Cibus, Inc. (CBUS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thanks, and good afternoon, everyone. Bill Koschak here, Calyxt's Chief Financial Officer. I appreciate all of you spending part of your day with us on the Calyxt Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Results Conference Call and Webcast. Joining me on the call is Michael A. Carr, our President and Chief Executive Officer. Our Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Travis Frey, will be with Michael and me for the Q&A portion following our prepared remarks. A press release with these results went out over the wire after the market closed today, and you can find it on the company's website, calyxt.com. Before we get into the formal presentation, a reminder that anything stated on this call and webcast — including comments about future financial results, future operational goals, and industry prospects — is forward-looking and could be subject to various risks and uncertainties that might cause actual results to differ materially from what's described here. For a list of the associated risks, please refer to the company's SEC filings. This presentation also covers adjusted gross profit, adjusted gross profit percentage, and adjusted EBITDA. Each of those is a non-GAAP financial measure. Additional disclosure about these non-GAAP financial measures is included in Calyxt's press release and its SEC filings, both of which are posted on the company's website at calyxt.com. These non-GAAP financial measures should be looked at alongside GAAP financial measures, not as a replacement for results presented in accordance with GAAP. And finally, we are webcasting this conference call. You can find the webcast link in the Investor Relations section of calyxt.com. With that, I'll hand things over to Michael for his opening remarks. Michael?

Thanks, Bill, and I appreciate everyone being on today's call. It's a pleasure to share that during my initial 3 months at Calyxt, we've made substantial headway. A number of you, I realize, took part in the business update call we held last month. During that session, we unveiled our strategic plan to broaden what the business offers, delivering plant-based solutions that are innovative, high in value, and produced sustainably to a larger set of end markets and a more varied customer base. Given these fresh offerings, we are, in the truest sense, a plant-based synthetic biology company; this push represents a major fresh opening for the firm, grounded in needs driven by customer demand along with the incorporation of PlantSpring, our proprietary technology platform, working together with our biofactory production system. As you might remember, PlantSpring rests upon this company's know-how from over 10 years spent engineering plant metabolism, our proprietary systems, our tools and technologies, our extensive intellectual property portfolio, and a growing collection of artificial intelligence and machine learning, or AI ML, capabilities. Through an efficient path from the lab to pilot, this licensable platform provides innovation, letting Calyxt guide a customer's plant-based chemistry requirement through our design, engineering, and verification development process, and afterward finish pilot level production inside an anticipated 36-month period. Often, Calyxt anticipates collaborating with our customers across this 36-month window so that regulatory submissions get developed simultaneously, aiming to speed up whatever clearances their end products require. Our proprietary BioFactory, a synthetic biology bioreactor production system, is what then produces these PlantSpring-derived compounds. The BioFactory production system taps the potential of plant cells within a multicellular matrix structure, paired with nutrient media for production, and draws on multiple cell types while avoiding fermentation. When you put these multicellular matrix structures up against what you'd get from traditional fermentation systems or from single cell plant culture methods, they make it possible to work with plant-based chemistries that are more complex. On top of that, over time, the rate at which that multicellular matrix grows should accelerate how quickly compounds are produced at scale. Together, PlantSpring and the BioFactory mean Calyxt can help our customers turn out consumer and industrial products containing plant-based chemistries, which lets those customers reach their corporate sustainability targets as well as their financial goals. As I'll go into more detail on shortly, our process has the ability to unlock the power of plants so that complex, plant-based chemistries can be created — ones that are finite, difficult to source in a sustainable way, and perhaps not achievable through any other production method. All of these are key points of differentiation as we bring our offerings to market for a broad base of target customers; across these highly productive recent months, we also revealed a research collaboration with a leading global food ingredient manufacturer headquartered in Asia. The purpose of this collaboration is to develop an improved soybean that can yield an oil, a sustainable commercial substitute for palm oil. For this research partnership, Calyxt anticipates getting cash payments in each of the 2 years of the agreement's duration, and at present, the first payment has been received and the development effort is underway. A commercial option for the worldwide food ingredient producer is also part of this collaboration agreement. I'm happy to share as well that the sale of our 2020 grain inventory to ADM is almost finished. Every grower has been paid in full as of today. All of their grain has arrived at Calyxt; just the final several trucks remain, currently in transit to ADM. Total cash proceeds of $35.7 million have come from this set of transactions, which started in the third quarter of 2020. Consequently, we expect to wrap up this activity as soon as the close of the month, once ADM sends the final payment. Cash and cash equivalents and restricted cash stood at $14.9 million at the close of the third quarter, and Bill will give a financial update afterward during this call. Dr. Seth Dobrin has just joined our Scientific Advisory Board — he serves as IBM's Chief Global AI Officer. A true visionary, Seth brings deep experience in bringing AI-driven business solutions to major multinationals, and that will be enormously valuable as we refine our strategy and efforts around AI, ML and data. This also speaks to how we keep growing and upgrading our team's capabilities and our capacity to make what we deliver more efficient and more scalable. At Calyxt, we have an uncommon opportunity to change how plants are utilized across the globe. Our goal is to innovate right where limited resource use intersects with the sustainability of the planet. The way today's worldwide economy operates simply isn't sustainable — indicators such as carbon pollution, water scarcity and soil erosion make that clear. Shareholders and their stakeholders increasingly insist that companies make products in a different, sustainable fashion, and plant-based chemistries offer a distinct and greener substitute for many goods and materials used currently. Over 20% of the world's 2,000 largest public companies have pledged to become carbon neutral, and we think that reaching their targets will require companies in every industry to fold plant-based solutions into their operations. Beyond that, consumers are pressing companies across sectors — among them cosmetics, personal care and wellness, food, advanced materials and chemicals — to make their products using sustainable, eco-friendly plant-based chemistries. The Boston Consulting Group recently projected that nature-derived products, like those made from plants, will touch $30 trillion of the global economy across the coming 30 years, propelled by sustainability, decarbonization and carbon-neutral goals. That opens an enormous opportunity for Calyxt to collaborate with its customers, creating plant-based chemistries that meet end customers' needs. This significant movement opens a door for customers and other stakeholders to join Calyxt in developing and producing high quality ingredients and materials, which reach beyond the traditional plant-based food and feed chain and also extend into other industries and segments that are increasingly looking to decarbonize and better their environmental footprint. Synthetic biology refers to how we design and engineer living organisms. This field builds on what several decades of genomics work have taught us. That body of research led to a key idea: biological systems are programmable at their core. Cells don't merely hold information — they also process it. In the same way code directs a computer, natural code — a cell's own DNA — can be used to direct that cell. What's key here is that you can use synthetic biology to program a cell so it produces physical applications, and plants are a uniquely suited platform to take advantage of. We count on Calyxt's deep knowledge of the metabolic pathways plants provide, and on applying our own expertise along with proprietary tools to achieve efficiency gains. Calyxt is set up to be a major force in the sustainable, biologically based revolution. As the world looks to move toward more sustainable solutions, plants have a unique ability to make many chemistries that no other method can produce, microbial fermentation included. According to Calyxt's estimate, over 80% of all natural compounds known to us come from plants. Right now, more than 170,000 distinct chemistries fall under the category of these recognized natural compounds. In our view, plants could potentially reach a large share of the roughly 1 million chemistries that are estimated to still be undiscovered.

Plants possess a one-of-a-kind ability to make these chemistries, and when compared with single-celled organisms, they represent a superior system for generating them. The reason is that plants naturally produce so many compounds, and they don't need the programming that a microbe requires to make the same compound — assuming a microbe could even make the complex chemistries plants are capable of. At Calyxt, our scientists are experts in engineering plant metabolism, which involves getting plant cells to produce greater or lesser amounts of particular chemistries, or novel chemistries that might exist only in plants. Our scientific team has proven this capability repeatedly, across many plant species. That demonstrated expertise gives us a distinctive view of what plants can do and how they can help shape what comes next, and it gives Calyxt an edge in know-how over others. Now I want to discuss our PlantSpring technology platform. Calyxt is concentrating on putting PlantSpring to work on innovation needs driven by customers, using plants to create high-value products and materials that may help meet customer sustainability targets and financial goals. Given current industry trends, we anticipate such needs will focus more and more on swapping existing compounds for more sustainable alternatives. We use PlantSpring throughout the development process, which allows us to cut cycle times and apply what we learned while developing the next compound; during the design phase, Calyxt draws on systems and insights to pinpoint metabolic pathways, the target genes that control those pathways, strategies for optimized expression of the target genes, and the technical approach for achieving the targeted compound; during the engineering phase, Calyxt guides changes in the plant sales through a mix of tissue culture, gene editing capabilities and transformation. Once the target has been designed and engineered, Calyxt's rapid prototyping system can produce compounds quickly, and those compounds can be checked against customer specifications using natural product chemistry, metabolomics, genomics and gene expression tools. This system, together with these analytic tools, can rapidly confirm that the exact plant-based chemistry the customer wants has been made and accelerates new product development and delivery, all while gathering data, learning, and applying those lessons to future product offerings. Calyxt has built early-stage AI ML capabilities into PlantSpring, letting knowledge gained from past activity be paired with predictive analytics to prototype rapidly and provide feedback. As I noted, with Dr. With Seth Dobrin now on our Scientific Advisory Board, we anticipate ongoing advancement as we keep building out and honing our AI and ML capabilities throughout PlantSpring and the BioFactory — I'll touch on that in a moment. Those capabilities rest on Calyxt's extensive scientific know-how and the massive volume of data gathered throughout its history, which includes a sizable proprietary genomics database covering many plant species, and they'll also bring in publicly available information along with other data sources. As a result, Calyxt thinks it can create engineered biomolecules in plants for its customers faster than competitors in the synthetic biology sector. The BioFactory production system's fundamental purpose is to enable Calyxt to expand the ways we produce things, extending past open-field farming into production based in bioreactors within controlled environments. We see the BioFactory as a natural next step in how PlantSpring gets applied. Within BioFactory, plant cells are placed in a multicellular matrix structure, and nutrient media is used to drive production. Multiple cell types are also employed by the BioFactory, and those multicellular matrix structures allow controlled replication and processing of compounds, with replication speeding up exponentially as time goes on. Output from our PlantSpring platform powers BioFactory. Together, BioFactory and PlantSpring can make high-value compounds for a wide range of sectors, and do so faster than other approaches. Another belief we hold is that BioFactory may emerge as a leading sustainable manufacturing approach for many sectors, given how it produces goods. No fermentation step is involved, and it sidesteps several of the sustainability problems that come with alternative controlled environment growing methods — among them diminished off-gas emissions, smaller water needs, and less energy consumption. We further anticipate minimal idle time separating production runs at BioFactory, and because this facility generates plant-derived chemistries throughout the calendar year inside a climate-managed bioreactor, numerous negative weather-related impacts that farming operations usually face leave the system unaffected. After the verify stage of product development wraps up for our customers, BioFactory production kicks off. For roughly half a year at this point, we've been operating large scale bioreactors. Our first pilot scale bioreactor has been commissioned, and it should be online before this calendar year ends. That first pilot bioreactor can scale to just about 200 liters, and depending on what customers need, we anticipate broadening what our pilot facilities cover, increasing toward commercial level production with various vessel sizes. When it comes to commercial production, the approach we have now is to rely on third parties — what we call infrastructure partners — for BioFactory output at scale. We've identified several businesses that could potentially serve as infrastructure partners, and once our pilot bioreactor is up and running, we'll start moving those conversations forward. That approach lets us run the BioFactory while lowering the risk associated with reaching production at scale. Both of these are essential pieces of our business model and our strategy for bringing the BioFactory to market. Let me walk you through a few examples fairly quickly that demonstrate how our PlantSpring platform and BioFactory function together as proof of concept. The first involves a plant-derived protein known as ovalbumin, which resembles a protein found in egg whites and has applications across multiple end markets, among them use as a protein replacement. The next one of these, and this is the leverage piece, is betanin, which we got to the ovalbumin proof-of-concept stage with. A natural antioxidant and red colorant, betanin is typically made by extracting from beets grown in fields using PAs. It could find use in cosmetics, nutraceuticals, flavoring and ingredients, and end markets, plus probably additional ones. Marketed betanin derived from beets is water-soluble, and it degrades quickly under medium to high heat, UV light, or pH changes, and that limits how broadly it gets adopted. Calyxt's betanin, which has been shown to work in a proof-of-concept, can overcome the drawbacks associated with betanin sourced from beets. To fund further development and commercialize this compound, we may seek out a partner. What matters most regarding these initial 2 compounds—each a proof of concept—is that they made it through the design, engineer and verify phases of PlantSpring development in only a matter of months. This work demonstrates PlantSpring's strength in producing plant-based chemistries very efficiently; and with Calyxt continuing to scale, our intention is to pursue numerous opportunities spanning a wider range of end markets and a more varied customer base. To sum up, the PlantSpring platform from Calyxt along with its BioFactory production system represent a rising force in plant-based synthetic biology, thanks to their distinctive combined capabilities, their foundation in plants, and the speed and cost at which Calyxt aims to deliver more sustainable compounds to its end markets. A potent new technology exists that illustrates the kind of innovation required to satisfy a substantial, unmet and speeding-up demand for ingredients and inputs that are differentiated and sustainable.

After we've designed and engineered the target, Calyxt's rapid prototyping system is able to churn out compounds fast, and those can be checked against what the customer asked for by drawing on natural product chemistry, metabolomics, genomics, and gene expression tools. With this system and these analytic tools, we can promptly confirm that the precise plant-based chemistry the customer wants has indeed been made, and it accelerates both the development of new products and getting them delivered — and throughout that process we're gathering data, learning, and then applying what we've learned to products we offer down the road. The target addressable markets for Calyxt's PlantSpring platform and BioFactory production system are both valuable and varied, because plant-based synthetic biology allows compounds and products to be made faster, at lower cost, and in a more sustainable way. On the whole, we see enormous potential end markets for plant-based sustainable solutions. For the time being, our customer activation and development efforts will concentrate on the slim market segment in which, we think, our present capabilities provide the strongest chance of success. The nutraceutical, cosmeceutical, pharmaceutical, advanced materials and chemical industries are among these end markets; since every one of them has existing business needs around lowering carbon footprint, they hold strong prospective customers for what we've innovated. Before the announcement we made in early October, we had already started many conversations with potential customers. Across the 4 weeks that followed, inbound queries from potential customers have been significant. Even though we made this announcement just recently, talks are already underway with six companies from the Wall Street Journal's top 100 most sustainable list, plus a number of others, about creating products that would be manufactured in our BioFactory. The response we've gotten from these prospective buyers has been extremely encouraging. Right now we're in the process of assessing nine compounds as possible development candidates, applying the same criteria Bill will describe shortly. We think what we're offering is highly attractive to the customers we're targeting, and we're pushing to land the first BioFactory contracts. At this point I'll hand things over to Bill, who will cover our business model and financial updates. Bill?

Thanks, Michael. In the past, Calyxt would hand its technology platform over to whatever opportunities it came across, with the main emphasis on the outdoor ag space. Getting one product ready cost us several million dollars, and reaching commercialization took 5 to 6 years, sometimes longer. With the BioFactory model, our whole approach becomes centered on customers and pulled by demand. We understand how synthetic biology markets behave when it comes to compound economics. So we've built a list of criteria for judging opportunities and concentrating our development work — things like what the customer actually needs, how big the market or markets are, how quickly adoption happens, what our BioFactory can do, and the financial returns. This is what we refer to as our target product profile, or TPP. Applying it helps us pick, from customers, the compounds with the strongest shot at succeeding at this stage of the business. Pairing PlantSpring with the BioFactory should bring a sharp drop in what it costs us to develop a compound, along with shorter development cycle times, as we keep leveraging PlantSpring and growing our AI ML capabilities over time; we expect customers to share in funding the development of their target compound in PlantSpring, and that funding should be enough for us to earn a margin on the development work; those payments ought to start upfront and continue across the 36-month development cycle. How much gets paid will differ based on the customer's chosen way of funding regulatory costs; by the end of 2022, we're aiming for customer agreements covering development of up to 2 to 4 compounds, and after that we're also aiming for similar deals bringing 2 to 4 new compounds into development each year. Those amounts might speed up as the business evolves. Under a supply agreement, customers are expected to buy the compound from Calyxt. Infrastructure partners will take care of our production, and they'd receive a fee for making the compound on our behalf. Guided by our selection criteria, we're aiming for the compounds we develop for customers to generate at least $1 million of revenue within the first 12 months of launch, then scale rapidly across the next 4 years; we think growth rates of 100% or more per year over that period could be achievable, with actual revenue and growth shaped by the size of the end markets the customers go after and various other factors. After we scale production and optimize costs, we're targeting a gross profit in the mid-double digits on product-related revenue from the BioFactory. The end markets we're going after largely drive this, since compounds there can sell for hundreds and even into the thousands of dollars per gram; that's a far cry from our prior business, where products went for pennies per pound. When you put those things together—shorter development timelines plus the potential for development revenue, product revenue, and profit margins—that adds up to meaningful progress for Calyxt's business and financial models. We also think this model lets us address 2 major risks: we make customer demand the criterion for selecting what we work on when applying our TPP, and we rely on infrastructure partners to handle production at scale. Beyond that, we intend to keep licensing our technology and to build new products for agricultural partners according to what they need. On the technology licensing side, this work reaches across Calyxt's extensive intellectual property portfolio, which was assembled over 10 years as a top plant-based biotechnology company, and it covers several gene editing platforms, plant breeding, and additional capabilities. It also takes in licensing of product candidates developed earlier, like alfalfa with better digestibility, soybeans that are high oleic and low linolenic, and candidates that come out of our hemp work. Although we'll chase licensing chances for those candidates, we anticipate only limited spending on moving them further along until we know who the licensee customers are. As the recent news of a new soybean product being created for a partner shows, Calyxt will keep developing products on an opportunistic basis for partners whose focus is traditional agriculture. To manage how resources are prioritized and to drive returns on what it invests, Calyxt has set up criteria against which every opportunity gets assessed, covering how big the overall opportunity is, what kind of product would be created, and how much cash Calyxt would get, both at the start and later on. Our view is that technology licensing, along with opportunistic product development and agriculture, can each create revenue streams for Calyxt across the whole arc of a project—from inception through development to commercialization. Today we put out a press release laying out our third quarter 2021 results, and this afternoon we also filed our Form 10-Q for the third quarter. Revenue came to $7.8 million in the third quarter of 2021, which is up $2.5 million, or 48%, versus the third quarter of 2020. Volume and mix of products sold drove that gain, since the company sold grain during the third quarter of 2021, whereas in the third quarter of 2020 it was mainly selling oil and meal. Gross profit was negative $0.5 million, or negative 7% of revenue, in the third quarter of 2021, against negative $1.8 million, or negative 35% of revenue, in the third quarter of 2020. That $1.3 million improvement, or 71%, over the third quarter of 2020 came mainly from the advantages of shifting to grain sales rather than mostly oil and meal, along with unrealized commodity derivative gains from contracts entered into to convert fixed price grain inventories and fixed price forward purchase contracts into floating prices, matching the way the grain was sold. Adjusted gross profit, which isn't a GAAP figure, came in at negative $2.7 million during 2021's third quarter, equal to negative 35% of revenue, versus negative $1.3 million, or negative 24% of revenue, in the same period of 2020. That decline in the adjusted gross profit percentage resulted from the net prices received for grain we sold during 2021's third quarter, set against the product mix we sold and the associated profit margins we achieved in 2020's third quarter. Operating expenses totaled $6.4 million in 2021's third quarter, down $0.8 million, or 11%, from $7.2 million in 2020's third quarter. This reduction came about because of lower personnel expenses stemming from cost cuts after shifting to grain sales rather than oil and meal sales, along with other operating expense reductions and the restructuring costs recorded in 2020's third quarter. We remain on track to hit our 2021 goal for cash operating expenses at $25 million or below, including whatever BioFactory-related spending occurs in the fourth quarter. The net loss for 2021's third quarter was $7.3 million, better by $2.2 million, or 23%, than 2020's third quarter. Stronger gross profits plus lower operating expenses produced that net loss improvement. Adjusted EBITDA loss reached $6.9 million in 2021's third quarter, basically unchanged from 2020's third quarter. Net cash used by operating activities came to $3.4 million in 2021's third quarter, an improvement of $1.8 million versus 2020's third quarter; collections on grain sold to ADM, ongoing shrinkage in the company's working capital investment tied to winding down that grain sales activity, and disciplined cash expenditure management all drove this cash result. Across the past 9 months, we saw a $16.2 million year-over-year gain in cash flow from operations, for reasons similar to those behind the 3-month period that ended September 30, 2021. We launched a $50 million ATM share issuance program on September 21, 2021. As of today, Calyxt had issued roughly 1.2 million shares of common stock through the ATM facility and had received proceeds of $3.7 million after commissions and payments of other share issuance costs. Calyxt's operating plans assume a modest amount of customer payments from commercial activities in 2022, and that assumption, combined with planned spending and the present balance of cash and cash equivalents, makes it probable that additional liquidity will be needed to keep operations going under this business plan across the next 12 months. Without customer payments beyond Calyxt's operating plans or the capacity to raise capital, management believes we can put in place various cost reduction and other measures to manage liquidity through the next 12 months. The documents covering our results, available on our site, give key background on the non-GAAP figures we disclose and contain reconciliations linking those figures to the closest GAAP equivalent; if you need the year-to-date numbers covering the initial 9 months of 2021, kindly look at our press release or our SEC filings. At this point I'll hand things back to Michael so he can offer his closing thoughts.

Thank you, Bill. Over the 3 months since I came aboard at Calyxt, the speed of our advancement has delighted me greatly; we're steering Calyxt toward becoming a significant force behind plant-based synthetic biology solutions and the partner customers prefer as they work to hit their sustainability and financial goals. Complex chemistries can be sourced compellingly from plants; and thanks to our PlantSpring platform, paired with our proprietary BioFactory production system, we're positioned to seize a huge market opportunity. What sets Calyxt apart is our plant-based approach. We're out actively pitching our proprietary PlantSpring technology platform and our pilot BioFactory to prospective new customers, among them 6 of the top 100 sustainable companies as identified by The Wall Street Journal. Industries represented by these and other initial target customers include nutraceuticals, cosmeceuticals, personal care and pharmaceuticals, plus businesses making advanced materials and chemicals. Additional strides came in the third quarter, when we announced a research collaboration with a leading global food ingredient manufacturer based in Asia and welcomed Dr. Seth Dobrin to our Scientific Advisory Board, where he'll advise us on our AI, ML strategy and other matters. Taken together, our future excites me, and I'm confident our expertise, skill, technology and know-how could deliver compelling financial returns for our shareholders. I'm eager to give you updates on our progress down the road. Operator, that wraps up our prepared remarks. Please open the line for questions.

I suppose the first thing is, when considering the regulatory challenges tied to developing plant traits, as opposed to the BioFactory items you'll be providing, could you compare for us just how burdensome, slow, or expensive the agricultural work is from a regulatory angle relative to what you're doing with BioFactory?

Yeah. Thank you, Bobby. I appreciate that question. When we examined these new end markets — the ones we first announced on October 5 — from a regulatory standpoint they're far less demanding, both in terms of expense and in terms of scrutiny. So, take the cosmetics sector, and of course nutraceuticals, and clearly the chemicals sector as well: the regulatory threshold will be lower. Consequently, we anticipate that those costs will be smaller on the whole by comparison.

Alright, that's helpful. Next, regarding one of the BioFactory items, you mentioned anticipating roughly $1 million during the initial 12 months after launch. Does that clock start when the development was announced, or does it begin at a later point once you're actually generating some volumes?

Right. In our framework, we anticipate receiving payment for the work we put into development. The structure likely spans a period of time. Consequently, it would come as a recurring installment tied to the work we perform throughout development.

All right, so essentially, does that $1 million figure already account for it?

That's right. Yes.

No, hold on — Bobby, it's Bill here. So our expectation is that payment comes in throughout the development phase, like Michael mentioned; after that, when we begin selling products to our customers — it doesn't matter if that happens prior to them obtaining clearance, correct, since they might purchase product from us in order to complete whatever regulatory steps are required — our expectation for that initial 12 months is product revenue on top of the development revenue amounting to $1 million or more during that first 12 months. From that point, the product revenue would grow from there.

All right, that's helpful. Moving to what was said regarding liquidity — the 12 months you both brought up. Bill, when you mentioned having 12 months of runway, is the $3.7 million you just brought in counted within that figure?

Yes, that's included.

All right. And now, perhaps somewhat off-topic, but I'm wondering whether you folks have been keeping up with the COP 26 or COP26 gathering over in Scotland. And they're discussing items such as forest stewardship and land stewardship as a means of hitting those climate goals. And I'm aware that you have a partnership in place with a worldwide food producer aimed at developing a substitute for palm oil. Has anything from that event stood out to you that you feel puts a favorable light on your efforts in that space?

Yes, definitely; and as a matter of fact, I believe there was an announcement this morning regarding how much money investors are putting toward what comes down to sustainable and environmentally friendly investments. And so for us, it truly underscores the fact that we took pleasure in closing that agreement with the business, which is based in Asia, to tackle what comes down to palm oil and whether or not palm oil is sustainable; thus, the news emerging from that event, in my view, is a positive sign for what we're undertaking here through our new initiative.

I just wanted some clarification regarding what's ahead — you mentioned that 6 of the top 10 most sustainable, according to The Wall Street Journal. And many of those came as inbound calls. So yes, I was hoping for a bit more detail there.

Of course, Brian. This is, I believe, among the things that excite us the most. Before we made our announcement on October 5 about our new initiative, we'd held some confidential conversations with potential customers, and the level of enthusiasm is tremendous. After the announcement went out, we've not only launched a push in which our business development team is out speaking with potential customers in the end markets we've talked about, but there's also been somewhat of a pull. We've received inbound calls literally stemming from press releases, announcing our initiative, what we're focused on as a plant-based synthetic biology company; so we're getting both not only from our business development team, but we're also receiving inquiries inbound.

Excellent. One thing — just at a high level, one point — regarding that BCG figure about $30 trillion, and I realize this could be a difficult one, but can we somehow consider what share of it might consist of things like more intricate molecules and proteins that fit better within the plant matrix?

Apologies, would you mind saying your question again?

Yeah, so regarding that total addressable market — the $30 trillion figure that came from the Boston Consulting Group — is there any way to gauge roughly what share of it would be better matched to multicellular plant matrices, given how complex they are?