IXICO plc (IXI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the IXICO plc Final Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand you to CEO, Bram Goorden. Good afternoon to you, sir.

Thank you very much, and welcome, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to come to this webinar and listen to our 2024 results. I should probably quickly introduce myself first. I'm a new face, I think, to quite a few of you who've been following IXICO. My name is Bram Goorden. I joined IXICO over the summer, so a few months ago. If you look at my background, which -- for which we have a slide that I will briefly go over. I started my career in pharma at the likes of Eli Lilly and UCB names, which you may hear us mention in the future as well because they are very much active in this neurology space that we are active at as IXICO, and so those are our customers. And I then moved to more the precision medicine area where I managed platforms, not unlike the one which we are managing at IXICO to help inform biomarker research for pharma companies and help those platforms also go public, which I did with a Swiss startup called SOPHiA GENETICS, it's NASDAQ and Foundation Medicine, which was acquired by Roche. I've been hired to IXICO in order to, obviously, help the company scale further, do a trend reversal, which we will be discussing today and also really look at other revenue areas that we believe our platform, which has been completely revamped can access. I'm joined today by Grant Nash, who probably is a little bit more familiar to those who know IXICO as the CFO and Chief Operating Officer also of the company. And so I'm delighted to have him be part of this. With that, let me maybe introduce in a few slides who we are and how I see the company now a few months in. From there, Grant will take you through the financials for 2024 and especially also how the second half of 2024 translates into renewed momentum, which we continue in 2025. And then I'll talk a little bit about some of the strategic drivers following a recent capital raise, which maybe some of you have been part of or have been following and which obviously now fuel this renewed growth trajectory that we're on. So with that, let me first talk a little bit about the track record of IXICO. As you see, 15 year, we're actually going close on 20 year, we will be celebrating that very soon, a company that very much came out of London academia, but which of course, now since quite a while already, is operating globally as a commercial player. And you see some of the statistics there managing 1,250 imaging centers. These are not our centers, but these are preferred sites we work with as a clinical research organization, 9,000 patients in supported trials, 250,000 imaging scans. And then I think important as well, if you look at the right of this slide, 25 studies across 18 clients and those clients are biotechs and big pharma. So what we do is, in a nutshell, informing those clients about critical decisions they're making about their development programs. When we talk about their development programs, we mean molecules, drugs that they are bringing to market. As they bring these drugs to market, they obviously do clinical trials. These clinical trials will start in Phase I all the way to Phase III and eventually, hopefully, an approval for patients. And during these trials, they look at endpoints, which are going to be around safety, around clinical efficacy. But these days, luckily, we can actually go and measure in the brain what the activity is. We do that through MRI scans, with PET scans probably some of these radiology techniques that you may have heard of in general in the hospitals. And we actually ingest data coming out of these scans to inform what is actually happening in the brain, what do we actually see in terms of effects that the drugs have or have not in specific areas of the brain. We do that specifically in disease areas such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and also Huntington's disease and rare diseases where we've got a very dominant market position and we'll talk a little bit more about that. And so really, we feed back these analytics together with clinical research organizations such as ourselves to the pharma companies that then can take decisions on furthering their drugs through their pipeline. The way we do this, and this is a bit of a busy slide, is through our platform and of course, through our organization and our team of experts. The platform basically consists of 2 main elements. You see this top part here, which we call our backbone TT, TrialTracker, of which we have just launched a brand-new version TTNx, next generation. The backbone is really about ingesting those data in a manner which from a regulatory perspective, from a quality perspective, from a cybersecurity perspective guarantees that patient data are treated in the way that clinical trials are expected to treat those data, which all goes through the cloud, as you can imagine, now these days from the sites. The magic, if you wish, happens much more in the bottom of this slide, which is that orange box, that is where we equip our platform with algorithms, with technical plug-ins as we call them, that will actually be programmed to go after specific biomarker research in specific disease areas, say, for example, going after inflammation biomarkers in Alzheimer's disease. And so at the end of the day, to make a difference in this space, obviously, you need to be an end-to-end clinical research organization, which is what we are. And so we are a fee-for-service business. But you also need to make sure that you've got a state-of-the-art platform, which obviously, after 15 years, we have been evolving and I would argue in 2024 really have also been going through sort of a big change here, leapfrogging some of the technology, and I'll come back to that. If you look at 2024 in a nutshell, again, we'll come back to financials in a minute. It was a slow start, which I think is the least we can say. It was in H1, which was below expectations. And so you see that here actually at the beginning of this timeline where the company made a few deals, but we could not report any material deals. But at the same time, I think the company also with sort of a view on longer-term growth started to make some changes. And you see that at the bottom here where we've actually welcomed a new Non-Executive Director with Dipti Amin, who joined us as an executive or an ex executive from IQVIA. We also see that under the leadership of Grant actually and of course, also my predecessor, some restructuring happened and some further cost efficiencies happens which downsized the organization slightly. We're now, of course, back into a growth mode, and I'll show you how we are actually onboarding new people with different profiles into the company. Mark, who was already part of the Board, became Chairman of the Board, which I think is actually a great addition for us as well. Mark, who's himself also the CEO of DeepMatter and so very much a sparing partner. You see that I myself joined sort of in the latter part of the year and also initiated the capital raise, which we will come back to. The second half of the year though really also presented a change at the first place because of the fact that we did go live with this revamped backbone of our platform, TTNx, which has been a big change. It's basically onboarding new customers now on this platform, making sure that everything works and is put in place. So this is something that has required an enormous effort. But frankly, if that had not been put in place, we would not have necessarily the platform to scale for the next coming 10, 15, 20 years. So I think this is really a very important driver for some of the ambitions which we have with the company as we're now turning to 2025. As you then go further on this time line, you see that we made some deals in order to further equip that platform. For example, Imeka, as I mentioned, is around inflammation in Alzheimer's disease. Life Molecular is about PET tracers, which actually allows our company to not only position ourselves as MRI experts, which is very much how we are seen, but also as PET experts, which is going to be important in disease areas such as Parkinson's disease, for example. And then you see that towards the end of the fiscal year, we actually landed some very important deals in the areas of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, Huntington's disease, which is very much our bread and butter, I would say. And so that actually allowed us, at the end of the day, to end with an order book of GBP 15.3 million, which is an increase compared to 2023. So that's a good sign. But I think more importantly, you see that it actually was a massive increase compared to where we were in the middle of the year with GBP 12.7 million. As I mentioned, towards the end of the year, we reached out to the market for a capital raise, and we're very happy to report that this was actually a twice oversubscribed raise, which we sort of kept at the top end of what we endeavored to collect. Maybe one last word. I'm not going to read everything on this slide here. I already explained you what my background is. You can read it here as well. I mentioned Dipti coming from IQVIA in Denmark. So within the executive and the nonexecutive team you've got quite a few changes there with the exception, I would say, of Grant who very much actually has been, I would say, the leading man throughout 2024. And also, Robin, who's not joining today, but who is our Chief Scientific Officer, and he's very much mastermind behind the scientific platform. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Grant to take you through some of the details of our financials.

Thank you, Bram. And good afternoon, good evening, good morning to wherever you are in the world to you all today. The financial results, I'm going to present 4 slides. I'm going to firstly present on the financial results -- financial performance for 2024 and slide on our financial position and the impact looking forward. And then I've got a couple of slides on our order book to give you a perspective of what -- how that's made up and how that positions us as we look forward. So my first slide is on financial performance. The headline here is that across the KPIs of revenues, gross margin, EBITDA we outperformed the market expectation in each of those areas in the year. So that's a positively reporting that. And I think the key message is that despite some significant headwinds across 2023 and certainly the first half of 2024, we've done a good job of managing our costs. We took some difficult decisions in the first half of the year, but then made sure we were still able to execute and leverage the opportunities that arose as we went into the second half of the year, and that can be seen in these financials. To start on the left with revenues. We delivered GBP 5.8 million of revenues in the year. That was split GBP 2.5 million in the first half, but then a strong 27% increase on that in the second half with GBP 3.3 million of revenues being delivered. That was driven by very strong contract bookings in the second half of the year. In total for the year, we booked GBP 8.9 million of new contracts. But the bulk of that, almost 90% of that was actually signed in the second half, showing that recovery in the market and in our opportunity to leverage that. As you look to the middle graph for gross margin, you can see that we held our gross margin steady in the high 40% to 47% reported again ahead of market expectations. As a reminder, our gross margin is a function of 3 elements: Revenues, which obviously came down a bit in the year, then trials mix. As a reminder to those who've listened to us before or for those who haven't heard us before, we have a mix of revenues that we report will drive the margin. So if we have a tendency to have an order book of earlier phase trials, they tend to have lower analysis components and tend to be lower margin. If we have more later phase trials, they tend to have higher analysis components, which is very profitable for us, and therefore, tends to drive higher margins. This year, we've had mainly early phase trials. So that's something we've managed. But the key thing for us this year was cost management. We managed our costs very carefully. In the first half of the year, we did 40% gross margin as revenues were covered as we made those restructures in our cost base, that improved significantly in the second half such that by the end of the year, we were over 50% gross margin for the second half of the year. And that flows through into EBITDA, as you can see on the right. A couple of key things I want to draw out here. Firstly, our EBITDA of GBP 1.7 million was a couple of hundred thousand better than market expectations, which were at GBP 1.9 million. And again, the 2 half years were very stark. We had losses of GBP 1.3 million in the first half with a loss of just GBP 400,000 in the second, which again shows the impact of a slight uptick in revenues. The operational leverage that exists in the business where much of that excess revenue -- extra revenue flew -- flowed down into our gross margin and EBITDA, but also as a reflection of the fact that we made those cost savings in the first half of the year and then they came through in the second half. The second -- there were also a couple of additional costs in the year when compared to previous year. Firstly, on our technology platform, we completed the investments in that platform in 2023. What that means is that when we invest in the platform before it goes live, a lot of that cost gets capitalized. That's part and parcel of the accounting requirements. But once that platform is complete, some of those costs go away, we don't need them anymore, but others come through, actually don't get capitalized any longer. They come back into the P&L. So when you compare '23 and '24, you need to bear in mind that some of the cost that was capitalized last year is now showing in the P&L this year. There was also an element of one-off costs with some restructuring costs at the start of the year, plus the fact that we had a succession in CEO, which added some costs into the year. But you can see with the line graph here, the impact on FTEs where across the year, we brought our FTE numbers down, such that we were just over 70 FTEs at the end of the year. That represents a 12% reduction in salary costs across the year, whilst keeping our non-salary cost steady irrespective of the fact that there was a reasonably high inflationary environment. So moving on to my next slide, which shows the financial position of the company. And starting with cash, at the end of 2024, we had GBP 1.8 million of cash on our balance sheet. Again, a couple of hundred thousand higher than market expectations. But then as you know, we augmented that quite quickly in October with GBP 3.7 million of net proceeds from the GBP 4 million capital raise, which then meant at the end of October, our cash is back up at GBP 5.7 million. That's obviously a strong cash position for a company of our size and gives us the strength -- the cash strength to make investments to deliver on the expectations we're setting. The middle graph shows the capital investment. And this is, if you like, is the flip side of the graph, the EBITDA graph, where you can see in the year a significant reduction in capital investment. That is because our next-generation TrialTracker platform is now complete, is now being used on client trials. And therefore, the capitalization of that cost has fallen right away. Some of that cost line into the P&L as you saw, and some of that cost has gone. And why that is particularly important is because this means that, that significant investment in technology we needed to make as a company is complete. We have an absolutely cutting-edge platform that -- it gives us huge potential going forward, which we have yet to access the value of or we're only just starting to access the value of. But our ability to incrementally improve that and differentiate our analytical capabilities on this platform is now low cost, tens of thousands of pounds rather than hundreds of thousands. So we're in a strong position here to go forward, having made the big investment we needed to make. And then for completeness on the right, we show a net asset position, GBP 9.5 million net assets at the end of the year made up of GBP 6.7 million of the asset value of our platform, our technology and scientific platform plus working capital of GBP 2.8 million, which then immediately after the year-end, we augmented with that GBP 3.7 million of net proceeds from the raise. Again, just to highlight, we are debt free with very low long-term liabilities of just GBP 200,000. So a strong balance sheet for a company of our size and a robust position from which to move the company back to growth. And then to talk about the opportunities for growth, and specifically, how the order book reflects that. This slide, again, is one that we show regularly at these presentations. And the good news here is that the order book increased in the year from GBP 14.8 million at the end of the prior year, up to GBP 15.3 million. As Bram already mentioned, that was actually even [ starker ] increase from the half year where we're at GBP 12.7 million, 20% increase since then, bringing us back up to GBP 15.3 million of order book, which reflects those strong contract bookings in the second half of the year. Also, as we look forward, in terms of the market expectation for revenues for this year currently in the market, over 75% of those revenues are already contracted in our order book at the end of the last year. So we are well positioned to deliver on those expectations with a fair wind we'll hit those and surpass them. So that's obviously what we're looking to do. On the right of this slide, we have the movement between the order book at the end of the prior year, GBP 14.8 million and the end of this year, GBP 15.3 million. You can see the GBP 5.8 million of revenues that we recognized. You can see the GBP 8.9 million of new contracts that we won, those contracts made up of new contracts with 11 clients and also contract extensions with 15 clients. And it's worth pointing out that, that shows that when we sign a contract, there is still opportunity for that contract to increase in value. That is often the case as clients have protocol changes or they want to do some more analysis. So we might sign a contract for GBP 1 million, but by the time we've delivered that contract, it might be worth GBP 1.2 million, GBP 1.3 million because of changes or because of contract extensions. And then the flip side of that is that in the year, we did see GBP 2.6 million of client trial descopes, that's where for whatever reason the drug has been shown not to be sufficiently efficacious or there might be some safety issue, which means a trial has been descoped or even canceled. And in our space in clinical trials, we have to be cognizant of that, that happens. So we need to bear that in mind when we look at our order book. And in doing so and turning to my final slide, this again shows the analysis of our order book. Each of these graphs are summarizing the GBP 15.3 million of our order book and giving you a different profile on that. The bar chart on the left is that GBP 15.3 million split by projects. So we had 25 projects across 18 clients in our order book. As you can see, a very nicely diversified order book. The top project is 13% of the value. So what that means is that compared to a few years ago, we've been successful in diversifying our order book. We have no single project that we're so heavily reliant on should that particular trial fail or have to be stopped for safety reasons, that it would undermine the company. We have a good level of resilience now built into our order book, which is a much stronger risk profile than we had previously. Positively as well, in the middle graph here -- in the middle -- the pie chart in the middle, you can see that GBP 15.3 million order book split by the phase of trial that we are supporting. So you can see from this that over 60% -- about 65% of our order book is made up of Phase Is and Phase IIs, GBP 5.2 million in Phase I, GBP 4.8 million in Phase II. And that gives us a portfolio of opportunities within our order book. And the reason for that is where and if those Phase Is and Phase IIs are successful, there is a good likelihood that they would then become Phase IIs and Phase IIIs. If we do a good job, and we -- and because we provide the analysis, that puts us in a strong position to follow those trials through to Phase II and Phase III. So there is essentially a pipeline of opportunity in our order book, in our contracted order book to win further trials that are likely to be larger in value and higher in margin. So from a risk profile and from an opportunity profile, we have a strong order book that gives us confidence in looking forward to and returning the organization to growth. And then finally, for completeness, on the right, we show, again, in the order book of GBP 15.3 million, split by projects in therapeutic indication. As you expect, bearing in mind our reputation still over 50% of that order book is focused on Huntington's disease with about 25% of it focused on rare diseases, which is shown as other in this pie chart. But importantly, and Bram will again talk about this, part of our very clear strategy and focus in the coming periods and the basis for raising money is to expand our market share in the larger therapeutic indications in Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. And you can see we're starting this from a good place. 20% of our order book is already in AD and we're gaining traction. We won a really important contracts in 2024 with the global Alzheimer's platform. A lot of profile that gives us with large pharma, and that's an important project for us to build from. We've also got a foothold in PD in there as well. So with that, I'm going to pass back to Bram, who will summarize the investments.

Thanks, Grant. And I think you hopefully answered some of the questions that I saw come up in the Q&A. I invite you to take a look at them Grant. But one of the questions was how the orders actually inform revenue. As you saw in one of the slides, we have a view on 75% of revenues already. Yes, those deals are usually multiyear. And so there's a very clear forecast there. Grant can provide some more feedback if needed. I think another question which I want to answer now as well is that there is a GBP 10 million top line ambition in the near term and whether we can achieve that based on Huntington's disease or whether we should expect other disease areas. I think by now, and I will actually expand on that a little bit. You will have heard that it is indeed about expanding into other disease areas, which is very much ongoing already. And I'll show you actually on the slide with some numbers also why that is so important. So when we went into the capital raise, the strategy that I laid out together with the team is Innovate, Lead, Scale. And I think hopefully, this is clear, and I'll just highlight a few elements there. Innovate is very much around equipping that platform, which, as I mentioned, has gone live now in its next generation. So the big capital investments to the platform do not need to happen anymore. They have happened. And I'm very glad that the team actually held the fort, if you wish, and did that despite the fact that they went through some rough times from a revenue perspective because if we haven't had that platform ready for scale now, those investments still have to be made. So the platform is there but we need to make sure that it's equipped especially in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. And on the next slide, I'll show you that we actually picked some very specific scientific themes where we know we will be able to differentiate ourselves and they're based on proof-of-concept work that was already done by the team, but that was slightly put on hold. And so it's very much around accelerating some of that algorithm development which I'll show you in a minute. So Innovate is around accelerating algorithm development, making sure that there is differentiation. Of course, always in Huntington's and rare diseases, but also now in some of these bigger disease areas, especially Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. And I should maybe add to that, that we've made some choices because it would be easy to say we're going to all these big disease areas, and that's where the money is. One of the bigger disease areas, for example, is also multiple sclerosis where very much through MRI and PET technology, you can make an impact. But we also think that it's a bit of a heavier lift for our platform to really make that differentiation. So we've chosen Alzheimer's and Parkinson's specifically because we know they're very adjacent and we already have a foothold there. Lead has to do with the fact that we very much want to continue to be part of the conversation with thought leaders, and that has also got a geographic component. When we say thought leaders, a lot of them are in North America. And so we're actually in the process of hiring some medical affairs personnel to help Robin, our CSO, CMO, our Chief Medical Officer, to really make sure that we're on stage that we can further also talk about those algorithms and that we're part of the development of the next-generation biomarkers. And then Scale has to do with the fact that as a U.K.-based analytics company, we are very much operating globally. It has always been part of the trials that we supported, but especially as we move into Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, we also want to make sure that from an operations perspective and from a commercial perspective, we're very close to the decision makers. And again, there's an element there of making sure that we increase that footprint slightly in the U.S. in North America, and I'll come back to that. And so at the end of the day, it is about accelerating growth based on our current business model, but also increasing value for the company. And I saw that there was a question there, which I will try to answer maybe based on this slide as well regarding licensing of data. It's not so much maybe licensing of data. Obviously, those data are patient data even if they're anonymized. These are not data which we are in a position to commercialize as such, but we can license our platform in collaboration with bigger data providers or with bigger organizations that actually inform clinical decision-making as a platform that could actually work in the hospitals as well closer to patients. And so there is indeed an ambition, as we've laid out also in our capital raise to look at TTNx as a platform that is not only, I would say, sort of the black box that informs the clinical research organization activities, which is fee-for-service, but that we actually go out with that platform and look at how it can access other revenue areas. And that indeed would mean that there would be licensing revenues coming there. That's at least the vision of those partnerships that we are pursuing. So this slide is sort of the, I would say, the most scientific slide that you will find in our deck, but I found it important to share this with you. You basically see these 3 orange boxes here. And those are these 3 scientific themes that I alluded to before that we have chosen because we know that this is what customers care about today when they do research specifically in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. So if you look at this table here, you basically see Huntington's disease, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis. I already mentioned that multiple sclerosis is an area which we have slightly descoped where we are opportunistic. We do have a small pipeline there. And obviously, we also will continue to serve some of these customers, but we're really going to be honing in on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And why is that so important? If you look at the right-hand side in this table, there you see the estimated market potential. So one of the question was, can you grow with Huntington's disease? The simple answer is we can grow, but we cannot grow as fast as we want to because the market on an annual basis is around GBP 12 million and we already own around 80%, that is 8-0 percent of that market. And so you see that also translated there in a pipeline, which we have for the upcoming 12 months or 18 months, sorry, of GBP 8 million. But of course, if we now go into Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, you see that these market sizes become much more considerable and you also see, as Grant already mentioned that we do have a pipeline there of existing opportunities. Some of them are based on the order book because we have landed, especially Alzheimer's disease project, some of them are opportunities in the pipeline. And as I mentioned before, I think the pipeline at the moment consists of 45% of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's opportunities, of which 50% is considered mid- to late-stage and hopefully, that answers a bit the question of when can we sort of see the next deals coming in now. I obviously intend to bring this to market as soon as we've got signatures on the dotted line. But what I can tell you is at the moment that we've got this sort of a couple of dozen material opportunities where we're up around half of them are Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. This is a way to sort of describe maybe a little bit more visually why it is so important that we expand into these other markets. And I should actually mention probably for those that know IXICO a little bit longer that this is not new for us. IXICO actually started as a company that made a difference in Alzheimer's disease, but this was almost 20 years ago. And 20 years ago, pharma wasn't very active in fertile when it came to developing assets and molecules in Alzheimer's disease, which is when actually the Huntington's disease opportunity came to IXICO with a massive contract. It was the biggest Phase III trial ever done globally. But at that moment, that's where I think IXICO became a little bit vulnerable being dependent on that opportunity. So going back into Alzheimer's, into Parkinson's, diversifying is not such a heavy lift for the company because it was thought in that manner from the start with the platform. Anyway, what you see on this slide here is how important it is to go there. You see the number of trials, 139 for Parkinson's, 164 for Alzheimer's disease. And you also see how they're distributed around Phase I, Phase II, Phase III, where we know that Phase II, which is really our sweet spot, but definitely also Phase III are high-value and high-margin opportunities. So as we now have started to execute on the post capital raise strategy of Innovate, Lead, Scale. I just wanted to share with you some of the things that we are measuring some of the elements that we find important to keep an eye on and that we also want to start to report back to the market. So as we come back to you in the next coming months, hopefully, with clear deals that will support the strategy, but then later on also with the results -- the first results for 2025, you will see us present also how are we actually doing on the development of that differentiation. We've given ourselves 6 to 12 months to turn that from proof to concept into a commercial offering, which is short, but which is feasible. So we want to make sure that we also show for that as we bring that algorithms or those algorithms on the platform. And then obviously, the ultimate proof is some of the awards, some of the deals that we will actually win in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, thanks to that differentiation. Lead has to do with bringing medical folks on board, but it also means that we want to be visible. And so we want to be measuring that through publications, congress attendance, presentations, basically having that share of voice as we call it, from a thought leader perspective. And then Scale, obviously, will be the financials where you will see also a clear geographic split. Today, our revenues are largely -- or around 40% coming from the U.S. And our expectation is that as we move forward, probably more of the opportunities will be coming from that geography as well. I did want to take a moment. I will probably not be sharing my org chart with you every time. It is a bit maybe our internal kitchen. But I think this time, it's an important one because those are some of the key things for which we were capital raising, right? So I think there was a question actually around you've saved 12% on FTEs, could you say further and get your breakeven to less than even an GBP 8 million revenue. Maybe Grant, you can respond to that later in a bit more detail. But I would maybe sort of a bit provocatively say that's not necessarily our objective, right? We want to make sure that we actually now bring the right talent on board, that we invest in the right skills in order to actually accelerate that revenue because otherwise, I think the way I put it internally, we will have an organization that is a little bit trying to sort of speed forward with the handbrake on, which I don't think would be the right strategy. So what you're looking at here in this org chart at the one hand is a confirmation very much of Grant's organization as CFO and COO. And so also really overseeing that TTNx, that novel platform rollout to our customers, where, as I mentioned before, we're largely on track. And then very importantly, also Robin as Chief Scientific and Medical Officer, strengthening that medical group, especially in North America where we are making progress now with onboarding some of these folks, and hopefully, around having that organization in place early in 2025. What is, I think, the biggest change for those that have been close to our organization is that I've really carved out that commercial role into a separate department where I will be recruiting a Chief Commercial Officer. But the first priority was to bring in some U.S. leadership and to have some senior recruits on the North American soil and that has happened. I'm actually glad that we managed to do that before the end of the year. So quite shortly after the capital raise. So those people are coming on board, especially 1 senior person that will be overseeing all these efforts from the Boston area. And then maybe the last thing to highlight here is the little red box below my box, which is corporate development. That has everything to do with strengthening those partnerships, those efforts of going out and looking at other ways to maximize our platform outside of the CRO space and looking especially at those licensing deals that someone already asked about. So to conclude, this is very much the thesis which we brought forward a few months ago as we went into the capital raise, which we believe, of course, very much holds and which we are now actually full steam executing upon. We do have a market-leading technology. As I came on board, this company, obviously, I knew the reputation of IXICO already, but I've really now seen it also being confirmed by customers and actually competitors, I should say, as well. So the fact that we have now revamped that platform is important. I would argue that as a company we are undervalued because I think the platform itself already presents an enormous value. And then obviously, we've got the revenues linked to that. A clear strategy to increase the market. Hopefully, we've made that clear again today as well as we now move into 2025 and then leveraging the existing technology for new markets, which has to do with the fact that we can actually very easily equip our platform with novel algorithms. Those are not heavy investments. Those are not as heavy investments as we did for the backbone of the system. So we can really bring new algorithms on board. I think there was actually a question that I saw earlier around more biomarkers, new disease areas. Yes, absolutely. Now we will not disperse ourselves too much. Obviously, we could start to think oncology, for example, which I think would be a bridge too far. We are very much seeing as leading in neurodegenerative diseases. This is a market which is growing. And I think as we expand, especially in some of these bigger disease areas such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, we're in very good shape. And there, indeed, you will see us bring novel biomarkers also in the future on board. And so the last thing I would say is Innovate, Lead, Scale. I would say, keep that in mind. We're going to beat that drum, continue to report out on the progress there. And so to conclude, 2024 was a transition year. It was a year that started in a difficult fashion, but where really, I think we managed to turn around things which obviously also resulted in deals that are at the end of the day, I guess, the proof is in the pudding. So we very much endeavor to continue to report out some of these successes. And in the meantime, I hope that today, you also saw that we have the strategy in place in the organization in place now to continue on that trend. I think with that, we're going to end the presentation part. Grant, I will maybe invite you to pick up a few questions that you may have picked up already as well, and I'll take a look as well.

Yes. Thank you, Bram. I'll perhaps take a couple and then hand on to you and then when we can move between us. First question to take, I think, from Sam, and Grant, I heard you say that when revenues reached GBP 8 million to GBP 8.5 million IXICO should be profitable. Can you clarify, is this EBITDA before tax, et cetera.? So thanks, Sam. Yes, I'm referring to EBITDA. So that's the metric that we use internally. That's the KPI that we report to the market. So it's EBITDA that I'd expect to see move from negative to positive around about that level. And again, just to highlight the operating leverage that exists in the business. So once we start to see revenues above that, we should see our EBITDA number increase quite quickly because essentially, we are operating slightly subscale at the moment. Our relative fixed costs are higher than they would be possibly for another organization. But as we see those revenue volumes come back through, a significant portion of those extra revenues falls through gross margin, falls to EBITDA, and that's why we have confidence in that number. Second question from Sam. You mentioned that there is upside from existing Phase II trials, potentially becoming Phase III. Slide 12, which I can go back to just so everyone can see it. So GBP 2.9 million of the order book is from 5 Phase III projects. What sort of contracts are these with such low average values? So the key thing to remember here is this is an order book at a point in time. So we are -- these are ongoing long-term projects that we're delivering. So the value of GBP 2.9 million is what's left, if you like, of those 3 -- Phase III projects in the order book. It's not the original total value of those Phase III projects. So it's a time set -- it's a point in time where we are on any particular projects. But also, it's an element of the fact that some of those Phase IIIs are in rare indications, which due to the number of patients available means they tend to be smaller than in some of the bigger areas, Huntington's and then even bigger areas of AD, PD, et cetera. So that's hopefully explain why you see that. Bram, maybe one for you. There's one from [indiscernible] here, you're operating in relatively small market segments. What is the plan of thought for gaining such significant scale? Would you be better as part of a larger group rather than independent?

Yes. No, that's a very good question. I think we should always sort of keep something like that in mind, right? Obviously, we aspire to become the next Google, so to speak. And we think we've got a platform that can do that. But at the same time, we also want to make sure that we capitalize on synergies. I think the first step for us to do is to actually open our platform and maybe our organization up a little bit more to collaborations and actually really look at plug-ins for our platform but also to be open to contribute. So in the midterm, as we've laid it out in the capital rates, we definitely want to be reaching out more into sort of our ecosystem of providers. And of course, at some stage, that means that there's actually a true synergy and some M&A elements might make sense. We will pursue that. And frankly, that can go in both directions. I mean, obviously, I'm realistic with the capital raise and the valuation, which we have now. But we also know that we've got some highly motivated institutional investors who are willing to listen to further opportunity there, I think. Maybe suffice to say as well that a bit closer to home we are, in any case, already part of always a bigger project, right? So obviously, we're contracting with big pharma and with biotech, but we're often working with the ICONs, the IQVIAs, the Fortreas for those who know sort of these big clinical research organizations in the world. And so getting good agreements and getting preferred vendor relations with them will already be a big boost as well. So I think the mantra is definitely more collaboration, more synergies, whether that will pan out at some stage at sort of a bigger collaboration that remains to be seen. I think it is very early to say that. I will maybe, if I can, take some of the -- can I call them fun questions. I don't know if they're fun, but there is. I think the first question was around whether the Trump presidency will have an impact? And I think about one was about U.K. budget. I'll be quite short, of course. But I think without going into politics, I lived in the U.S. during the first Trump presidency and I know that it didn't have any negative impact on pharma research. Traditionally, pharma actually supports the Republican government and the Republican government often is somewhat better for pharma budgets, I would say. But I think sort of -- keeping sort of these generalities apart, we are very much operating in an area. If I was, for example, a vaccine business today, that would maybe be a little bit more worried. But as we're operating in the CNS space, I've seen sort of the Moonshot program from the White House survive for several decades now regardless of the presidency. So I'm very confident that we will see continued growth. In terms of the U.K. budget, I'm not sure if that question was towards sort of the market and investment or whether it's the health care budget, I'll maybe take the latter as I think that's an important one. There is an element of who is going to fund Alzheimer's treatments, Parkinson's treatments as they gain momentum now. I mean you may have seen indeed that thankfully, there are approvals of drugs in Alzheimer's disease, specifically from companies such as Biogen and Lilly, for example. And so the MHRA has approved those drugs, which is actually a bold decision. Europe isn't at that stage here. But NICE hasn't decided to reimburse those yet because obviously, there is a fear that there will be tsunami of expenses there for patients who might not necessarily all benefit. But I think that's where we come in again. When you talk about post-marketing surveillance, which is an additional market that I'm sure will be created now, which very much exists already in the oncology space, for example, we're talking about identifying patients based on biomarkers that will be eligible for reimbursement or that have to be monitored for safety and efficacy parameters. And that will, at the end, actually also inform whether a reimbursed product can come to market.

Maybe I can add to that as well, Bram, in terms of the U.K. but because obviously, one other thing that came up in the U.K. budget was the increase in employer NI. That, of course, will impact us, like every company, we expect that about GBP 100,000 of extra costs will come into the business a year up back of that because we are an employee-based business, a people-based business. So we expect to see that. And of course, there's also the fact that the [ end ] market, as Bram mentioned, now it attracts some long term IHT tax. But I think the market itself was fearing that it might be worse. So in many ways, I think aim was relatively pleased that it wasn't worse than it turned out to be.

I think this kind of covers the questions. I don't know, Grant, if you see there's anything else there that we might not have -- or if anyone else wants to type a question or repeat something that we may not have covered, please feel free to do so. There's still a bit of time left. Otherwise, we'll be happy, of course, to give you guys some time back as well.

Bram, Grant, I might as jump in there and thank you for answering those questions from investors. Of course, the company can review the questions submitted today, and we will publish all the responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. But just before redirecting investors, to provide you their feedback, which is particularly important to the company, Bram, could I just ask you for a few closing comments.

Sure. Thanks very much, Alessandro. Hopefully, we've been very clear today that what happens at the end of 2024 is very much a first signal of what we expect to continue in 2025 and to accelerate. And that's also why we did the capital raise. The capital raise was not to fill our coffers, but was very much to invest in areas where we know that, that acceleration needs to happen. It's expanding the size of the market in which we play, which has -- which is vital, and then you've seen that, but we're building on something that we already have. So I think in the short term, we very much built on a trend that has already started. In the midterm, I'm excited to say that we are really going to explore what our platform can do in other areas as well. And I think that is a new area for the company. It is not new for me, which is why I feel very confident that this can be done. And obviously, we will make sure that we continue to report out to you and you will be the judges of that progress. So with that, thank you very much, both from Grant and myself, to everyone who dialed in and listened to us, and we look forward to reporting to you in the future. Take care.

Bram, Grant, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order for the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This is going to take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of IXICO plc, I'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.