MaxCyte, Inc. (MXCT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I'd now like to hand over to Doug Doerfler, who is the President and CEO of MaxCyte PLC and also the founder. Welcome to you, Doug. I believe it's morning time where you are. And we look forward to hearing all about MaxCyte and I shall come back a little bit later for the Q&A.

Well, thank you, Terren, and thank you, everyone, for attending this update on MaxCyte and seriously thank ShareSoc for hosting this event. Great to see so many existing shareholders at MaxCyte. Thank you for your support and look forward to providing the update. And those of you who are new to the story, I look forward to giving you a background of the company. MaxCyte is currently listed on London Stock Exchange, on the AIM exchange. We're also listed as of July of 2021 on the U.S. NASDAQ. So please refer to written documents for any forward-looking statements. So next slide, please. So a little background on MaxCyte. So we're focused in the area of cell engineering. This is where our technology called flow electroporation is used to engineer cells for a particular use. And that particular use could be in creating a protein from a workhorse industrial cell. It could be for producing a vaccine. Could also be for engineering a cell, in most cases, a blood cell and turn that cell into a disease-fighting drug. And so our technology is -- we invented the technology called flow electroporation, which puts electric forces and uses electric forces to put molecules into cells. We've just announced that we have over 500 systems in use around the world. And these systems enable our partners to deliver virtually any molecule into any cell at any scale at the highest performance of any technology that's available in the marketplace. And that performance is consistency, it's efficiency, it's viability, it's flexibility and scale. I'll talk about why that's important and why we have this seminal position in the marketplace. We have an extensive product portfolio. We're the first in this space. So we have a very, very strong intellectual property. And the business has been growing at about 25% per year for the last 5 or 7 years. We enjoy 90% gross margin. So it's a very attractive business. And we've been doing this for quite some time. So we have a couple of decades of experience. We have several -- a couple of dozen people in the field focused on helping companies solve these cell engineering problems. We have a number of collaborations in industry and academia, I'll talk to a lot about those. And we're closely watched as a company that has a master file with the U.S. FDA and what's called a technical file with regulatory agencies all around the world. And this is a file that we maintain with the regulatory agencies. We put the confidential information about how our technology works in that. And so a company sponsor of a clinical trial can reference our master file and have access to that technology or at least the regulatory agency can have access to the technology without them knowing what's inside that file. So it's a very powerful and very important part of our portfolio. This master file has been referenced over 35x by companies who are moving their products into the clinic. So it's a way for companies to really reduce risk and it's an on ramp, if you will, for clinical development. Now we've been working, as I mentioned, a long time with the technology, we've also been working on developing a business model. And we think this business model allows us to really share in the upside of these programs with our partners. I'm going to talk about the company today, of course, but everything I talk about is a product business. So we sell, we license our products. This is not a services business. And everything that we sell, we either manufacture or have manufactured exclusively for us. These relationships we have, these strategic platform licenses are all nonexclusive. We just announced our 16th about a couple of weeks ago. And so what we do is we either sell the instruments or we lease the instruments, and I'll talk about that to our partners. And then we also have the ability to earn milestones as our partners progress through the clinic. We then achieve certain milestones based on their success. And eventually, when the product of their drug is approved, we will also participate in the commercialization of that product through either royalties or sales-based payments. So it's a business that we're creating that includes short-term growth from annual licensing fees and the sale of instruments, longer-term growth through the generation of milestones through our partners' progress. And eventually, the large opportunity, obviously, is when these products become commercialized and MaxCyte enjoys a portion of the end-user revenue. Next slide, please. A little bit about the history of the company. So we were founded around 1999, so a little over 20 years ago. My co-founder and I, he was the Chief of Hematology at FDA, retired. And he had a grand vision of using cells, engineered cells to treat disease. And I came to the problem with quite a bit of experience in engineering cells. So we -- we created the company to do that. And we were way ahead of our time, but we spent the last 20-some years just perfecting the technology, working with key opinion leaders, working with the top researchers in academia and in industry and really understanding what they need to have in order to create a successful cell therapy and that's efficiency of delivery, it's the ease of use of the technology. It's the scalability so that our partners can work with our technology with a drop of blood, let's say, 75,000 cells, and that will scale to 1 million cells to 1 billion cells, the 20 billion cells on the GTx, all in a cGMP. And so it allows our partners to move through the development phase with the same platform and it's basically a drop-down menu and the computer and allows them to scale and scale and scale. We just announced the release of our VLX, which is a much larger scale system. It's 10x the capacity of our STx and our GTx process is 200 billion cells in a lot. Takes about 30 minutes, and it scales from the GTx or the STx and the ATx. So again, it's a major platform. I'm not going to talk a lot about that, but we're -- the applications for that technology will be for a large-scale vaccine manufacturing or scale, rapid production of proteins and also large-scale allogeneic drug manufacturing in cellular therapies. In addition to creating the technology, we've also created a business, and we've created an organization that supports this technology and really enables the development of these therapies by our partners. And so we have salespeople who are 100% dedicated to our company, field application scientists, most of whom have PhDs, who work closely with our partners and allow them to not only get their first product into the clinic but allow them to think about the next product they want to put into the clinic in the next product and helping them really help them develop the cellular therapies that will be successful both for them and for MaxCyte and for all of our stakeholders. And this dedication, this focus, some say it is hardheadedness of a company has resulted in the following. The next slide, please. So we're really pleased to say that we now have 16 signed strategic platform licenses. These are with the companies on the bottom of this panel. These are the top companies in the field. Companies like Allogene and Beam and Caribou, [indiscernible], CRISPR, Editas, Kite, these again are the top companies in the field. I'll talk more about what they're doing, but -- they work across a number of different cell types, whether that be NK cells or gamma delta cells or T cells or B cells. They're putting mRNA, they're putting proteins, DNA into the cell. They're using CRISPR technology, zinc finger nuclease technology. So we're agnostic in terms of the cell type or the loading molecule, and they're also working across a number of key indications, including blood cancers, solid tumor cancers, autoimmune disease, neurodegenerative disease, infectious disease and inherited genetic diseases. And one of the programs that I just want to make mention of because it's getting quite a bit of press lately is the work we're doing with CRISPR Vertex in their CTX001 product, which is a treatment for sickle cell disease. It's moving very rapidly through the clinic. It's a very exciting product. They're seeing really incredible results for that. And every patient that's being treated for sickle cell disease or beta-thalassemia with the CTX001, that product is manufactured and enabled by MaxCyte's technology. So 16 programs licenses -- of those licenses includes about 95 programs. You can think of those as drugs, half for name, the other half are options. They're all nonexclusive, but they do have relatively narrow fields of use. And again, about 15 of those drugs are currently in the clinic with the capabilities for us to earn milestones. If you look at the far left-hand side of this slide, this will give you an indication of how many additional SPLs we believe in our pipeline. And these are companies that we're working with. We don't disclose who they are. They may be in preclinical, they may be an even earlier stage in nonclinical work. And we're working with them. And as they move closer to the clinic and they need access to our master file. They need access to our GTx to actually run clinical trials. That's when they sign their strategic platform licenses. Next slide, please. So in terms of the milestones I talked about, the pre-commercial milestones. We now have over USD 1.25 billion in pre-commercial milestones. So this isn't -- this hockey stick [ isn't ] the projection. It's actually a historic representation of the cumulative potential pre-commercial milestones we've built through these relationships with our partners. And as you see every year, we've been able to sign deals and 2019 was a big year. 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, went down to about 3. Last year, we did 4. And we've already done our first in 2020. And again, these -- each of these create new products in the clinic and also a pipeline of additional products that are all incorporating MaxCyte's technology that would go into the clinic. And eventually, hopefully, some of them will progress to a point where there'll be submitted for approval by the regulatory agency. Next slide, please. If you're familiar with the space, it's a very exciting area last year 2021. There was over $23 billion that was invested in cell and gene therapy. In 2020, it was $20 billion. And as you can see, the projected sales are quite formidable and we're also seeing a rather significant number of clinical trials that are in progress, those that follow this and predict these things suggest that this number could double in the next 3 to 5 years. And as it doubles, we're going to see a much larger proportion of those cells being modified using nonviral techniques. Currently, the majority using viruses. You're going to see the majority shifting toward nonviral techniques in the near future. And that's where MaxCyte really is focusing our attention. We're also looking forward to a really big change in our business as these products move into commercialization and a very well-recognized group called Evaluate Pharma have mentioned that the first generation of these -- these engineered nonviral cell therapies should be approved in the 2023, 2024 time frame. So not that far from today, and we're quite excited about working with most of the companies that are developing these kind of therapies. Next slide, please. So there are challenges in using viruses and many people ask us, well, why are people moving away from viruses? Well, first of all, viruses have been used historically in cell therapy because viruses are very efficient at infecting things and delivering that molecule into the cell. And so from a research perspective, they're easy to create. They're easy to manufacture. But when you start thinking about it from a clinical perspective, you end up running into some issues. And the issue is, if you want to be a cGMP material that is required for clinical development and commercial development, the development times are quite long. They're very, very difficult to manufacture. There's a capacity issue in the marketplace. Nonviral approaches don't use those same techniques. They use more chemistry methods that create the molecules that go into the cell. These nonviral techniques also don't have capacity constraints. With the virus, you end up with a limitation in terms of how big of a molecule can put into the cell. With nonviral techniques, we really haven't found any practical limit in terms of the size of the molecule that we could put into the cell. There's also some safety concerns around viruses. And our systems tend to not have those kind of same issues. And that's really why we're seeing this shift from safety and regulatory risk, but also the new generation of cell therapies where you're doing multiple edits, you're maybe not just putting in a CAR molecule into a cell, but you're putting a CAR molecule into a cell you might also be down regulating a certain pathway that will enable that cell to evade the immune system of the patient. You may be putting another molecule into upregulate a certain pathway so that the cell can be much more effective in the tumor microenvironment. So as the clinicians dream up new ways of engineering these cells, they become more complex by their very nature. And that's where MaxCyte really does come in because we have the ability to do multiplexing. We can put in 3, 4, 5 molecules into a cell, either at 1 time or sequentially. It's a very gentle process and highly controlled. So we're seeing this shift from virus to non-virus. This usually happens in the -- when you're thinking about the -- when you're thinking about the drug and you're designing it, that's when you make that decision and more and more companies, certainly than allogeneic outside and with multiplexing, they're moving toward nonviral methods. One area I do want to comment on, which I think is really very important is it takes about anywhere from a couple of weeks to a month to transfect and engineer a cell using a virus. It's a biological process. When you're using flow electroporation, it's more of a physical process. So it doesn't take us 2 or 3 weeks, that actually can take us, in some cases 1 day to engineer that cell. And that has a major impact on from a clinical perspective because now you're telling a patient, you don't have to wait 2 weeks or 1 month to get our drug, you can get that much faster. And we're hearing from clinicians that that's really an important consideration for patients and their families. So again, this is another reason why the industry is moving in a very strong way into nonviral engineered cells. Next slide, please. So this is our product range. All these instruments are designed, developed and manufactured by MaxCyte in our facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland on the East Coast of the U.S. We sell the ATx for about $70,000. There's a single-use disposable. The STx, we sell for about $120,000. The GTx we license, this is for clinical purposes. The annual license fee for this instrument is USD 250,000 per year. And the VLx is a new system that has been in alpha trials for a number of years. We've just released it in beta trials. This is a system that actually runs 200 billion cells in about 30 minutes. And so -- we worked the entire -- from a single drop of blood, maybe 75,000 cells up to 1 million, up to 1 billion, up to 20 billion for the GTx, now up to 200 billion for the VLx. And again, the scales from 1 to the other with basically changing the drop-down menu in the computer. So that provides quite a bit of certainty to developers and dramatically reduces their risk as they scale up the process, and then we can manufacture these systems very consistently. So when you're scaling out a process, moving it from a single manufacturing site to maybe 3 or 4 to 20. MaxCyte has over 500 instruments in the field. So we know how to manufacture. We can provide the assurance from our partners that they're manufactured -- product in development in Oxford, England. It's going to work in New York City, it's going to work in California and in Japan in the same way. And that's going to be, we think, critical for the -- really the enablement and the commercialization of the cell therapy industry. Next slide, please. I talked a little bit about the business model. The left-hand side, we're selling instruments in the drug discovery and development. We have most of the big pharmas, at least 20 of the top 25 are using our technology. Again, it's a razor-razor-blade business, the razor and the razor blade both have about a 90% gross margin. So it's a very attractive business from that perspective. Then on the right-hand side, we get the annual license fees, which I talked about, $150,000 preclinical, $250,000 per year clinical plus a single-use disposable that we sell anywhere from $200 the $1,500, the difference of prices and the volume of cells that they can process plus the strategic partnership terms, which include the milestones. I talked about the $1.25 billion in milestones plus either royalty or sales-based payment upon product commercialization. So it's the razor-razor blade economics along with the share of the economics of the therapeutic assets being developed. So again, a very unique business model. And 1 that we're building not only near-term value around but mid- and long-term value for all of our stakeholders. Next slide, please. We're always asked about the size of the milestones in a particular phase and the development. Early development milestones tend to be in the mid-6-figure, low 7-figure milestones. When you move up closer to a pivotal trial, we'll start in the low 7 figures. Approvals will be 7-figure milestones; mid-7 figures for U.S. approval, for instance. And then eventually, the low single-digit percentage of sales, which would include the sales-based payments, the annual license fees, disposable sales. And as you can see by the different colors, this represents what we believe to be really the value ascension of the business over time. And we're obviously somewhere in the early stages. But all these deals are signed and the numbers that we've are providing to you have been validated and there are parts of -- they're in agreements that we currently have signed with our partners. Next slide, please. So just to give you a sense of how we match up with what's going on in the industry. The inner circle is MaxCyte. And on the left-hand side, what you see is MaxCyte working with different cell types, CAR T, stem cells, NK cells and then the outer would be the cell therapy market in general. And what you see is a pretty good reflection. This needs to be updated because there's actually some more cells that we're working in. But it gives you a sense of how we mirror what's going on in the industry. In the middle bit is the cell source. So it's either allogeneic, which means it's coming from a donor or from a cell line and autologous, which means it's coming from the patient and being given back to the patient. And here, we're leaning much more toward allogeneic. That's where the future, we believe, of cell therapy is heading. And that's 1 of the areas that we're doing a lot of focus. A lot of our partners on that 1 slide we showed earlier are developing these allogeneic cell therapies. And then finally, the bit on the right, which is, I think, probably the most exciting part of this is that, again, we're modeling and reflecting what's going on in the industry in terms of applying cell therapies to different diseases. And here, we're showing multiple myeloma, pancreatic cancer, other solid tumors. So blood cancers represent about 10% of the total oncology market, it's $100 billion a year. Solid tumors is 90% of that. So we're seeing people move from blood cancers into solid tumors, they're much more difficult to treat. Obviously, there's also a tremendous amount of unmet medical need and the need really to engineer these cells in a much more sophisticated way, more complex way. And that's where MaxCyte is focusing a lot of its time. We're also involved, I mentioned in inherited genetic diseases like sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. We're seeing a lot of interest in autoimmune disease, neurodegenerative disease, infectious disease. So what you're seeing is cell therapy really becoming a major new class of drugs that are being used and developed to treat diseases that really can't be adequately treated up until these cell therapies come on the market. From an investor perspective, we've heard many, many times that the space of cell therapy is very dense. It's confusing. There's a lot of binary risk in each of these companies. What MaxCyte provides is kind of an optionality across all the different approaches from the cell therapy field. So here's 1 way where you don't have to necessarily pick winners and losers. You can focus on an enabling technology that works across all these different companies and all across these different applications and cell types. And then the next slide, please. So talk about a little bit about 2020. We finished 2021, we did had a preannouncement. Our fourth quarter revenues were greater than $10 million. These are unaudited. Our full 2021 revenues will be more than $33.7 million. This represents about a 36% increase in the core business and a -- let's see, 20 -- sorry, [ 28% ] total revenue, 36% in the core business. The difference is we had a slight reduction in milestones in 2021 versus 2020. But again, really strong core business, a 36% growth in that business. We signed 4 SPLs last year with, again, major developers. We have 1 more we just signed this year with Intima Bioscience, has released a VLx. We added some extraordinary new board members. We completed our NASDAQ offering, which I did mention. We announced that in July. And in the future, continue to invest for strong top line growth, invest in manufacturing and expansion automation. As our partners move into commercialization, they're going to need more support. Their volumes are going to increase. So what we're doing is we're investing in manufacturing. We have a new manufacturing head who has been with the company for about 1.5 years, comes from the blood products industry. And it's really turbocharged our investment profile in being able to really secure our supply chain and manufacture the commercial products for our partners. We're looking for new products to address our customer needs. We have 16 of these partners. They're telling us what they need from a product development perspective, that's gold. We don't have to guess. We have our partners, the leaders in the field, the ones that have the most capital, the most resources. They're saying to us, MaxCyte, you solve this problem for us. Here are some other problems that we believe you can help us solve and enable only to develop these cell therapies but the future commercialization of these cell therapies as well. So we're very actively building out the organization to support the acquisition of new technologies and potentially new entities to really fill out the company and become even a greater force in this new area of cell therapy incorporating MaxCyte's technology and now other technologies that we believe are going to be important for the future of this new and exciting area that we call cell therapy. So last slide. Thank you for your attention. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. I believe we're on time. So, again, thanks for participating. And Terren, I believe you may have some questions for us.

Yes, Doug, thank you very much. Very interesting presentation. I'm not going to pretend that I understand it all and we have some quite sophisticated questions. So clearly, some very dedicated individuals here who understand the field well. So I just want to start off. There are a couple of questions about sort of competition and developments in the nonviral area. I'm just going to read 2 of them out that I think will go together and sure you can respond. So Jonathan is advising there's been another number of developments in the nonviral area. Lilly signed an agreement with Entos for neurological particle delivery systems. Intellia has had success with vivo. Are there specific cell types or indications where electroporation is likely to remain the preferred delivery option? And a question from Duncan is, how worried are MaxCyte about competition from in vivo delivery technology, specifically liquid nanoparticles?

Yes. So let me take the last 1 first. So there's in vivo therapies or ex vivo therapies. And so ex vivo is where you're taking the blood or the cells from a patient and engineering and giving back to the patient. In vivo is where you're actually -- it's almost like gene therapy where you're putting the molecule directly into the cell. And they typically use a lipid nanoparticle, which is an adjuvant and encapsulate the molecule, then it goes to the cell of interest. And then it excites that cell because it's an adjuvant and delivers the molecule. These LNPs are almost all directed toward the liver. And so virtually all of the applications are in the liver, or if they can be directly administered to, let's say, the eye or the brain. And so that's a whole new area of science. I mean it's something we -- I don't believe that's competitive. I think that's an expansion of the use of -- that's more like gene therapy in our minds. It's very early stages, but there's some really promising work that's being done. On the ex vivo side, there really isn't any formidable competition to us. We typically run into companies who have used a laboratory scale devices that may be using [indiscernible] device or a thermal device or a bio-RAD device. They're not cGMP. They're not scalable. So we typically capture those companies as they become more developed, that they're developing their programs toward the clinic. And that's where they come to MaxCyte. Because we have the cGMP. We have the master file. And we also have the performance and scalability that no 1 else has. I think I answered your question. There are a number of companies coming in and no 1 heard of MaxCyte 3 or 4 years ago. Fortunately, some of your investors did know about us when we went on AIM. And now with our success, I think we're seeing a number of different groups coming in, capitalizing on that success and raising money to develop new and sometimes interesting alternatives. And our team is well aware of all these. We spend time thinking about them. We -- our view, our remit to the organization is, do we see something out there that solves a problem that we can't solve or can solve it better. We want to know about it because we want to bring that in and expand our technology base. So we're not just singularly focused on electroporation. We're looking at all nonviral cell engineering methodologies because, again, we have this, I think, privileged position in the marketplace where we understand what's going on in the cell therapy industry. And we're staying very close to companies who have extraordinary resources that can look at across the board at all these different technologies, and they're coming to us and saying to us, take a look at this 1 because it could be interesting, but none of them are early in prime time. Some are very early and very few of them have published and are in the clinic. So it's still really early phases.

Another question, and it's about the new VLx machine. And Jonathan is asking just sort of is there a layperson explanation of how the new VLx machine might be used in biopharma or bio manufacturing and possibly address some of the bottlenecks that have developed with the shift of manufacturing capacity to support vaccine production. So could you see the VLx machine getting widespread use by CDMOs like Lonza.

Yes, we're super excited about the VLx. The VLx has several applications. And we've been working with companies over the last several years on an alpha version. Now it looks like the expert line, but the applications we've been working on are vector production, VLPs and bio-vector production, which, again, there's a huge capacity issue in the area of monoclonal antibody production. This is a particularly big area, I think, for us in 2 ways. One is that big companies want -- they say they want to sail fast. They want to get a product into the clinic as soon as possible. And the VLx will allow them to produce gram quantities of cGMP material that they can use in the clinic. So they can test it and that prevents them from having to build out a manufacturing system for that same product so we can get to the clinic faster. The other big application that I'm really excited about is rapid protein production. I think we found in the last couple of years how important it is to be able to create and produce a monoclonal antibody at enough scale that it can actually treat a population after you've identified perhaps a sequence for an antigen or a virus that you want to treat those patients. So rapid production of monoclonals, I think, is going to be a big one. And then finally, a lot of companies are developing allogeneic therapies. It's still early phases. They're eventually going to be wanting to scale those up. And the VLx will allow them to do that. They're not at that scale yet. And we're going to enable a lot of these companies to move into larger scale for allogeneic. So a lot of really interesting applications. But just to 1 say, I want to be careful, though, setting expectations. These -- is such a disruptive technology that we need to make sure we've got the applications information and the support that we work with the customer. They can integrate this technology into their day-to-day work. So part of what MaxCyte loves to do is work closely with partners and get them to use the technology and incorporate it for the long term.

Could you just remind us of the definition of allogeneic?

Yes. So allogeneic is where you're taking -- it's not bespoke. So you're taking it off the shelf. So it's coming from a source other than the patient. Autologous would be the patient's own cells being processed and giving back. Allogeneic is either or donors of a lot of different patients or a cell line. And so that would be off the shelf versus a much more bespoke, which would be autologous therapies. Some of these therapies like for treating sickle cell disease, that's probably going to be an autologous therapy because you're going to go in there and you're going to engineer that patients on stem cells, so they produce normal red cells versus sickle red cells. When you're treating a cancer patient, it might be different or you can actually create a cell line engineering that can give that to the patient.

And how many of these VLx machines are there?

We haven't disclosed how many are currently in the field. It's basically a handful or 2, and we've just released this new one. So it's really a new release for us, and a formal launch will be towards the middle of this year -- in kind of the middle of 2022. And a formal launch would include, for us, all the applications. Well, the application data will launch it first along with making sure that our field application team is fully trained to support the customer integration of the technology.

Great. We've got a couple of questions here just about the I think it's the strategic platform licenses, the SPLs and some queries around that and revenues. And obviously, you have to be, I guess, careful with what you respond to here. But I'll read you the questions, and then you can see. Given that you started signing up SPLs in 2017, the related revenues still appear low, and 2021 was lower than in 2020. Does that indicate that these SPLs are having problems or taking time, getting your technology through the clinic or perhaps there's just sort of a process there that you can elaborate on. And the first generation of engineered products using cell therapy, I think you mentioned also in the presentation is expected to be approved in year '23 or '24. Is that going to be a product engineered on your platform?

We believe it will be. And we have indicated that the CTX001, which is a CRISPR treatment for sickle cell disease, is enabled by our technology, and that could be one, obviously, if everything works out right. I don't think it's the integration of our technology. I think it's more the progress of these programs in the clinic and through the clinic. At the very beginning of the SPL journey, if you will, of the product. It's a very low -- it's a mid-6-figure milestone typically an IND clearance or maybe they dosed the tenth patient. You don't see those individual milestone numbers go up until you start getting later in the clinical development phase, like a Phase II pivotal and eventually into a product approval. I also think that there was -- during the pandemic, I think that there was a slowdown in clinical recruitment during 2019 and -- well, 2020 rather, certainly mid and late 2020. I think certainly, I think we were finding -- our partners were finding that hospitals just weren't able to handle all the COVID-related pandemic issues along with running clinical trials. And so as I'm sure you know, a lot of elective surgeries were delayed, a lot of clinical trials were delayed. We think that, that has really picked back up again. It's simple things. I mean, many hospitals have a single point of entry for all their patients other than an emergency room. And so that was a major problem for these hospitals. And so many of them started to set up separate entrances for oncology and surgery and clinical trials. And once the hospitals start to adapt their logistics, the clinical trials started to come back online. So I think you're seeing a little bit of that in a slowdown of 2021, I think you're going to see it picking back up in 2022. But no guidance, sorry.

Yes. And there's a couple of questions around Trinity Delta, who had a note on MaxCyte, I think at the end of last year in November and that they would be sort of updating forecast and sort of that hasn't happened. I'm just wondering what research companies may be covering MaxCyte and some general questions about fourth quarter revenues and what's been included in those revenues and what you can talk about in that with regards to any guidance for 2022.

Yes. So Trinity Delta still covers MaxCyte as does Numis and Panmure Gordon. We also have 5 analysts in the U.S. that cover MaxCyte. That includes Cowen Stifel, Stephens, W. Blair and BTIG. So we now have 7 research analysts plus Trinity Delta. All I can say is that being a dual listed company, it does have some effect on our ability to have these kind of meetings and talk about things that aren't public and actually even have meetings with investors and analysts and bankers. And so part of this is we're learning. We're kind of new to the dual listing. It's -- I got to tell you, it's a bit complex from a legal perspective and a disclosure perspective, but we're working through that. I clearly understand the need to become much more visible in the U.K. In the London market, I think we did a pretty good job. Before the NASDAQ listing, we're trying to get back into it. We're trying to also navigate it so that we don't trip up on any regulations as I'm sure you -- some companies have figured it out. We're still trying to figure it out. In terms of fourth quarter, there is a -- we published our preliminary fourth quarter numbers in -- on January 24. And so we did break down the -- where those revenues came from. I can't go into any more detail than that, but it's on our website, and I'm sure that if you haven't seen it, I think it could be illustrative of kind of the strength of the business and the growth in the business.

Yes. And another question about the SPL partners, and I guess the size and how many machines. So there's a question that says, I believe Novartis has 300 treatment locations globally, I'm probably going to get this pronounced wrong, [indiscernible] and if SPL -- if an SPL partner had a similarly sized delivery network, would they need a MaxCyte machine at each location.

I don't know the answer to that, and I can't comment on how many systems Novartis -- they don't -- that's a virus-based system. So I don't know how many deliveries they have. It really is going to be around the disease and their own clinical and commercial strategy. But you'll see at least 1 MaxCyte instrument in every manufacturing site for every autologous cell therapy.

I think we have answered most of the questions that are here. I just wanted to know if there was any sort of other information that you would like to give, particularly based on the types of questions that we're receiving today.

No, we will have -- we'll announce our full year results sometime in March. And so we'll be able to provide a lot more information around the details of the business at that point. But I have to, again, refer to what we've just recently published. And again, point folks to the analyst coverage for additional information.

And so all of the development is based in the United States?

Yes. So our facilities are in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is outside of Washington, D.C. And that's where we have our research and development labs. We have our process development lab at our headquarters. And that's where engineering, development and manufacturing is done.

And you obviously have a lot of patents already received, and you have quite a number that are in process. And that's largely they are initially filed in the U.S. and then you choose which other countries to file them in. If you could explain a little bit more about your intellectual property?

Most of the discoveries are in the U.S., although there are some discoveries that we have made outside the U.S. because what we also do is we endeavor to protect certain applications of our technology. And an example of that is single base editing, which is becoming a pretty big deal right now. We've been working in the area for 5 or 6 years. And so we have fundamental patents around that. We have fundamental patents around using messenger RNA, and many of those come from applying the technology with partners. And we have the ability to do that with our license agreements. The strategy is when you're licensing, you don't want to get patents in every country in the world. You want to identify those countries where you either have a major commercial opportunity or you have potential competition. So it's -- again, it's a big complex. We have a lot of patent attorneys that give us advice on how to prosecute our patent estate. We have a full-time patent attorney inside. So we're pretty focused on making sure that our IP is protected, not only with patents, but by trade secrets, by our master file. There's a lot of different things that we do to protect our intellectual property.

And what is the size of the organization in Maryland, how many people have you got?

Well, a lot of people work remotely. They -- so we have probably close to 30 full-time remote people. These are field application scientists. Many of the people that we've hired in the last couple of years are also not in Gaithersburg, Maryland. It's a challenge in some regard to lead and manage the team. But on the other hand, we're finding that we can recruit and -- identify and recruit really seasoned top-notch people that really maybe not want to move at this point. And certainly, a lot of people are reluctant to move from their homes during this period. So I think we had -- I think we mentioned 65 people in our IPO at the end of the year, I think we're probably slowly approaching 100 people in the company, both remote and Gaithersburg based.

And for the foreseeable future, you see the dual listing continuing.

Yes.

Great. Great. And do you come to the U.K. at all?

As soon as I'm cleared, I will come over. I used to come over at least 5 or 6 times a year, many times with my team. But I made a decision to -- I have not got in the plane in 2 years to say no. I want to keep it that way.

Yes. Well, listen, thank you very much for the presentation today. Very, very interesting. And clearly, a lot of interested shareholders and perhaps potential shareholders on the call. So thank you very much.

Well, thank you for the opportunity, and thank you to meet new shareholders, potential shareholders and existing shareholders. Any follow-up questions, please feel free to contact me at [email protected] or irmaxcyte.com and we'll be happy to follow up with you. So thank you.

Thank you very much.

Be safe.

You too.

Thank you.