skeptical at the beginning because they thought -- they make money on doing a biopsy, obviously, and they thought that this test would take away people that are not showing up for biopsy unnecessarily, right? But they were worried about losing that revenue. And our economical study, which has also been published, there's a PR around it, if you want to study it more, basically indicated that horologists becomes much more efficient. So that means that man, that where the urologist said, hey, you should go to a prostate biopsy, very often do not show up, right? As you see here, 39% in the standard of care would only show up. Now if you get a EPI score and it tells you that you really should be going then the compliance is over 70%. So the huge difference and the patients that will show up are actually really needing to show up. So there's tremendous efficiency there. And that's why we feel we got such adoption. The adoption we feel, is actually driven because of the noninvasive nature of the sample. We had really high predictive value and real strong clinical data and economical data around this test. And therewith, we also had tremendous success this last year, 90% growth in this product and continuing very strong. The nice thing about this is that it really educated us about the workflow. So the API workflow is very much the same as this workflow you see here. You get a liquid sample in there. You pull out your cell-free DNA as well as your exoRNA and we have proprietary products to do so. You run a qPCR machine and you get easy data readout. So it's the exact same format as for EPI, but we are going to apply it to many other markets, specifically in oncology. The very first marker that we are going to bring to market within a year is in breast cancer. And we all know that breast cancer is a horrible disease, and it's still very frequent. In this table, you can see that once a patient gets diagnosed with breast cancer, the 1 L basically means first line treatment, meaning a treatment gets chosen based upon information. And then once you're on this treatment, there are these little tube in there, those are basically monitoring tests. So the patient gets monitored to see if the disease got worse, the disease gets better and/or if there's resistance building against the medication. Now if there is resistance building, you want to find it quick early on and then you want to switch your line of therapy. So you go to your second line of therapy, et cetera. Now you do that really well. It doubles the survival chances of this patient, right? So there's a bunch of testing in between. You just see 3 there, but it really depends on how long the disease goes on and when resistant pops up. But it's obviously frequent testing, and it's -- it needs to be simple, it needs to be fast, and that's exactly the workflow I just showed you. In this ESR1 marker, the first one that we're going to bring to market, is a market for resistance. So this will tell the doctor, listen, this medication is working, it's working, it's working up until there's resistance from the cancer and it's not working anymore and then you quickly swap your treatment. We -- in the blue there, you see the channels. We have all the channels, meaning our laboratory channel in U.S. and a laboratory channel in Europe will be a perfect fit for this test. And yes, it's going to be the first of many in this menu of oncology monitoring. Very excited about this part. Now you also saw me talking -- heard me talking you saw on the slide the screening test. Screening tests in general are large market opportunities in complicated tests. But in order to crack that now, we are working and are actually putting in action a multi-omic platform internally. What does this multi-omic platform do? It basically takes in any sample, and liquid biopsy that you would like to look at. We look at various analysis. So we're not just looking at the exoRNA but other analysis as well. In light blue, you see the analysis that we have proprietary information about and that we are using and have a differentiated offering. And then on the right-hand side, you see all the different types of analysis. Now of course, you have to pick the analysis that would make most sense for you. But we're building out this whole toolbox so that we can deploy that in our CLIA labs, we have 2 PLFs in a centralized offering. We can deploy that system for our partnership with big pharma in CD. And of course, if we choose to, we can make it a kit, like I mentioned earlier, and then distribute it through laboratory channels and then use this test and be centralized way. Now we have quite the pipeline behind this multi-omic platform. The very first 2 tests that we have been working on is a prostate cancer ruling test in oncology and colorectal cancer signature also in oncology. You see some other applications in immunology and neurology and, of course, a broad portfolio of partnerships in pharma. I want to talk about those. Those are with other partners, and we'll work on those in the background. The 2 cancer applications are the first ones I want to talk about. There's the early detection for prostate cancer ruling test. This test would live next to our current exosome prostate rule out test. However, it's a screening test, meaning it will be run regularly because this is for man at risk after the prostate biopsy. And once they're in a gray zone, they need to come back and repeat their testing if they are having to go further or whether this is still safe to not go to any radical treatments. The interesting part is that this test will have a 2 to 3x bigger TAM. And of course, we would utilize the same channel, the current channel we already have with over 40 people in North America selling these prostate tests. The next one is the screening early detection of colorectal cancer and very importantly, advanced adenomas. It's obviously a huge market. We also know that this is a crowded market. So there are tests available currently. However, we do believe that this exosome-based testing that our tests would significantly outperform all current solutions. And that's because our sensitivity and specificity is so high. We do not intend to go to market ourselves, but we are gathering data in collaboration, and this data will then be used for negotiations to see who would like to partner with us on this test and licenses from us. These negotiations, I foresee the first discussions will happen 2, 3, 4 quarters from now when we have compelling data, just like we had with the ExoTRU test that we licensed to Thermo, once we have the compelling data, the negotiation will start, and we will partner on this test. Now the last one of the screening test, we will not partner on. This is really in our wheelhouse, and that's a genetic screening test, it's called the Carrier Plus kit. As you know, in laboratories, they run these large panels on genetic screening, basically looking at all inherited diseases. And that works fine. It's NGS test. We are not going to compete there. But 5 to 10 of those markers are just really hard to read. NGS is not the right technology for it. And the laboratories then end up running these markers in home brew setups and offline, and they have to get additional sample to run them at logistical nightmare, operational laboratories. And that's the reason why we have signed an agreement with Oxford Nanopore to basically through long-read sequencing to basically be able to run these 11 genes that are hard to do all in one workflow and 1 test and 1 readout. So that really would resolve the nightmare of the laboratory director and then they will just put 1 test in to do all the hard to do genes. And this is right up our wheelhouse because we know how to design those kits, and we have the channel. And yes, we will really get some traction really quickly because it's pretty messy out there right now. Now there's a lot to digest. But in a nutshell, Bio-Techne will build out a leadership position in Molecular Diagnostics. And that's how it is. And why? Because we have the complete diagnostic solutions, right, all the way from sample to a very easy answer. We do have this tremendous competitive advantage of being able to look at these exosomes, which gives you higher sensitivity. We have strong channels in urology as well as in the laboratory space. A wonderful genetics portfolio from the Asuragen acquisition, which we can build around. We have access to those molecular controls and a great team building those out. And then we have a fantastic team working the pharma, companion diagnostics team. And they utilize this Lotemax platform I talked about for these pharma partnerships where we make some good money and we can participate, know where the market is going. But also this multi-omic platform will be used for all the screening tests that we have in the pipeline. This high-value screening tests which in some occasions, we will use for our own portfolio. And in some occasions, we're looking at the high-value ones that do not have a channel for, we will look at partnering now for those. Now last but not least, we have the special biology division. Yes, this division looks at tissue and tissue is still the gold standard. If you think about a liquid biopsy and how easy that sample is to obtain, tissue is not the definition for this phases. So you want to maximize the information you get out of the tissue. And we have a fantastic portfolio of products to do so with the ICD franchise, and we now have automated solution with the Lunaphore franchise. So Kevin, I see that here 6 minutes, but that is not correct, right?

No.

Okay. Excellent. Well, then I'll continue talking. Our core portfolio. This is the ACB portfolio of products that we've had for 6 years. It's been growing so nicely, very profitable. And that's not a coincidence. We have 7,000 unique probes in this portfolio. And if you think the nearest competitor sits in the thousands, nobody has passed 10,000 yet. We're seeing a 47,000, a huge portfolio of probes. Highly specific and by the way, any tissue and over 400 species. So not just human mice, but all form of species, you can utilize those on. Our customers really picked up on it. And over the last 10 years, we've published more than 8,600 peer-reviewed articles. And then, as I mentioned, highly profitable, but we also passed the $100 million in reagents only last year. And why is this business so successful? It's looks like a complicated picture. And I start on the top left, basically, right now, we have the capabilities to give true special insights, right, true multi-omic, when people talk about RNA, they usually talk about messenger RNA. And messenger RNA is relatively long. And therefore, I wouldn't say easy, but it is easier to detect. So if you look at the 11:00 position, there you see mRNA. And we came up with this RNA scope product, which has become the goal standard. You can look at those long RNAs, you can look at long noncoding RNAs, you can look at viral RNAs. And that was all fantastic because we did that best in the market. But we also invested in pushing it further because no other technology can look at short RNAs. So we really found a way. And it's a true innovation to look at MicroRNA, we call it MicroRNA scope. You see that at the 7:00 position, and with that product, you can look actually at short interfering RNA, MicroRNA, ASOs, and those are therapeutic vectors. So those are all kinds of applications that are really important in cell and gene therapy market that Will just talked about. You keep going up and you say, okay, we also want to look at single base pair differences. Well, that's why we invented base scope. So you can look at splice variants and point mutations. So you really look at on base pair, right? Nobody else can do this. So now you have all varieties of lengths of RNA. And eventually, we also added -- made steps into being able to interrogate proteins. So there are different markets -- research markets where this is being used, namely oncology, inflammation, neurosciences, and as I just mentioned, the gene therapy, right? But most new researchers were really interested in having automated solutions. And that's exactly the reason why we added Lunaphore to the Bio-Techne family. We brought this company in because it's, first of all, a fantastic solution for automation, but they also have a real broad proteomic portfolio. And there we would complete the circle that I just showed with way more of the little boxes and have a full a full gamut of solutions. So this company, as I mentioned, is fast growing. It's 9 years old. The technology is well patented. It's got over 120 employees based in Switzerland. And their vision was really in line with ours, and that was to bring spatial omics, spatial, meaning you can see where what happened and OMX,DNA, RNA and protein, bringing it all together. And the first platform is called the COMET. That platform can run RNA as well as proteins, and it's pretty amazing. It's just world-class because it has full automation, basically walk away automation. You can build custom panels, meaning all these markets you want to look at, very easy to build a panel. You can use your own antibodies, and this is very important for some researchers because if you have used antibodies before, you want to use the same antibodies because you already have data and you want to compare. So you can use your own antibodies, any antibody really. But you can also buy panels from us, we call them SPYRE, and these panels will give you a pallet of different antibodies you can use in certain research areas. The machine has excellently producibility and that is very important. So in any lab at any time at any temperature really, you'll get the same results because the box has temperature control. And it's really how you call it, it preserves a tissue. It's really nondestructive. And that means you can run the same test longer time or you can run different markets. It also means that you can run NGS after it. And that's important because your tissue sample, you usually don't have too much of it, and you want to be careful to use all of it. And that's why it's so nice that you use this technology in front of other research tools. Now the nice thing, too, is that those has an end-to-end solution. And that means that your complex data that comes out of this machine goes into the software and then eventually you can get your image analyzed and you get really nice data of this box. Now what did they do for our addressable market, 2 years ago, I was talking about the ISH market we're in. You see the lower left ISH is the NC2 hybridization. That's a $2 billion market in the dark blue circle. And that was mainly RNA is some DNA. But if you think about it now with adding automation and adding a full proteomic panel, we are basically stepping it up into the full Spatial Biology business. And that then translates into a much larger market, which would be $5 billion still growing low double digits and gives us a much broader opportunity. Now I think that we will be taking market share pretty rapidly, and that's because we just have this fantastic combination now. If you think about a fully automated same slide multi-omics workflow by combining Lunaphore and ACV, this is going to be the best solution in the market. As I mentioned, very fast and flexible assay design. So think about it, you want to take some RNA targets. We've got 47,000 in the liability. So have at it, you can pick them. And then you can use your own antibodies or you order some of the fire panels with predetermined antibodies. You can basically buy any antibody you really would like. Will, by the way, has a ton of antibodies. So he would probably want our customers to use the Thermo -- the Bio-Techne antibodies. Good catch. And we'll work on that together. And of course, our AI and our website will guide people in making the right decisions here. If you think about the workflow in the middle bubbles here, there's always standard tissue processing. So for any workflow, you would have to put your tissue on your slide, and there's some work that you have to be done. But after that, in our solution, you put that slide on the machine and all the way through hybridization, amplification, RNA detection, protein detection all the way into image analysis, outcomes and image. So you can basically walk away, run it overnight, and it's really, really smooth workflow. Now to bottom gray bar here, you see that you can load 4 slides onto our box. Most solutions have just 1 slide. The throughput is really, really high, so you can run up to 20 flights a week. And that's also unique in this -- in the market. As I mentioned, you can run -- it's multi-omics. So it runs the RNA as well as the protein on the same slide, all in the same workflow and it's fully automated. Some people talk about automation, but yes, you still have to do cumbersome hybridization steps on your slide or because it comes from the stainer and it goes into the imagery, and you have to transfer the slides, and it's not fully walk away. And we do have a fully automated solution. And as I mentioned, at the back end, it basically has wonderful software to do your image analysis. Now where does that get us? It gets us to a space where Lunaphore and the proteins give you all kinds of information that pathologists would like to see. And then the whole gamut of RNA information can be used from the ACV corner, basically looking at any species, any organ and gives you a fully automated full special biology tool kit. Now how does this fit in the overall market, right? There are other players and how does those interact? Well, we do have automation partners. But before I go there, I'll talk about the different phases the technology usually goes through. Early stages, you have discovery, right? This is where a researcher tries to acquire knowledge, right? So you look at hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of markers. And this is where players such as 10x genomics as well as NanoString, right? We really feel this is symbiotic because out of those large panels can novel RNA biomarkers. And those biomarkers, once you know which ones you are interested in, you want to run them with more slides, but you want to run them very precisely, high sensitivity and very repeatably. And that is the area we call translational. So this is the translational research. And if you think about it, we have, of course, a partnership, meaning we are now part of the same family with Lunaphore, for high-plex. If you look at many markers. We've also enabled standard BioTools Hyperion System because there's over 100 in the market and now high power users. So we have enabled it. And then if you want to go low-plex, but there's many, many samples and you think about 30 slides at the same time, that's when you can go and use the LICA system in Roche. We have enabled both those companies. And if you really wanted to, you can also run this assay manually. So the interesting thing, though, is once you get more and more data on those markers of interest, there might be that one marker that you really want to make a diagnostic tool. And that one marker would then -- you would have to run it repeatedly and very, very precisely. And for that, you would be able to use a LICA system, which we have deployed and enable for the clinical industry. Now the clinical applications, a couple of years ago, people were not sure if special biology instrumentation would make it into clinical. But we've made it. Like we've got over 10% of my revenues right now coming out of the technical space. and it's growing faster than the rest of the portfolio. And that's also another surprise because if you look at this, our best and earliest application was -- or is HPV, human papilloma virus. This is related to head and neck cancer. And if you look at the other tests, right, IHC, there is a DNA ISH test, and then you have the RNA scope ISH test. The other tests, first of all, they have over 20% falls negative, which is horrible because you think you have a disease, you might not have it. Secondly, it does not really show if the virus is active. It could be also a dormant virus. So our assay shows whether the virus is active. And as you can see from the sensitivity specificity table, with the 2 blue boxes around it. We are best in class if it comes to sensitivity and specificity. And therefore, the adoption has just been really strong. So that means that our assays in general, not only do we have the right quality systems and thinking in place, but our assays can really perform in a clinical setting. This chart could look familiar because I showed it 2 years ago. But fortunately, for me, there are more checkmarks on there, meaning otherwise, Chuck would have not been so happy, but I made fantastic progress, I think. So think back in time, right? I just talked about looking at RNA, right? So we, of course, came up with our new scope about 10 years ago, and there's the RNA solution. Then the big innovation I was talking about is looking at those shorter RNAs, right? That's the MicroRNA innovation. Then we wanted to look at DNA, then you want to look at more markers. So we started multiplexing and that's the level I was at 2 years ago, September 21, when we had the investor meeting. And since we've really broadened the multi-omic meaning adding protein capabilities to it and then we wanted to get it automated, and that's why we have the Lunaphore acquisition from 2 months ago added to this product line. Now that's where we are today. And where is my next one here, and that's in co-detection of RNA and protein fully automated. And that's quarters away. Of course, the Lunaphore team and the ACV team are working together and building out that menu really rapidly. There are further image analysis tools that I would like to add to the portfolio. And of course, our successes in clinical will also depend on menus. So I would like to broaden the menu in the clinical space with other assays. And I know we can be very, very successful there, and I want to build a stronghold in the clinical space. Now all in a nutshell, our Spatial Biology division is basically the only one that has a fully automated multi-omic view of health and disease. So on the left-hand side, you see all the targets again. So there's all these different RNA targets and proteins in both, right, because that's what we just acquired. It's a seamless transition. It's very interesting because if you look at the left-hand side of that circle, that's a fluorescent signal, and that's a signal an amplification type that they really use in research. And our system can, of course, do that. But pathologists use the chromogenic amplification. So you see it looks very different, and our system can also do that. So that means we are compatible both ways, and that means that the step into clinical is much easier using our technology because we can accommodate both those amplification systems. And as you can see on the right-hand side, we already have a footprint in clinical, but we want to continue broadening out that portfolio. Now this is back to the segment level. These are the 3 divisions. I walk you through what they do, their strategies and also their sustainable advantage. Because each and every one of them does have a sustainable advantage. And I'll talk about that a little bit more in 2 slides. First, I want to talk about the strategic progress we've made in this segment. The first header is build out our product portfolio. And yes, we started building out the capability of assays, making assays and delivering assays to our customers in DRD. We've really developed the best-in-class exosome-based liquid biopsy. And again, this is really important because the sensitivity is so much better, and therefore, we can detect diseases much earlier. And our proof of principle is EPI, the exosome-based prostate test, and there we pass the 100,000 test mark earlier this year. In Spatial Biology, we obviously already had a broad portfolio of RNA detection, but we added the Lunaphore company because they are providing the best-in-class automation but also to proteomic portion that we are just tooling in that they already have that fully available. So it's a match made from heaven. On the channel side, we fortified our links into the Chinese IVD companies with DRD. We build out a North America commercial channel for urology. And then we build out a channel for the laboratories in Europe. And this, we did while we're building some of our fundamental capabilities. We continue to drive Six Sigma and DRD. We have a market access team. That's a team that basically increases your coverage of your test, right? So we're bringing out a menu of molecular tests. So you need to work continuously on them being covered. And we also have built out a bioinformatics team also important for the development of these tests and generating the right data. And those 2 capabilities we've built out. And then we also build out our medical and clinical capabilities across the segment. Now that means we made great progress in this segment and that we have real game-changing projects ahead. And on the right-hand side, there's a couple of shorter-term things that we need to do. One is to build out the Spatial Biology channel to also be able to sell instrumentation. They've been selling this $100 million business of RNA agents, but we need to make sure we can sell instruments to and build that capability. Of course, we want to unlock the Bio-Techne capabilities for this new acquisition. And then very importantly, the FD portfolio, you saw the portfolio in monitoring as well as in screening. That portfolio is going to be very important. So we need to progress the pipeline very rapidly. So that's high on the agenda. On my very last slide is the care cycle. And this is why these businesses kind of linked together. I'm trying to describe to you how this really works because some people might say, "Hey, how do you come up with those 3 divisions. Now this is the reason. On the 12:00 position, you see that blood tube, that's basically routine testing. That's the testing that we would do actually annual checkup, right? Now that's a very crowded market, very competitive. So we're not playing in that. Other than that, we create the standards and controls and the agents that we sell to the people that play there, which is these large IVD companies. And DRD has long-standing relationships there and real deep understanding of the assay standards and controls. So that's how we play in that market up there, and that's our competitive advantage long term. Now at the moment, one of your test is out of range. Usually, we get sense to get a screening test. Now here, we want to play more like the exosome prostate test sits there. The colorectal test would sit there, this is the portfolio we want to build out for the screening test that I talked about, and we believe that our competitive advantage and long-term competitive advantage is that we can look at these exosomes, which gives it more specificity. And you will check -- you will find the disease earlier than other technologies. Now again, once you then get flagged, and you end up having to go further down this chain, you will -- they will look at obtaining a tissue sample. Yes, tissue sample is more invasive, but it brings a lot of information to you. And as I talked about, the special biology division, we have fantastic as to really optimize the information you get out of this tissue. And our sustainable advantage there is the RNA scope portfolio and fully automated system. So we feel very comfortable in that corner. Now once you're diagnosis and your treatment plan gets made, so meaning the doctor decide what you're going to get treated with, then usually, you want to see how the treatment is working and if the patient is regressing or if there's resistance building up and that's where the monitoring tests come in that I talked about earlier. Here, we have that easy workflow, this first test would be this ESR1 that talks about in breast cancer, and we'll build out our portfolio. And again, there, the reason why we feel that there is a sustainable advantage is because of our exosome portion of that test, which will make it more sensitive, and which will make early detection of these events much more likely. Now once this patient is healthy again after treatment, you go straight back to the 12:00 position and that's how the circle is run. And that's how these businesses work together. And that's how I believe we have sustainable advantages across those businesses. And that's how I think Bio-Techne will become a major player in the Molecular Diagnostics industry. Now to the more exciting part, which is Jim and the numbers that we've been waiting for. Thank you very much for your attention and looking forward to seeing you next time.

When we had an investor conference, the number is the most important or exciting part of the presentation, I guess, that's -- thank you both Kim and Will, for just a tremendous job, incredible job describing the capabilities of our platforms and the future potential of them. I'm just always in all and I hear them speak in depth about their businesses. And for me, it really drives home our mission as a company, right, to catalyze advances in science. To enable our customers to improve the quality of a lot of patients. In our core, that's what we do. Of course, fulfilling this mission wouldn't be possible without, as Chuck talked about, the empowerment passion, innovation and collaboration of our colleagues over 3,000 of them, that make up our EPIC culture. But of course, as another stakeholder that also stands to benefit from our company executing on its mission, and that's our investors, of course. So I'll spend the next maybe 20 to 30 minutes or so going through what those strong financial returns might look like and how we get there. I think you're doing a fair, if you could flip the -- or was it already on the -- I'm good. Well, I'll do what Kim does when he stuck. Yes. Yes. Okay. were good. All right. So before we get into the future, we'll talk a bit about the current and how we've gotten here in the past, I know our tower strategies have already provided strong financial returns. Our revenue breakdown today. This is as of fiscal year '23. So those who follow the company that's just ending here this past June with $1.1 billion of revenue. If you look at it by segments roughly, 3/4 of our revenue does come from the Protein Sciences segment. They've done a little deeper. One of the reasons for that is the majority of our core portfolio that being our RUO, protein RUO antibodies and Isis, our legacy products reside within that segment. And albeit that diagnostics and genomics today, a lot smaller than protein sciences, 2 of our 4 major growth platforms for the future, that being Spatial Biology and liquid biopsy do design in that segment. Moving over to the product. Revenue product [indiscernible] Chuck earlier, but I'll repeat it here quickly. Over 80% of our revenue is driven by consumables, and makes for a fairly resilient and recurring revenue, not to mention very, very profitable revenue. And as Chuck also alluded to, the instruments make about 10% of our portfolio, but it's a very, very strong pull-through of very specific consumables, that can only be used on that instrument, which drives 10% of our total consumable business model. So we think about protein sample as more like a closer to a 20% contribution to our overall company, as opposed to just the 10% that's pure instruments. Moving down to by geography. In the Americas, make up roughly 60%. Rest of the world is around 40%. And the key point I want to draw on here is Asia, China and APAC combined is over 15% of our revenue today. And we've talked about one of the major growth teams in [pillars], is that of regional expansion, especially in Asia and, lately, primarily in China. And that remains true going forward as well, which we can get into in Q&A. But to put that in perspective, [indiscernible] has been so important for us. And Chuck said China was 2% to 3%, and total Asia was around 5% of our revenue 10 years ago, and now it's north of 15%. So essentially, that region has tripled the growth rate for the rest of the world. And then finally, by, I call end market on the lower right. You see, the Pharma/Biotech now makes up 50% of our revenues, more than double that of our academic customers. Roughly, again, 10 years ago, that were closer to a 50-50 kind of split. That's purposeful. Our strategies, our product development and applications have been geared more heavily, towards the biopharma end markets. It's simply because they're more scalable. They have larger budgets and they usually have more stable budgets. Not to say academic is not important, and we've been growing there as well. And we need to stay relevant to academic as a life science tool supplier because, as you all know, today's academic is tomorrow's biotech. The one change in [indiscernible] this year from what we've shown historically is this Diagnostics slice of our revenue profile. So most of this revenue is out of our Diagnostics Reagents division, which we refer to as our OEM model, for diagnostic instrument suppliers, the calibrators and control business. But [indiscernible] north of diagnostics, it's going up quite and well in the future. So will diagnostic uses for our spatial biology platform, as well as for our instrument platforms, namely Simple Plex. I thought it's important I start calling this out as the [indiscernible] market really is, ultimately, which is diagnostics. So again, today, that consists of our Diagnostics Reagent division largely, and our Molecular Diagnostics division. The last [indiscernible] distributors, that's essentially a [indiscernible] of our Asia business, because most of our Asian businesses transacted to distributors. All right. Talk a little bit about our capital deployment historically. I think a key driver for how we're positioned today. As Chuck alluded to also, no longer required to do M&A to double size this company every 5 years. We think we have a pathway to get there organically. But because of our deployment of capital over the past 10 years, that has allowed that to happen. You see over 2/3 of that has been geared towards M&A. And aside from bolstering our core, it can fairly evenly distributed, in term of our investments into our Q4 growth platforms. That being our instrument platforms and proteomics or spatial biology, liquid biopsy and cell and gene therapy. All between $400 million and $500 million of investment into each. Cell and gene therapy, if you add the $50 million for the GMP protein manufacturing facility, that gets you to over $400 million there as well. So it's been a fairly purposeful M&A strategy over the past 10 years, and it's why we have 4 fantastic growth platforms in the future today. Talk a bit about our profitability. For those, we've talked in various investor conferences and one-on-one, we've explained this quite a bit. I think most of you have to understand this, but nonetheless, it's worth repeating that when we do M&A, it's going to impact our margin profile, at least in the short term. For at least a year, sometimes 2 years. And I think this chart illustrates that very well, where right before the ProteinSimple acquisition, which was the first major one we did, 9 years ago, we arrived about 40% operating margin. But as we are -- if you look at our acquisition history, they tend to be smaller companies with lower revenues, but very fast-growing revenues, that on the verge of that tipping point scaling on verge of profitability, within 1 year or 2. And so therefore, for the first year or 2, they tend to be dilutive to our margin. And you see that step down in the curve after the ProteinSimple acquisition for a couple of years. And then just as it started to stabilize, we had the ACD acquisition. So there was another lag down in our margin from that together with Exosome. And then when the COVID period hit, there wasn't a lot of M&A going on. And either from us, only 2 years or so without a real acquisition. That, coupled with the amazing growth we had in all of our growth platforms and the COVID halo impact that scale our entire portfolio, including our core, how quickly we ramped up to close to 40% following that. And it really wasn't until we made the Asuragen acquisition 1.5 years, 2 years ago and Namocell last year and now this year Lunaphore, that curve starts to come back down again. Chuck already gave their figures on ProteinSimple, in terms of where it started and where it is now. I'll add to that ACD. ACD was $25 million to $30 million of revenue and we purchased that 5 years ago or so. It was not breakeven at the time. And now we're sitting in the business, you saw Tim show over $100 million of revenue and operating margins at 30%. So it's because of these acquisitions that we look for that they're a unique position. They're unique differentiation from the competition, their IP and the market ahead that allows them to scale, gives them all very strong gross margins, and those gross margins, usually, will turn into very high operating margins as it has in our core portfolio. The other thing I'll point out, with regards to this chart, is the absolute figure. It looks like a dramatic drop and then increasing the dramatic drop. But let's keep in mind here that we're still talking about a range of somewhere between the mid-30s and 40%. So we definitely have a leading industry profitability margins. And that's been a core financial competency of this company, since the very beginning, and something we're proud of, and we will continue in the future. We're certainly much more of a ROIC, except for the fact that it basically nears more or less the profile of operating margin in these acquisitions. And also here is the profile of the industry leading ROIC to begin with, with ROIC ranging from the low double digits to nearly 20%, depending on the timing when we do acquisitions. And that's exactly why we have a pretty high threshold for ROIC on new acquisitions, because we're proud of our high -- our history of the high ROIC [indiscernible] continues going forward. All right. Now going to transition to the future. And I know I can't get away with talking about the future, without addressing -- start addressing the targets from 2 years ago. So this will be 1 slide, we'll do it. I'll get off it. I'm never going to talk about fiscal year '26 again, until maybe end of fiscal year '25, okay? We recognize for sure that there are headwinds to that target we put out 2 years ago, right? And it's pretty obvious. I kind of categorize them into some themes. And the first one, believe me or not, being cell and gene therapy. Despite how well, cell and gene therapy has performed for us and will continue to, it's a nascent market, and then nascent markets, you're learning every day about how that market is going to develop. And I don't think we were alone, and I was thinking 2, 3 years ago, and they're probably not alone in our thinking now, with regards to how that's evolved. And mainly is that -- we talked about the number of trials that are out there, but it's a relatively low amount that are getting through to commercialization. And there's reasons -- there's personal reasons in the FDA, but I think the bigger reason is that there was a perception 2, 3 years ago that cell and gene therapies would get to the clinical trial process at a similar rate they say that biologics did or even small molecule drugs did in the past, call it, 3, 4, 5 years kind of time frame. Well, I think what we all missed is that cell and gene therapy, aside from being novel and new, they're actually cures for disease. They're not just treatments for disease. And to prove a cure, does take more time to demonstrate. And so basically, the market leaders out there saying now that the average time for approval could be stretched as long as 7 or 10 years. So we have in our initial assessment that we talked about the inflection point that was going to occur once our customers, who got to the clinical trials and became -- got commercialized and that would probably happen in the latter part of our 5-year period. I think it's more realistic now that it will happen outside of that original 5-year period. So we estimate there was about a $100 million impact to our original assessment 2 years ago for fiscal year '26. The other item is the ExoDx Prostate. Yes, again, another test that's now performing remarkably well with 90% revenue growth over this past year. But about a year or so later than we anticipated 2 years ago, partly because we were hoping that the folks going back to see their doc would happen sooner than it did, but it did roughly happen to start happening last year. But also you got to do your considerations to get the Medicare reimbursement to equate to what the NCCN guidelines were. It's just 2 additional passes. And at the time, we were hoping to be one additional pass. The last point wouldn't get through until, I think January, February time frame of this past year. And that's important, not only for you getting paid, but it's very important to get doctors acceptance in this to practice, because they don't want to issue a test where they feel like the patients can be on the hook for paying for it. So that was very important, even from a doctor's perspective. But again, the delay has, we believe, and we extrapolate that out to '26 potentially $100 million of impact. And now if the China. So clearly, China has been an issue all this past year. They've probably suffered most from, as we pointed at the COVID hangover. And we're not out of it yet. They're still working through it. We're very confident that they are going to make it and come back soon and come back strong, but they're not there yet. And when you extrapolate -- because they're such an important part of our growth, given the fact that their AAA growth rates everywhere else, when you extrapolate that, call it, macro-economic slowdown pause to '26 is about a $50 million impact. Now this is not necessarily organic, but unfavorable foreign exchange rates. They are what they are, and the dollar is definitely stronger now than it was 2 years ago. So that has a somewhat significant impact. And then there's just kind of a big question mark, because it's very hard to quantify, which is why we're not going to say a new '26 target. We're going to think further out than that. But at the end of the day, these targets were developed in summer of '21, when at the peak of what I call, the COVID halo, right? I mean our customers were flushed with cash, with all the COVID testing and COVID vaccine that is going on, and research going on. VC, private equity were flush with cash and pointing the biotechs. And at the time, no one saw an end to that, really, because there wasn't even a vaccine out really at that point in time. And so I think everyone's thinking that, that kind of momentum would last, potentially last for 4 or 5 years, was a elevated thinking from a get-go. So I mentioned that, because I think that's mostly impacting the biotech space. We don't see biotech spaces crashing or dying. The levels that we see it funding going on is probably familiar with what it was in fiscal year '19 before COVID hit. It's just that it was abnormally high during the COVID halo, right? But nonetheless, it's a big, big impact to we extrapolate that out to '26, and I'm not going to try to [indiscernible] at what -- I'll let you praise do that. But that's the last -- I'm going to talk about fiscal year '26 and get off the Debbie Downer. And instead, we are top positive, because we have an amazingly positive story. Starting with, yes, the last 3 years, right? So even though we're telling that after certain major headwinds to our fiscal year '26 target, our growth these last 3 years was tremendous. And as importantly or more importantly, it was even more tremendous in the key growth platform that is going to carry our company for the next 10 years and beyond. 54% more annual revenue as a total company today in fiscal year '23 than we had just 3 years ago. And let me keep going and then come back to my point. Yes. Cell and gene therapy, right? So I just explained cell and gene therapy, the reason for a headwind in '26, but it still grew more than 3x in '23 versus '20. And the GMP proteins component of that grew over 4x. Exosome Diagnostics, despite the late start, 150% higher revenue than 3 years ago. Our protonic analytical instruments, which have been around the longest in 9 years in our portfolio, still grew 80% over those past 3 years cumulatively. Spatial biology. Yes, not to our aspirations 2 years ago, but still grew 60% over the past 3 years, without automation. And then finally, China. Everyone is down on China, down on China. It contributes 65% to our growth last year. And they're holding their own on consumables right now, which is good to see. And that's the last point I want to make here is that, we benefit, we positioned extremely well. And as a result, we are a much bigger company and even so much -- definitely more stronger company than we were 3 years ago. And it's not temporary. As '23 proved out, where a lot of companies in our space are calling revenues down and negative growth, as a result of the hangover. We still grew 5%. So what I'm saying is this is a sticky [indiscernible] revenue. It's recurring revenue, and it forms a new baseline, very strong baseline, healthy baseline for our growth going forward. So what about our growth going forward. We do have different approach this time than we've done in past Investor Days. And we talked about how our 5-year plan, and Chuck showed you, it's geared off of our prioritization process that we do internally. And what we've -- kind of the learning off this '26, being probably the first time we could be likely a material miss from what we thought. So we need to step back a bit and look at these markets bigger, broader and for a longer period of time, because so many of them are still evolving. Namely liquid biopsy, cell and gene therapy and spatial biology. Those 3, I think everyone believes, will be huge markets. But in a nascent developing market, it can be lumpy, choppy and trying to pinpoint those inflection points is very, very difficult. So the 10 years is a significant amount of time. So we thought that was a pretty -- and by the way, with this management team now has been in place and our strategy has been in place for 10 years, too. So I thought made sense, if we're looking 10 years back, let's flip 10 years out. And Chuck showed a chart, there is a very similar rift by our product end markets. Here is with more looking back historically, to where our market sizes are today. Starting from that third column, we start talking about what the growth rates we believe look like in the future. And these aren't crazy growth rates for these big markets, low double-digit growth. I feel like we're being somewhat conservative here. It is over a long period of time, but these are hot markets, right? And they can be as Will showed us, note that [anybody] market's exploded from $5 billion to $125 billion. So this could be very conservative, depending on how you look at it. But out of this view, it's still our markets by themselves. We believe that we are very well-positioned and in total, will more than double over the next 10 years. And as we continue with our positioning and a very strong positioning in all these end markets, we think we'll continue to well exceed the growth of the market. And these growth plates you see here for Bio-Techne long term, in all categories, except for one, are essentially less than the growth rates of experience of last 10 years. So I think there's some conservatism there, as well, given that the inflection point in some of these markets still hasn't hit yet. If you do the math and you run that all out, it just says, "Hey, are they from a conservative, believe it or not conservative perspective, -- we could be a $4 billion to $5 billion company in 10 years. Double and double again. And that's what we're setting out to do. And -- but for me, is even more exciting is that 10 years from now, it's one thing to say you can double and double again. And then if you're done, your multiple goes at like 9 or whatever. But you'll see, we believe 10 years, that will still have a very, very small market share and still plenty of room to grow even beyond that. But I know this room and I know that very few of you -- there's a few that do. A lot of those investors, but very few of you have a 10-year horizon, right? And I just hope most of you have at least a 3- to 5-year horizon, right? Because that's what we're in [indiscernible] for the long game. And so now, yes, I missed my queue. Before I get to the shorter-term view, which is the 5-year view that you're probably most interested in, I do also take this 10-year view and flip it on its side a little bit, and look at it from a peer end market perspective as opposed to a product end market. Because if you think about, there's really 2 broad end markets that are going to propel our growth over the next decade. And if we keep talking about it, it's cell and gene therapy. And you can see from this waterfall here, cell and gene therapy alone could contribute $2 billion to our revenue over the course of the next 10 years. And you can see here that the biggest buckets of contribution to that growth, of course, is our GMP reagents. For all the reasons that we'll get into. We are including that Wilson Wolf in these figures. Now we typically don't include any M&A, and we still don't. But Wilson Wolf is essentially, or it will be officially, if no later than fiscal year '27. So if we're going to look at few years beyond '27, it makes sense to start including that in our view. So you see the Wilson Wolf contribution there, and a very healthy and nice contribution, believe it or not to the -- from the proteomic analytic tools that Will talked about. So the key here is that as an end market, we talk about our GMP proteins, because it's a huge piece of the growth for us in that market, but it touches our entire portfolio. No different than the biologics, drug therapies do or even small molecules do. We play across the board in our portfolio, in all them. Spending with diagnostics. [indiscernible] Diagnostics. We're some $200 million in Diagnostics today. That's including our core Diagnostics Reagents division. But we see a potential for $1 billion or more revenue growth for the next decade from this end market. And if you look at it in the center there, by far, the biggest contributor of this, we believe there's our ExoDX Platform. Again, for [indiscernible] Will talk about it, it's a superior platform. And if we dissect that a little more, right down the middle, you see there's Exo that it's in a -- 2 different buckets. There's the ExoDX Prostate growth, and it's kind of the all other. And the ExoDX Prostate growth, the growth from our surgeon products and our course, our core Diagnostics Reagents, that's all the products we have today. And particularly, prostate is still nascent and has a long way to go. So really, 3/4 of that growth is going to come from what we have today. But of course, we're not stopping what we have today. You heard about the pipeline that we have within ExoDX, but also you heard Kim talk about where we're going. This spatial has ultimately been the clinic, and diagnostics with that platform. And you heard from Will, about our opportunities as Simple Plex as a diagnostic platform. And it's not time to sky, you heard them both say it's actually already happening now. It's just still very small scale. And we know diagnostic markets from our own history with ExoDX, take a long time to evolve. So you'll see they're very small slivers of contribution from spatial biology and Simple Plex. And that's why we had the significant upside potential to the right, because if the -- if our strategy is evolved to or that to be pulled in, we try to be conservative somewhat this year. So if they can get pulled in sooner, there'll be much more significant upside to the $1 billion bogie we travel right now for fiscal year '33. So again, diagnostics, cell and gene therapy. Those 2 end markets alone to get us to $4 billion of revenue in 10 years. So now, what does this mean for a shorter-term view. And then we kind of did this top down starting 10 years out, and we combine that with our bottoms-up prioritization process to make sure it held together and made sense. And so our new 5-year view for fiscal year '28, I know honestly looks very similar to our last target we had. So you might be just saying, look this is just kind of kicking the can down the road. But there's actually more to it than that. I mean it is true that the strategies are still the same. There's no major shift in our strategy. We're actually starting a stronger point, than we were even 2 years ago. But there are nuances within this, that I think make this forecast -- that actually derisks this forecast and make it even that much more achievable. And I'd rather share with you what I believe is more realistically achievable, and then show the upside potential next to that. And I'll go through this a little bit piece by piece so you understand where I'm coming from. And I'm actually going to work backwards from the top of the chart down to the left, starting with Wilson Wolf, right? So our outlook now is greater than $2 billion in fiscal year '28, does include Wilson Wolf for the reasons I just mentioned in a 10-year view, right? That was not included in our prior forecast. We hadn't bought the company yet or hadn't been -- bought a piece of it yet. Cell and gene therapy is a very large contribution in the 10 years, but you'll notice relatively speaking, not as much in the 5 year. And that's because in those forecasts, we assumed, any commercialization of our customers. Where our growth, we're growing like crazy in cell and gene therapy and where we're taking share dramatically is in, I'd say, early clinical and preclinicals. The ones that are already in clinicals, they want to get through their clinical whether it's very, very difficult for them to want to swap out at this point, but we are mopping up everything that's at the low phase, Phase II and Phase III. And it's really a [ pyramid ]. I mean the 2,000 clinicals that we'll share is a tip of the pyramid. We know firsthand from our own customer interactions, that there's at least 10 or more indications in the pipeline for everyone that's in a clinical trial. And that's the space that we're waiting. But it's going to take longer for that to get through the various stages of the clinicals, and also may become commercialized. So we've stripped that out. This is all growth from new customers and customers progressing through clinicals. Now is there a chance that some of these customers that we're currently doing is selling proteins to and other products could be commercialized in year 4 or year 5? Sure, and that would be upside. But we're not baking that right now into a plus $2 billion -- greater than $2 billion per year. Moving down to the left, the Exosome surge in Molecular Diagnostics business. So here, I'd say the fundamental difference is, again, learning from the past. This is primarily growth of our existing surge in carrier screening products and our prostate test and a little bit of ExoTRU dribbled in, once that -- hopefully that goes live in the next year with Thermo. But all the new products from pipeline activity that you heard Kim talk about, we understand how long it takes to get that to market. And some of that is in our 10 year as you saw, but we're not putting that in the 5 years. Could some of it happen in our 5 year? Sure, and if it does, it's upside. And then finally, I speak to the spatial biology space. So this is one, probably the only one where we've actually taken our expectations higher than where we were 2 years ago. But the reason we've done that now is because, of course with Lunaphore acquisition. We truly believe that Lunaphore combined with our ACV and RNA scope, will be transformational for that product line. The lending transformation. It's not like it's been shabby growth, we still had double-digit growth. But the #1 -- we believe, the #1 limitation of much more vast and quick adoption of this technology has been a lack of automation. And now with that, we think it's off of the races. So that will be a very nice contributor to our revenue growth for the next 5 years. When it comes to our proteomic instrument platforms and our core reagents, just because they are already of significant size, even more moderate growth rates has a significant contribution to the overall revenue number. And I would say, the growth rates we've assumed for these 2 categories are more in line with what our growth rates were pre-pandemic. Meaning, actually a slowdown in the growth rate versus what we've experienced the last 3 years. If there's 2 categories in this waterfall that are actually ahead of our plan that we put together 2 years ago, it's these 2. So we've actually been conservative and taking those growth rates down to pre-pandemic kind of growth rate levels, which is still double-digit growth, by the way, for our instrument platform and mid- to high single-digit growth for our reagents. Okay. One final slide. I'll be on queue here is -- these are basically the key financial metrics that we're going to be focused on, and working towards every day, to achieve by end of fiscal year '28. First and foremost, growth, revenue growth. The 10 years has been about transforming this company, from a slow grower to a best-in-class growth company, within the life science tools space. And we're hell-bent on making sure that continues. And we think we're positioned better than ever to make that continue. Secondly, as I talked about before, our profitability. It seems like in this space, there's always a choice that has to be made, whether you want to be a growth company or do you want to be profitable? And we've never believed you have to make that choice. And I think we've proven over the past decade that you don't. And maintain our very, very strong profitability. I think that's very unique, something that's hard to find in any company, much like any company in our space is a company that is a growth company, that also has industry-leading profitability. So that is extremely important to us. We whether are profitable, of course, will depend on what future M&A we do and the timing of that M&A. Adjusted EPS, for those who want to get down below, operating margin, we expect that to be a high teens growth simply because we should have some leverage off this kind of scale up our fixed cost, but also assuming no further M&A, which is what this assumed at this point, we should be able to rapidly pay down debt and save on interest expense. Operating cash flow, shooting for 20% kind of CAGR, with that kind of earnings growth on the very bottom line, we also expect to get leverage off our working capital. Many of these growth initiatives don't require massive amounts of inventory, for example. So we should be able to exceed our cash flow, slightly more than our earnings going forward. Another beautiful thing in our business, high consumable model, very low capital intensity. And the capital we do spend, tend to be more for capacity to support our growth than anything else. So over the -- over the next 5 years, we're assuming an average of between $50 million and $55 million of CapEx. I'd say about half of that is sustaining and roughly half of that is capacity expansion. We do have some major investments, I think major, it's all relative. But we do have some big investments to make still with regards to our GMP antibody capabilities, as well as regenerative medicine protein, GMP protein capabilities. And we -- that's on the docket to do it this year, in fact. And then finally, with all this cash flow that we expect to generate in the next 5 years. Cumulatively, we believe that will give us roughly $5 billion of dry powder to continue the strategy that's worked the last 10 years, which is focused on M&A, and bolster our existing growth pillars with that M&A and/or find new growth pillars, because it's life sciences, and there's always a new mouse trap out there, there's some of it is changing the world. And our reagents are usually touching it some way, somehow. And by the way, that $5 billion is after the purchase of Wilson Wolf, the $1 billion purchase. Last but not least, at the end of day, you heard Chuck talk about prioritization, how that's a core competency of our operating processes, and we will continue to be absolutely rigorous in our prioritization of investments, to make sure that 5 years from now, our portfolio is positioned as it is now. So essentially, 5 years from now, when we appear talking to you, it's a rinse and repeat to get to those 10-year targets that we talked about. So with that, I believe that's the end of the prepared presentations and it's time for Q&A.

Thanks, Jim. Yes, just raise your hand and wait for the mic to ask a question, please. Who's going to pick them?

Great presentation. Jim, I wanted to actually start with the op margin outlook, 35% to 40% and see if I can just understand that. Just the way to think about that, that includes some level of M&A. And just it depends on how much?

Correct.

And if so, could you sort of give a view on what organic op margins would look like. If you took that $2 billion, strip that Wilson Wolf, where will we be?

If we strip out Wilson Wolf?

We just booked ex M&A [indiscernible].

Sorry, if we did no M&A in the next 5 years, and we strip out Wilson Wolf, I still think we could be north of 40% or at least at 40%. And you never see me put on a presentation or even talk in a conversation about anything north of 40%, and I'll tell you why. I think -- you get to 40% even high 30s, you're talking about rarefied air as it regards to profitability. So we're making these trade-offs every day, every quarter in our prioritization process that we live and breathe, about what's more important? Margin or growth? Margin or growth? In my answer, of course, is always both. And so we have to walk a fine line, to make sure we deliver on both. You get rarefied air close to 40%. I'm more inclined to take whatever extra margin that come -- normally comes from this process and reinvest that free and faster growth. That prioritization process that Chuck talked about, there's roughly 1/3, and we're talking about 300 or so projects that come up every year, roughly 100 of them don't make the cut. And it's not because of bad projects. And it's not because we haven [indiscernible] or ROIC -- it may take longer -- may have a longer duration to get to ROIC, but I would go further down that cut line to even further accelerate growth in the future. So that's the rationale from that ever [indiscernible] above 40%.

I'd also add that Wilson Wolf is a special case. You remember the chart that Jim showed after acquisition, the dilution we have. That won't be the case of Wilson Wolf and it's accretive. It's only at 75% op margins right now. And as they scale, and come more under our control, it will probably still always be around 50%. Yes. So we'll have a little bit of a bank to draw from to make sure we can surely attain the 40%. But as Jim said, we're -- I think we'll be above 40% overall net-net, we'll probably position ourselves at 40% to get more investment for growth.

But again, the reason for the 35% to 40%, just like we're sitting here today. We're not at 30%, we're between 35% and 40%, because we will do more M&A and hopefully, a lot of it. And that's where the margins will end up settling out at the end of the day. And depending when we do that M&A, it could still be early stage M&A that's done late in that cycle. So I have the impact of margin dilution with maybe not seeing that revenue until the next 2 or 3 years out. And we just can't predict that, right? But...

Okay. And maybe just a follow-up on the mid-teen CAGR. And it's an ambitious goal, but you do have a lot of high-growth things that you're targeting there. One of the things that we talk about, at least the last couple of quarters or years. Difficulty of comps and just the ups and downs in the market. Can you talk a little bit about your assumptions for the things like academic budgets and pharma development spending, and just what it is that you would expect out of the trajectory from '23 to '28, in order to get to that target? Do you feel like the things in the hopper and sort of supersede the comp issues that become time to talk about the target growth from mid- to high teens every year? Just talk a little bit about the past there.

Well, first of all, comps are going to get -- are getting easier now. So we've got something to work from there. And I think we all expected there to be much more investments, much more funding coming off of COVID-19, the country went crazy for a while, and I'm actually a little bit surprised that the backing off there is on academic funding. We'll see what ends up getting through Congress, but most countries are still committed, and there will be another x factor out there. They are bearing now. I think COVID seems to be coming back right now. So who knows. But I think the trend will be largely, I think, maybe just like pre-COVID ,8% kind of numbers long term, I think, for academic growth. I think it will be safe for us. And we've been mitigating a lot of our sensitivity of that anyway. And these high-growth areas we're talking about another couple of years, they start paying the bills there, right? They become material, and they kind of live outside and ground rules currently outliving it. So even so, tough macro [indiscernible] we're still a 50%-plus grower in our cell and gene therapy area as an example. Nearly 100% in Exosome. So it's -- we'll break some rules that way. And then maybe Will can follow up on the detail around his segment...

I think -- thinking about kind of outsized potential for proteomics within that pharma space, right? Even if there is some leveling off, what we're seeing is this pent-up demand to get kind of the answer. Is it's a mechanism of action for a drag and leveraging that genomic data. So as I mentioned, in these academic part, you can see moving to multiomics. But if you look at what's happening in big pharma and all of the big pharma, in the top 20, they all have high secret proteomics platforms. They're really linked to the genomic that they've got. So really, it's enabling, not just on MOA, but going kind of backwards and looking at Trican. So I think they like at ways they want to deploy whatever kind of investment strategy they've got. It's going to be overweighted into the proteomic side. So it's a very really nice advantage there.

And if I could, I guess part of your question was, I think you mentioned academic as well. It's part of your question. I'd be honest with you, in 10 years, we've been trying to build algorithm that ties NIH funding with our academic growth and now we have to find one. And it's not, I think, it's just us I think it's across our industry. I mean, as an example, we know academic budgets were increasing double digits throughout COVID, but no one was talking about double-digit growth in academic and life science tools. And ironically, since they've been talking about flattening the budget or maybe even slightly decreasing over the past 6 months or so, coming or academic -- actually, our academic growth has been the best it's been in 2 years, those 2 quarters. So my thesis on this, and it's not mine, but if you like to thank my dear friend [indiscernible] in the back for explaining this to me that for us, for Bio-Techne, sure. When all boats rise, it's helpful and it's good and water levels go down, it's a headwind. But for us, what's more important, is where that money is being spent. What kind of grants that money is being spent on. And much of these increases that occurred over the past 2 years in academic funding, was directed towards COVID. So if you think about it, as long as they don't dramatically reduce it by 20% or more, there is more money we'll work with -- a little more money to work with than there was 2, 3 years ago to get redirected back into areas like oncology, immunotherapy, neuroscience, and that's where our strength is. So it could actually be a tailwind for us potentially. Yes.

But don't forget, it's 15% of our revenue exposure. So we've mitigated a lot of that exposure. So.

[indiscernible] partners there still. So maybe just on the flip side of the 8% that you mentioned. Even if we do 7% to 8% next year in terms of growth. Even if we are not modeling 15% for the next 2 years after that. Your target move from FY '26, ex Wilson Wolf, now including Wilson Wolf FY '28. But I guess my question is, it does look -- when we run this forward to FY '28, it does look a little bit conservative. It seems that you can do over $2 billion. Maybe just help us understand how much growth involved are you imagining in that number in FY '28 and then what else is there for you to get to that $2.5 billion potential target?

Well, you know, it's between $2 billion and $2.5 billion because that was on the slide. They did say 2-plus, right? So -- but it's hard to -- we're not going to nail down a number, when we had to come clean every quarter, you guys don't know where we have this $2 billion goal. And it's harder to kind of work through it, with COVID and everything else. So we're going to give you a range. It's 2-plus. The $2.5 billion is also a plus, 2.5-plus. There's upside. We have been conservative on the Wilson Wolf number because just like us and everyone in the industry, their clinicals have gone a little bit flat too. They're making lots of bottom line as we talked about, but they're not growing like they were 2 years ago. But they are the standard. They're in -- they're the ones in all their clinicals. They have 800 customers. So as things turn back on, there's more prioritization put by the people doing clinicals. They stand the game because they're not getting thrown out anywhere. It's just a matter of this industry being a bit of a lull. And it's hard to really pick the next 5 years, where that triggers. It's a range. it's a good number. We're going to be picking them up, but no later than in 2027. And I fully expect it will be north of $200 million of revenue at least in 2017.

If I could add just one sort x factor, if you will on how big Wilson Wolf get. So right now, Wilson Wolf been 2 FDA approved drug processes. The 1/3 that's in and year out, that will pick them here. So it will be to [indiscernible] that. And I think you're all really aware of how this works, right? There's an initial therapeutic approved and then medications expand or the time frame. They don't have to go, be nearly dead to now get access to the period. So that's happening. But if you look at the 13 approvals that I mentioned earlier, right? And there's now 18 indications. So [ Kavitha ] got multiple indications, right? It's starting to get used earlier in process. So I'd say, as we have those shop time goal and as they start treating patients earlier, the potential of that to really skyrock is pretty tremendous. The other part, I think, the cases really widen that. If you look at kind of the product mix within Wilson Wolf and this pressure that's happening in the market, it's really favoring an adoption of their platform, because they've got a system that scales from very small-scale [indiscernible] scale. You probably your research on that. But with that financial pressure, people don't want to move forward with the multiyear others, right? And they do see a future system they're already not in it, right? So again, I think you're really nice upside with that.

I want to take you back to one of my slides. Our 5-year-old predictions have been pretty close, overall. There are a lot that you talked about today and looking forward short term that weren't anywhere on the game board 5 years ago when we were here. And that will be the same case in 5 years. And I'll give you one that's not in the chart today. It's just totally upside and who knows how big it will get, but it will be a huge bogey if it happens. And that's TC buster. If the world finally moves on from viral, in 5 to 10 years. And we have over 20 successful preclinicals and experiments with customers. We don't have 1 customer that turn this to -- everyone has been shocked at their dramatic results, and we have 40 in the pipeline right now, that want to get access to this technology. 40 customers. It's almost everybody. What's transposed on or in 10 to 20 years, if the entire industry goes towards that, instead of staying at viral? It's massive. We have 0 [indiscernible] right now. It's going to be something, and we're selling millions in revenue right now. It's actually selling. So there will be more of these coming. That's just the way our engine runs and innovation is alive and well here, and we'll have -- and we'll have more M&A. Somebody will be up here in 10 years and talk about the next 25 acquisitions that we did on top of the $4 billion to $5 billion that we just talked about today. So get ready. It's going to happen.

And the follow-up is on M&A. Maybe just one part is broadly talking about M&A. Where -- what's sort of -- what are you seeing out there at this point in time, which is somewhat of a softer environment indeed across tools? Are valuations coming down in your view. And there was an acquisition of RUO antibody in the space, too. So does that -- I'm wondering if that changes the competitive landscape in that space, because now the more scalable player is going to potentially carve out.

We can all chime in here in that one. But since Kim did the last one, let's let Kim tell us what he's seeing.

Thank you for the question, [ Puneet ]. I think that there are certainly a much better expectation when it comes to valuations in the market, right? The labor market, but also the acquisition market as other options, such as certain exits have just reset in pricing. So that's interesting. It gives us a better environment. Why I hesitate a little bit is that the real value companies, whether it's true value and competitive advantage, long-term competitive advantage in markets that are growing fast. I mean does targets will always have a higher value, just because that's what they're worth, right? So I don't think we've done anything that's really cheap but we certainly have paid fair prices for acquisitions that have tremendous potential. So that's all in all, okay. I think 2 years ago, 3 years ago, we basically did not acquire, because expectations were just a little bit too wild. That's why we've been careful in taking on more projects. But now, we're back in an environment where I think you have to just pick your gems.

And just last one actually had for Kim would on the screening side, those trials are sizable and very expensive when you go into screening. Colorectal cancer screening $15,000 to $20,000 and prostate cancer screening, maybe even along that you can correct me, but -- how are you thinking about that? It seems like you want to pursue partnerships, but I just want to be clear, what level of investment are you willing to pursue in that space?

Yes. Also a good question. Thanks, [ Puneet ]. The -- so what we basically do with those large opportunities, is the model that we've laid out for ExoTRU, right? ExoTRU is that kidney transplant rejection test. So rather than clinic -- running the whole clinical trials, that indeed are not only long but also very expensive, we became really good at creating data sets that show that our signature and our approach would be a winning approach in the market. And so for those larger clinical studies, we usually defer that to the partner, that has a channel and that has a position in that market, and for whom it would be to right investment. Because otherwise, they will be backward integrated, meaning that they will get pushed out of the market because our test will be better. So that's how we laid it out. We usually have some upfront payments to partner and hand over the signature and technology, and then a royalty stream down the line. So that's how we participate in it. And that's the way that we like it. Also to protect our profitability, but also from an expertise point of view.

Dan Leonard from Credit Suisse. Two questions that are unrelated. First off, can you speak to the concept of market share gains? It seems mathematically, with your 10-year view, what the business can look like 10 years from now, compared to your view on the growth rates of the markets you play in? Are you're expecting 5% to 6% -- 5 to 6 points of share gain? And you compound it over that time. So can you speak to your view on [indiscernible].

Let's jump in that. I'll start it, and you guys can jump in. It gets back to our positioning. Obviously, I'll pick a few to begin with. I mean satisfactual. RNAscope is a gold standard. And there isn't any real viable competition in that translational space. So it's ours to not only grow with the market, but as we move downstream into the clinical space, take more of that market share that way, as an example. Take our Exosome platform. We typically believe absolutely less platform out there, and we're really improving it in the prostate cancer, with the other 2 competitors that were out, way before our test was. They are now basically going away, because we're taking all the share there. So cell and gene therapy. Having cell and gene therapy is going to be so big, that anyone who gets in it is going to win some degree. But we're positioning ourselves to be a top 3 player, in terms of supplier into that space. And in the case of general medicine, the top player. So again, more than growing with the market, but taking share from others, who are trying to participate but won't be able to compete. So I think -- and that's going back to our instrument platforms, Simple Western -- that's cleanest example. There is no competition. There is no automated solution for Western other than -- rather than ours, true automated solution. So it's not market conversion. So even though that market might be only growing mid-single digits, we can -- as it has in the last 10 years, we've been growing mid-teens plus in fact in the COVID years at least 20% plus, because of the left-of-market conversion. There's still a lot of market to go after. And as we will outline a lot of new applications that, that -- those platforms can be used on that we take share from other platforms that are used today.

Maybe I'll just supplement that last one in the instruments. So if you like to just use consumable to leading indicator, right? In a year that everybody would say it was somewhat challenging, right? The 3 platforms are 15%, 19% and 21%, and the consumables kind of pull through, right? So we see that as a great indicator, even though the capital component has slowed down a bit. Those consumables just continue to drive and take share. So it's a good leading indicator for share.

And then I think I got a shorter-term question. But Chuck, you said in the opening that you're seeing a light at the end of the tunnel in China? Could you circle back to that comment and perhaps elaborate?

We'll always stay close to the team, as you'd imagine. And right now, all our current information is that they're still on track for funding infusion come October. And we'll be one of the first to see some of that, because we're at the reagents and the consumables end of the model. And the team feels pretty good about that. I don't think it's going back to 25% growth overnight, but we certainly expect double-digit run rates or better by the end of the fiscal year, and it should start beginning, we hope in October. As it was mentioned, we had decent growth last quarter, and we're really to quick in, quick out as we think, in China, partly because comps get very easy. Partly because we're not that big. And the funding impacts have a pretty big leverage effect for us. And we work through 30 different distributors. We have pent-up demand with our instruments. Our instruments are highly, again, gated towards productivity. And so as you know, they had a lot of strong growth 2 years ago, and it's coming off of that. But then -- and we expect that at to begin again. So that demand -- that natural demand will start occurring unless political macro events get worse or something, right? But the way things look right now, that's the team the same.

It's a top funding priority for the Chinese government. So it's going to be a place where they put money back in the first, once they start actually funding their budgets. We're not even talking about stimulus. So we're just talking about funding their normal annual budget. So it can't go on and as we forever. So that's how...

I think also -- we pumped our economies, lots of stimulus. We've been printing money for 20 years in this country. They haven't started yet. So they're just getting around trying to figure out what to do with their economy. And I think they're going to be doing some stimulation things, that we haven't -- we're not ready to -- we're going to be surprised probably. I just don't think they're ready to give up unless this thing crater. They had no economy for almost a year. There are nobody in the streets. They spend so much money on testing. We had employed to test every day. Every day, every system a test in China that was paid for by the government. They spend all their money. And so I think they're just trying to figure out what to do now. But I just been going there too many years, I just know that culture pretty well. I feel and I just think they're pretty fast. They don't mess around. They have a great government and when they decide and they're going to do stuff, they do it quickly. There's no arbitrage. And I just believe they'll come back better and faster than probably people are thinking. [indiscernible] go ahead.

Yes, I'll just add one thing. I just kind of -- just kind of where things stand right now. One thing they are finding right now is the hospitals, right? And the interesting thing is there are hospital that actually do research to it. So if You're a physician in the hospital and so you actually have to publish, right? And so what we're seeing is really a nice offtake of our consumables space, particularly ELISA. Because I think, the exposure and kind of the agility of our team in China, they're going where the money is right now. And I think our ability, as it trickles in and wherever it kind of ends up first as it gets funded well and be in a good position. We're seeing that the reagent solutions side of the business performing pretty well there, and it's really driven by the team shifting their time and resources before there is some funding in China, which is the...

And again, we had great growth in our instruments through COVID. Good 50% growth over there. And so that's bound to have a dip for a while, but the acceptance of our platforms in China, because of their low capital position under $100,000 mostly, it's really strong. So -- and we've had the same leader there for since we acquired ProteinSimple, and he's very bullish to come back. So I have no reason not to believe them. I don't think it's overnight, but I do think we'll start seeing the green shoots come October, hopefully.

And Chuck, if I could, I'll add in some in terms of pushing, perhaps more optimistic than what you're hearing from others. I can't speak for them, but from what I read from other schools, companies in business in China, they have a higher proportion of their business downstream, whether it's the biologic processing and CMOs, things of that sort. And a lot of that business, they might be Chinese companies, but those Chinese companies are doing -- they're doing the business with American companies. So I don't know it's export back to the U.S. or Europe or what have not. And now what's seem to be changing a bit there, in terms of companies diversifying their supply chain, whether it's for geopolitical reasons or have another COVID situation again. That's not where we're strongly positioned. We're strongly positioned in research, China for China. And you hear China for China, you often think it's made in China for China. Our stuff is not made in China, but it's sold to Chinese customers for Chinese research, not for American companies. So that's why, for us, it's much more about when the government turns to stick it back on funding in this space, and it's [indiscernible] they will. And they can't go too long without doing it, as opposed to perhaps some of our peer companies that are more -- have much more biased revenue towards the perhaps structural changes that are going on over there.

I apologize for another 2028 question kind of [indiscernible] but you're pointing to mid-teens growth and then Chuck, I heard you on 2-plus, and I'm guessing the plus is carrying there. But if you take the $2 billion back at visible, Jim, when you get to a growth -- organic growth rate that's less than mid-teen. Is there something about this that you're assuming, maybe lower growth at the beginning, given the current macro that accelerates, or is it just kind of broader...

Well, let's remember, fiscal year '24 is probably that 5-year plan. right? So -- and I think that's where it kind of evens out. I mean we've been cautious about that for the first half of this fiscal year, we think it should come back second half. But that's -- it's kind of -- you're starting off a lower growth, let's begin with the growth rates will be to accelerate to get to mid-teens. Even after backing up, you want some more.

That's really the bottom line here is us missing this $2 million goal is that we've always talked about it being more of a J curve and it's still been pushed out a year to 2 years. That's the issue.

Got it. And then maybe one for Will. We've seen several deals in the protein and antibody space by larger players including [indiscernible] the antibody player more recently. I'm just curious, obviously, how think about your platform, but kind of what you're seeing from a competitive perspective and what those deals could mean...

Yes. I think like a lot of these types of deals, right? It's disruptive for the companies we acquired, especially if they're being acquired by kind of lines you run, right? You're really referring to the Abcam deal which just happened with Danaher, right? Danaher has got this wonderful track record. The [indiscernible] probably no doubt if they saw an opportunity to deploy that with the Abcam. When we look at that portfolio, they're getting their legs in the space in a lot of ways, and transitioning from this OEM shop to do things themselves. They tripped on things like ERP and a lot of these execution things. I would imagine that over time, will get under will probably improve. I think our view, we don't react because of the day-to-day of what's happening with everybody else. So we talk about our ability to deploy our best-in-class content on our system. They don't have that, right? They don't have 40 years of that experience there, not a market leader in a lot -- they're really -- they were [indiscernible] and starting the basic. So I think if we reacted to every one of these transactions, we lose sight of what we're trying to do and what we're trying to do is go way beyond where they are. We're not super or overly concerned about those things. So kind of regardless of when [indiscernible] quite honestly, right? And not to be dismissive of those competitors, we're just on a totally different shift in there.

We gave almost the same answer almost 2 years ago now with peppertech being bought. What have you heard? What are you seeing? It's kind of [indiscernible] Mark probably mad at me. But it's from my comments, and it's all true. They've got a lot of money to put behind it, but they don't have a lot of domain knowledge. And it creates a lot of disruption, and you'll see it in this case, too. We picked up talent as other have. It's -- they have the wherewithal, do a lot with it, but this stuff is hard. It's the same reason why we're still a leader in all these years and proteins, we don't have a single patent in proteins. And we make gross margins that will knock out your chairs still. Why is that? It's really hard. It's so freaking hard, a new protein design. You cannot imagine in his comment earlier, having AI help you with the software coming out, it's just going to make us better. It's like, I just always use the analogy of what did professors do when it only started to let you use calculators in your tests, they made the problems a lot harder. So that's what's going to happen. So not too worried. I actually kind of like the distraction allows us to continue our after, which is a much bigger game.

All right, Alex Nowak from Craig-Hallum. Just kind of a question around the one [indiscernible] that you set out back in the years [indiscernible] successful. How do you set that for the cell and gene therapy. Because you're building this end-to-end workflow pharmacy was smart, he even mentioned that they don't even realize that they might be ordering certain components from you [indiscernible] that you have product. So how do you show pharma when cell and gene therapy is still so new that you do have this end-to-end workflow and then they ultimately can put them together?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Alex. And the way you are conflating kind of 2 things. Certainly the 1 lab and kind of bringing the masses in, and seeing the value in our offering. That's one part of the equation. The part of inflating a little bit on the cell and gene there because they are such a defined group, what we've done commercially is we have an enterprise selling team that's calling kind of director levels and above into those accounts. And so if you're one of those 500-plus kind of targeted accounts in North America, for example. We're engaging a director level above with our teams and kind of deploying the broader resources in it, because it is -- it's really essentially a production kind of workflow. Where we are capturing then with this -- the destination of choice that I spoke about was really at that front end, right? So if they're really doing just the basic research upfront, looking at a new modality car, then that will help us get that access. I guess the nice thing about cell and gene therapy customers, specifically, they actually are not that difficult to find, right? So we think it does [indiscernible] we will bring value there, but it will be valued much more broadly to academics and broader kind of research other than these really specific application spaces.

Okay. That's helpful. And then a follow-up to that. I think in the past, it was mentioned we're getting to numbers now that maybe we'll enroll maybe 600, 700 customers. You were calling on only a handful of those. Where do those numbers stand? And then a second question with regards to on the Diagnostic side. We talked about Protein sciences. We build these kits. We give these kits to pharma, we let pharma whatever they do with it. On the diagnostics side, we built this toolbox [indiscernible]. Why devote those tests internally and then partner route, versus ultimately selling an entire tool on the API and letting someone else figure out what to do with it?

One for each of my presidents.

Yes, I'll grab the first one. The second is more complicated. So [indiscernible] it. So Wilson Wolf is over 800 customers now, right? I mentioned that as part of the [indiscernible] already. And we're now well over 400. We grew our customer base by more than 20%. I think we shared that in our earnings call as well, if you look back at that transcript. So kind of both are growing in the right direction. Kim?

Yes, it's a good question around the Multi-omics platform. But basically, at the moment, we create a signature and the test. It's much easier to play in the downstream revenue line. Meaning, at the moment you partner it out and there are revenues coming from specific debt, and you have a loyalty-based income, that's really the reason why we would not just export to platform or sell the platform. We'd rather exploit it and use it as a continuous competitive advantage over all our signatures and all our tests.

You saw in the chart, that was actually quite conservative, what it could be 10 years out. I mean, it's there's a dozen different indications that could come out of easily in 10 years. There's no way we have the bandwidth, the money or the channels that actually do all of this ourselves. We would have to do a combination with partners. And there are different jurisdictions. We happen to be in MGS, which is not one of the easier ones. So there's going to be decisions we make of wanting to let things go and want to make sure we own it ourselves. And I think it's -- to think of that as a portfolio-based approach all by itself. But I still think it's a $1 billion-plus platform long term. And we've been talking for years now, why it's just so superior to sell for DNA, but they've got a big head start, right? It takes years. And we've been warned by many of you that it will take a while to get -- become anything in diagnostics. And we believe you, but we're getting there.

Just pivoting to spatial a bit. So I understand the TAM expansion looking for acquisition. Could you help us understand sort of the customer mix there now, and how you're thinking about the growth amongst the different customer cohorts going forward? And then lastly, any thoughts, longer term, on maybe capturing share from traditional [indiscernible]?

Yes. Okay. So the slide talks about going from $2 billion to $5 billion, right? That's obvious, because there's now we're in an implementation component, as well as the proteomic component there. You're asking about the customer mix. This platform gets used in the research, as well as in pharma, as well as in clinical, right? So how it will evolve? I think, at least academic and biopharma will continue to grow in double digits. One might outpace the other over the long term. And I think biopharma -- pharma, biopharma will be outpacing over the long term. And then we're entering the clinical space, where we would take share away from other tests, right? Mainly IHC and other tests available that are not as good as ours. So I would think clinical, because of the new space will be the fastest-growing. Biopharma will outpace academic. But overall, the spatial biology business is to such an important territory. And just because you can see what is happening where, that I feel the low double-digit market growth might be at the safe side, but we'll certainly outpace it and take some share.

Appreciate it. And then, Jim, one on the margins, it sounds like once the investments is an R&D line [indiscernible] high-growth acquisitions. But if we sort of strip that away organically? How should we think about, sort of the G&A line, and we convert that to underline core growth over the long term?

Frankly, the best way to think about it is how it's progressed the past 10 years. I mean, at the end of the day, we take internal innovation very, very seriously. So much of our prioritization is around the R&D side, and we're going to spend our R&D and we will continue to reinvest with the 8% to 10% of revenue rate with back in the business plan on the product line and what that rate is somewhere actually higher than at on average between 8% to 10%. How I think about that in terms of percent of revenue. And from an SG&A perspective, I mean, I think it's -- as you -- if you double the size of the business in 2 years, there's certain infrastructure investments you need to make that impact SG&A. But I'll tell you that mid-teens revenue growth, we won't be growing expenses, particularly SG&A by mid-teens. Much -- actually there is another reason I can say that, you look at where that growth comes from, whether it's the cell and gene therapy, the big growth platforms are going to drive accelerated growth. Cell and gene therapy, Exosome platform, those 2 in particular. Sales force for exo prostate test is already in place. So there's no real incremental cost going forward to capture that revenue. In the case of cell and gene therapy, it's a much -- even though 1,000 or 2,000 customers. It's not 1 million customers, like it is for general research, much more concentrated bit. And as [indiscernible] that growth comes from customers, just going to a pipeline of clinical trials. So it's not how to capture new customers constantly. So it doesn't require an additional sales effort to do that, that's just going to naturally happen to go to the pipeline. So there's a lot of leverage that we have going forward, particularly in our SG&A line, given where our revenue growth is going to come from.

You mentioned that scale already [indiscernible] measurement is not paying attention and at some point to [indiscernible] close to instrument. So maybe help us understand or remind us on what timing [indiscernible] is that in relative to product in your [indiscernible] look like or are you [indiscernible] differentiated? And what the economic uplift of an integrated system would look like [indiscernible]?

Sure. That's so good. So the system, the aseptic systems, so it's components of the system already available, right? We've got this 800-plus customers in GRAC, 400 plus leveraging our GMP proteins, right? So we're already in play. We'll close the system really over the next 6 months, like components of it will come out, and we'll also offer effective deliveries to other systems. So while we think most of that value will certainly happen in GRAC bioreactor. Other groups do want to tie in to those other platforms, right? So the fundamental differentiator of the GRAC platform one, accessibility, especially early on in scalability and process and hence the term scale ready, like literally, it really does translate. So in that format, you can move from 50 ml to 5-liter bioreactors so you can exact same results kind of based on the structure. That's kind of the advantage of the GRAC itself, right? The entire approach and everything that's kind of protected from that perspective. And so imagine the difference of -- if you want to serve 50,000 or 100,000 patients with these platforms. So in a room this size of [indiscernible] or those other systems, these are going to be relative numbers, but to give you a sense, maybe you can satisfy a few thousand patients with GRAC and the way that it's set up, you could service 100,000. So it's not even -- not a 20x, it's more like a 50x advantage there. And then kind of the early accessibility, what you find is a lot of these bioreactors actually used GRAC to [indiscernible]. So use it to prime the pump. I'll give kind of other example. It's not [indiscernible] was presented by the team out of [indiscernible], right? So they have some supply constraints, with their kind of status and you'll be able to GRAC in that particular process, and they presented at a conference. So there was a poster on it. And the results are there as is incredibly easy to put port over into the system. So I think there's lots of just technical advantages to. I think what we're really finding now is in that user base, that considering what their options are, the amount -- the following life of funding has really affected people's decisions, and they can access to and do so much more with it earlier in the process, that we're getting a ton of wind. I mentioned earlier that mix changing a little bit. And while the -- I think the revenue nets are somewhat static right now, that mix change and the number of customers being at it is really -- those are the tickets that we're going to be able to pay off over the next couple of years.

I want to also add that what John Wilson is up to. The sell-ready investments, we just paid this guy $250 million for Phase I of the acquisition. He's committed over half of it is already. You use this guy doubles down and guess what the workflow is going into sell already ours. So we're going to -- he reminds me every day, you're getting a [indiscernible]. So he's all over it. So he's [indiscernible] just what you're talking about, improve that mix, but it speed up the market development and all this, by franchising the whole workflow, which is what he's after it already, which is going to be a really, really good outcome for him yet again.

And Kim, back to comment. Obviously, we [indiscernible] platforms in the state [indiscernible] for I'm curious to get from a flex automation resolution scalability standpoint if there is [Indiscernible]. Where do you think there is compression from potential for the platform to development?

So you're talking about the road map of the COMET? Yes. So this is already the third generation to begin with. We have a COMET PA, which is in key academic centers around the world. Key customers, I should say, not only academic. And then the COMET launch was just a couple of months ago. We will certainly not stop innovating the system, but we're really happy with the characteristics it has right now. As I mentioned, it is significantly better than anything you could buy in the market for translational. There is work to be done to make it more fit for clinical, right? So clinical, once you have 1 marker and that you really like, and once you want to make sure it's full proof, that would take an evolution to kind of, I wouldn't call it dumbing it down, but to make it extra easy and lock it more down like. So that it can be approved in clinical setting. Are you seeing the same kind of life cycle with QPCR machines and NGS machines, where eventually you have to lock them down to make them clinical ready. So that's certainly, as I mentioned, we're going to evolve and...

So I think we're actually out of time here. And I'd like to thank everyone for joining us. And if you're hungry, this presentation made you hungry, join us for lunch. And thanks again for coming out.

Thank you.

Thank you.