Microba Life Sciences Limited (MAP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. So thank you, everyone, for joining. This is the first of what we aim to be a series of deep dive sessions on Microba's businesses. Starting first with our Diagnostics business, which is in growth acceleration mode. This is our standard disclaimer, so I'll move quickly past that. Today, I'm joined by 3 key members of our executive team to take you deeper into our Diagnostics business. We have Chris Saad, our Chief Product Officer; Eric Davis, our Chief Growth Officer; and Lutz Krause, our Chief Scientific Officer. And we'll all be available at the end for Q&A when we wrap up this presentation. [Operator Instructions] So quickly the agenda for today. I'm going to start where we will also end with the key take-home messages, then blast through a summary of the opportunity and why Microba is positioned to win. We'll then deep dive across product growth and evidence with Chris, Eric and Lutz, update on our growth midway through Q3 and how we're doubling down and focusing on our core diagnostic products and this big market we're in position to take and then close out with Q&A. So we've got a packed agenda. Let's jump straight into it. So first, there are key take-home messages we want you to leave this presentation with. First, we estimate that the market for this new diagnostic category of clinical microbiome testing could be worth more than $100 billion. Our focus today is the first slice of that, patients with unresolved GI disease, which is a $25 billion market opportunity. We have 2 world-leading diagnostic products addressing these patients, MetaPanel and MetaXplore, a world-class product engine, continuously improving product and shipping value one iteration at a time, a scalable growth engine with multiple channels and tactics and a staged approach to customers and regions, partnerships with 2 of the world's largest medical diagnostic companies and most notably, Sonic Healthcare, both a major partner and a major shareholder. A North Star metric of 1 million tests with the whole diagnostics business driving towards that metric. And we have accelerating traction in our first 2 markets, Australia and the United Kingdom, setting the foundation for what lies next in the U.S. And aligned to that, we're doubling down by focusing on these core diagnostic products designed for scale, replacing old product lines, putting all of our energy and focus behind that $25 billion market. Now as preface for those new to Microba, I'll do a quick recap on the opportunity and why Microba is positioned to win. But for those that know us well, there is also some deeper information here, which I think will provide new insight into how we think and execute at Microba. So I have to start, as always, with no assumed prior knowledge. So chronic diseases now affect 6 in 10 people. They include cancer, depression, diabetes, bowel, heart and many other diseases. The world is making some progress here, but the majority of these conditions remain difficult to diagnose, treat, manage and cure. If you just look at the U.S., these conditions represent 90% of health care spend. So that sets the scene for the scope and scale of the problem that we're targeting at Microba. So where does the microbiome and microbial come in? Well, to start, your body is home to trillions of tiny microorganisms, and these tiny organisms are essential for your health. Most of them, about 95% live in your gut, and we call this ecosystem of organisms your gut microbiome. And these organisms are so essential to our health that the gut microbiome is implicated as playing a role in essentially all of these conditions, and there's now more than 21,000 studies showing that. But the key insight and breakthrough is that there are now over 150 studies demonstrating that if we change these tiny organisms in our gut, we can improve and even treat these chronic diseases. And from this, Microba's vision is very clear that testing and monitoring your gut microbiome is going to be a routine part of health and disease management with your doctor and that novel microbiome therapeutics are going to be developed, commercialized and routinely used to treat chronic diseases. And taken together, if microbiome diagnostics and therapeutics indeed play a meaningful role in supporting these patients, this could ultimately be worth more than $1 trillion in total market opportunity. Now that's a big statement. So rather than just believe me, you can look to the giants in this space of medical diagnostics who also see this opportunity and have come to Microba and partnered with us at the forefront of this field. One of those, of course, is Sonic Healthcare, a global diagnostics leader and one of Australia's largest and most trusted health care companies who believe this so much that they became a major shareholder. And here's a quote from their CEO, Colin Goldschmidt, stating their thesis aligned to their strategic investment in us. So with such a big opportunity, the natural next question is, why us? What makes Microba unique in addressing these patients and capturing this market opportunity? Importantly, I should call out there is a lot of noise that's been created in the microbiome field with low-quality, low-efficacy products that, quite frankly, overpromise and underdeliver. And we see Microbial as the antidote to that, actionable clinical tools, proven science and real patient outcomes. That's delivered not only by world-leading technology developed by Microba's 2 co-founders, Professor Phil Hugenholtz and Professor Gene Tyson, who are in the top 1% of cited researchers globally and wrote the book in this field, but also these 5 pillars, which I'll take you through. So first, on top of our co-founders, we've assembled a deep bench of world-class leaders with expertise across multiple domains of science, medicine, engineering, product, operations and growth. These people have seen what world-class looks like and together are building towards a future state of health care that's patient-centric and deep technology and AI enabled. We have a clear global and ambitious vision with the United team all rowing in the same direction to realize what we see as a revolution in health care. This is a world where there's broad acceptance of the microbiome as critical to health and disease management. Testing your microbiome is commonplace with your doctor. Microbiome therapeutics are approved and routinely used for both maintenance and treatment of multiple chronic diseases, and that leads to millions of patients living better lives. Executing on that vision, we have a family of mutually reinforcing businesses that are synergistic in nature, serving the needs in both testing and treatment. And today, this deep dive session is focused exclusively on diagnostics. And we'll have future sessions on our supplements and therapeutic businesses. An important asset for us is what we've assembled over the last 7 years, and we understand to be the world's largest clinically applicable proprietary microbiome data set, enabling the development of our diagnostic and therapeutic products that deliver on that vision we just laid out. And we think that's very important. And we believe that on top of that, it's very important to build strong moats and businesses using flywheels. So far, we've identified 2 of these key flywheels. And the first of those is a science and data flywheel. So how this works is we have the world's largest clinically applicable proprietary microbiome data set, as I just outlined, which helps us deliver leading diagnostic performance interpretations and suggested actions, which drives improved patient health outcomes, which results in more clinical referrals, which allows us to engage more patients and patient health tracking, collect more consented anonymous proprietary patient data, which flows back into maintaining our lead with the world's largest clinically applicable proprietary microbiome data set. The second flywheel is a product-led network effect. So we increasingly have world-leading patient interpretability and collaboration features and easier to read and more shareable report leads to more patient sharing with families, friends and broader clinical care teams, which allows us to map a growing graph of relationships between tests, test data, patients, families and clinicians to supercharge patient care. And it also encourages patients to organically introduce us to their friends, family and health care professionals. And this broader view of a patient's care network and practitioners ultimately drives improved patient health outcomes. And in turn, the patient feels more comfortable with Microba's tools and our deep understanding about them and their care network. which drives increased retention, retesting and clarity for all stakeholders within that network. And that ultimately leads back to the start and more collaboration between patients, practitioners and better health outcomes. So now let's get into the meat of our Diagnostics business, starting with our strategy. And first, I want to call out, we are not a typical traditional diagnostics company. Predominantly, we're actually a software company, which is at the intersection of bits aka software; biology, which is the molecular biology in the patient and in the lab and atoms, which is the physical test kits and other physical interactions with the product. With increasing levels of artificial intelligence driving better product and operations and customer experience. So what are we pointing that engine at and what patient problem are we focused on solving today? As I outlined before, with the central impact that the microbiome plays in a range of diseases, there's a lot of opportunity. There is a lot of patient problems we could help solve. But today, we're laser-focused on applying our team and technology to help patients suffering from gastrointestinal disease. So why? Well, firstly, 95% of those organisms live in your gut. They're going to act there first before they have their systemic impacts on other parts of the body. And secondly, it's a ginormous market. So there are 37 million people every year in the U.S. alone seeing a doctor with GI issues, including severe diarrhea, bloating pain, irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease. And finally, it's a huge unsolved problem. Looking at the chart on the right, historically, only half of these patients suffering have achieved a resolution. So how do we help these patients? Well, many of the answers lie in their gut microbiome. And to address that, we've developed 2 tests: MetaPanel for diagnosing gastrointestinal pathogens, which launched just last year across Australia with Sonic Healthcare; and MetaXplore for diagnosing gastrointestinal disorders, which launched just the year prior. And our real-world data has shown that with our tests, we can get critical new diagnosis and treatment recommendations for 52% of patients who have previously had no path to a resolution. So this is massive. And we're very proud of the impact that we're having on these patients. And we're really only just at the start of this journey. So what is this first opportunity in gastrointestinal disease worth? Well, it's a big market. We did some great work with a Boston-based consulting firm and estimating that first slice of this major new diagnostic category, so just in gastrointestinal disease alone could be worth well in excess of $25 billion. We previously put out a $15 billion figure, which was just for the U.S. So now we've extended that analysis here to include a core set of markets that we're focused on, including, which is Australia, United Kingdom and a few others. Now before I hand over to Chris for a deep dive on product, I want to quickly take you through the customer flow and revenue model. So at a very high level, first step is the practitioner referral. So patient presents to a doctor with GI symptoms, identifies the need for our tests and provides a digital test referral. The second step is patient ordering and receiving the sampling kit. So patient follows that digital test referral, pays for the test online. They then receive their sampling kit either via the post or pick up from a partner collection point like a Sonic pathology collection point. Step 3 is that they take the sample and return that sample to the Microbial lab by following the kit instructions, sending that specimen back to our central lab either again via post or by dropping it off to a partner collection point, and that then comes back to the lab express and fully preserved. Finally, our lab then processes that sample, and we generate and deliver the report. So sample received, processed in the lab, generate the report, and then there is a review and addition of actionable notes for the treating clinician. And the report is delivered back either via the Microba portal or directly through their practice management software. And it's at that point when the revenue is recognized. So there is a gap between sale and money in the bank and then final revenue recognition once the report is delivered. And once they have the report, we provide world-class clinical and customer support to ensure that the clinician is equipped to act on the information. So on that, I'm going to hand over to our Chief Product Officer, Chris Saad, for a quick deep dive into our product strategy. Over to you, Chris.

I'm the Chief Product Officer here at Microba. Just by way of introduction, I have spent the majority of my career in Silicon Valley building and scaling product-led companies. Part of that was in a critical product leadership role over at Uber, where I was in the trenches with Travis Kalanick, the Founder and CEO and the team there, building that awesome product in that business. Personally, I've suffered from chronic gastrointestinal issues my whole life. So when I met Luke and the Microba team, I was very excited to learn what they're working on and blown away by what they had in the lab and what they had in the market and also the opportunity to really take this to the next level and make a real difference in people's lives, people like me. So it's been super rewarding working on this with the team, and we've been trying to build, and I think we're succeeding in building Australia's best product-led organization. And we want to build a product that can really deliver next-generation diagnostic products that will impact the lives of millions. So first, I wanted to recap what is product and product management. A lot of people, a lot of companies, especially in Australia and Europe, outside of Silicon Valley, they tend to think that product is just the stuff you can pick up off the shelf and product management is just working with engineers, translating business requirements into engineering requirements. But at Microba, we follow the Silicon Valley model of product and product management, and this is the same model that's used at hyperscalers like Google, Uber, Meta, Amazon. So at Microba, product operates across all disciplines of the business to facilitate and coordinate delivery of value to market. We work with technology, we work with operations. We work with marketing. We work with everybody to orchestrate the delivery of new value for users, for clinicians and ultimately drive the business forward. At Microba, there's actually 2 different kinds of products. There are apps and there are tests. For apps, you can think of the patient app that helps patients receive referrals, pay, track the dispatch of a kit, activate kits, collect samples, receive interactive reports. The clinician app that helps enable referrals, tracking of tests and access to our interactive reports for the clinician. You can think of integrations with practice management systems and electronic medical record systems to ensure that we're a seamless part of the medical software ecosystem. And you can also imagine internal apps that streamline operations and enable business intelligence. On the test side, you can think of our 2 primary tests today, MetaXplore and MetaPanel. These are targeted, of course, at addressing the needs of patients with chronic gastrointestinal issues. But you can, of course, imagine a growing range of tests here, each with specific clinical use cases. Perhaps it's easiest to think of this as the relationship between like the YouTube app, which is itself, of course, a product and the videos that live inside the YouTube app made by creators, which are also products, the products of those creators. And so these YouTube videos live inside and are served by the YouTube apps. It's the same here at Microba. From a customer-facing point of view, what does this look like? Well, we start with a kind of multichannel ordering capability so that there's no barrier to access between clinicians and patients in our tests, so they can order it from a practice management system or from our web portal and a growing range of places over time. We deliver continuous patient and clinician communication while we're dispatching kits and while we're processing samples. This is something that's painfully lacking in a lot of health care applications. We've obviously learned a lot about this from Uber and other apps where you can track the status of your ride as it arrives, as you're on trip and so on, which makes the entire experience much more magical. And then we, of course, deliver interactive, easy-to-read reports, which distill what's going on for the patient and what they should do next. And then finally, we make it really easy to share these reports with the patient and the patient to share it with their family and with the rest of their clinical care team, something that's often overlooked in health care. Within the product team and our cross-functional product squads, we have these essential product principles that help inform all our decision-making and to make sure that we're making the very best decisions, and we're making consistent decisions over time. You can read them here on the slide. I want to do a couple of callouts, though. The first is the one titled Driven by purpose, the first one there. And it speaks to something that we care very deeply about, which is while we have a great deal of respect for clinical judgment and the clinician's role in the process, of course, they're absolutely essential to providing care. We also want to make sure we're prioritizing the patient as well, their health outcomes and their experience through the whole journey. They are, of course, the one with the most skin in the game, and they need to be treated as a first-class citizen in all we do. I also want to point out brilliant design because it's not always obvious in health care products, the design plays a very big role. But we want to use really simple language. We want to use gorgeous design, intentional design that sets the global standard for diagnostic products and makes the product really easy to use, delightful, approachable, friendly and ultimately drive those health outcomes. And then finally, a really important point to call out here is while we have big visions, big ambitions for the product, many of which I don't have time to talk about here today, we don't ever want to disappear for 6, 12, 24 months, cooking up things in the labs and then dropping it after a long absence from the market. We want to use our craft to deliver thin iterations, thin slices of value as rapidly as possible so that the product is always improving quickly in front of the eyes of our patients and clinicians. So to talk a little bit more concretely about our short-term strategy, you can look at this diagram here. If you look across the top, our -- pretty much our only goal is to hit the 1 million tests that Luke described earlier. That is our primary goal in the product org. We think there are 4 primary opportunities to unlocking that growth. The first is making our tests more useful by supercharging clinical utility. We call that effort Project Lightspeed. The second opportunity is to make our tests more usable with an incredibly easy-to-use sample collection experience in the kit, and we call that Project Origami. We also think there's a huge opportunity to make our tests even more accessible by making all of our tests available in all channels, all workflows globally. We call that Project Serenity. And then finally, we want to have increased availability of internal business intelligence so that we can make better data-informed decisions across everything from choosing what the next feature is in the product to optimizing and improving our operations. We call that Project Beacon. So just to unpack one of these slightly more, this is the high-level Lightspeed road map, that first opportunity I described to supercharge clinical utility. And this is a very, very high-level summary, but it shows you how we're moving through this in phases. So clinical utility is really a multifaceted kind of Rubik's cube of a problem. There's lots and lots to do there, and there's a lot of interdependent concepts and moving parts. But we wanted to rationalize this to make it methodical and thoughtful and be able to tackle it one piece at a time. And so here, you see our high-level road map moving from improving the readability of the test to improving its coverage and then it's patient personalization, all the way through to actionability, patient engagement and ultimately adherence tracking. And we think by moving through these phases, we're going to supercharge every aspect of clinical utility. And along the way, of course, we're always improving analytical performance, scientific validity and turnaround times. And so when I talked about building an incredible product with craft and iteration, this is what we mean is breaking the problem down into a series of phases and iterations. And of course, each of these iterations have many milestones within them, and you'll see us releasing them one after the other after the other. Look out for some new readability features in short order as well. Our product vision is really about building one holistic universal global platform for all tests, markets and geographies, one platform that can power and deliver incredible tests everywhere. This is going to be a powerful engine for us to build more features, more tests across more indications and more markets over time. So when I talk about building Australia's best product-led company and building a product engine, this is an example or a diagram that helps to bring that to life. And we're going to -- we've been working really hard on this, and we're quite some way through it. As I said, we're delivering pieces of this every day, every week, every month and are moving to more and more of this powerful ability to innovate at pace and at scale. All right. With that, I'm going to pass the baton on to Eric Davis, our Chief Growth Officer. Thanks very much.

Thanks, Chris, and thanks, everyone, for joining the session this morning. My objective this morning is to provide an overview of our growth strategy, organization and activities. But because this is my first time presenting to this group, I thought I should provide a short introduction about myself. I've spent the majority of my career across 3 decades at the intersection of product and growth in the med tech industry, primarily medical devices and diagnostics. One part of my career about which I'm very proud is my time at Abbott Diabetes Care, where I built and led a team that conceived of, developed and commercialized a product called FreeStyle Libre, which is a continuous glucose monitor, or CGM, which is now the world's most successful medical device ever. It will do $6 billion in sales for Abbott this year. From my accent, you might discern that I'm from the United States. And indeed, I spent the first 5-plus decades of my life in America, but I was very lucky to be recruited by Cochlear to come to Australia in 2017. And I'm very proud that my wife and kids and I are now all Aussie Citizens. After working for 3-plus decades with large global med tech giants, I decided that I wanted to work in the start-up and scale-up space to have a chance to drive innovation at a different pace. So I feel very lucky to have found Microba, who are very unique in Australia for having both world-leading technology as well as the talent and resources to deliver profound innovation in a very important health care category. I'm proud of the work we're doing to improve patient outcomes and improve -- and I think we have a great opportunity to establish new standards of care for GI health and beyond. So let me provide a few insights about our growth strategy. This slide is about focus. One of my favorite insights about strategy is this quote, "We can do anything, but we can't do everything." And that's one of our mantras at Microba is focus, focus, focus. And as Luke noted previously, if we consider the disease state or indications, which we have prioritized, our focus is on gastrointestinal disease. For this page, if we consider our customer road map, what customer segments are we prioritizing, we are pursuing a B2B2C model that currently has a single-minded focus on activating clinicians or health care professionals to refer our products. This is our current focus, but there are additional customer segments we'll pursue sequentially through time to unlock additional growth. And we apply the same level of focus regarding the regions we are pursuing. The first phase of our evolution as a direct B2B2C company has been to figure out how we win in Australia, our own backyard. Next, we have just started the process of replicating our growth model into the U.K. and there is some positive data from our performance in the U.K., which we will show in just a moment today. And then we're looking at the United States, which we'll update investors on soon. So I want to provide a high-level overview of our growth strategy. Our go-to-market model employs multiple tactics or levers. First, marketing to drive engagement. Second, direct sales. And what I'm talking about here is having our own sales organization, our own feet on the street, our own sales reps who engage with our customers every day. Third, partners. Our partners can extend our reach. In other words, they can give us access to new customers, and they can add credibility to our brand or products. Fourth, events are a very important element of our go-to-market model, most notably because events can give us more access or reach than a days or week's worth of one-on-one sales calls. Number five, driving expert or KOL engagement or advocacy is critical to us because KOLs or key opinion leaders enhance our credibility and amplify our key messages. And finally, number six, leveraging the clinical evidence generated by our science team and physician partners provides an important boost to the credibility of our products. and Lutz is going to speak about that in just a moment. Another way to think about our growth strategy is that we have a growth stack. And again, as Chris said, I'd like to think of us as a lot like a software company and our go-to-market model applies that same concept of the growth stack. Our go-to-market model has many layers of activities. To put it another way, there are a significant number of channels and tactics we can employ in our go-to-market activations. This slide illustrates that the channels and tactics we deploy will grow over time as we gain scale and pursue additional customer segments. Again, remembering our mantra of focus, focus, focus, we are focused today on a finite set of channels and tactics, which correspond to Phase 1 of our customer road map, which is focused on individual clinicians or health professionals. For each of our products, we have a wide range of marketing and sales tools that help us engage with customers and develop the market for our first-in-class tests. This slide shows examples for MetaPanel, and it's important to note that our tool set for MetaPanel is growing quickly as we learn from our ongoing go-to-market activities. For today, I'm not going to do a deep dive on the inspirations or use cases for each of these tools. But what I would say is that these types of assets are widely used by med tech companies selling to clinicians or health care professionals. This slide shows examples of marketing and sales tools that we have developed for MetaXplore. It's important to note that because MetaXplore has been in the market longer than MetaPanel, we have developed a broader set of tools and programs as a response to the learnings we've captured regarding how we can be more effective in engaging with our customers and how we can accelerate adoption of our tests. Direct sales outreach is a critical lever in our go-to-market model. So I wanted to go one step deeper on this topic. It's a widely accepted reality in most med tech categories that to develop a market or dramatically shift market share, you need proactive, strong sales and account management staff with customers. Face-to-face, building trust, sometimes following up repeatedly over weeks or months to ultimately change clinician behavior. The key building blocks for having an effective sales organization are as follows: First, we have highly trained sales reps with channel-specific expertise relevant to the clinicians they are calling on. Today, we sell in 2 channels, the IFM channel, our integrated functional medicine channel and the medical channel where we find general practitioners and gastroenterologists. So we have a sales team for each channel. Second, we have a structured sales incentive program with commissions and SPIFs. And this reminds me of the old management adage, show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes. Third, we are leveraging a proven sales philosophy or sales model. We use a hybrid version of the challenger model. Fourth, as noted before, it's critical for our sales team to leverage KOLs, including local influencers, or key opinion leaders as advocates because peer influencing is essential in health care, and we have specific strategies for this. Number five, our teams have targets for daily sales engagements. The best practice in this domain is engaging with 8 clinicians per day, face-to-face, and our teams are delivering against this target. Six, our sales teams promote their own events such as small local group meet-ups, in-office lunch and learns and small local dinners. These events are a great complement to the one-on-one sales calls we do every day as well as to the larger national events we attend. And finally, number seven, as previously noted, our sales efforts benefit from third-party partners who give us momentum that we couldn't achieve on our own. A primary example of this is that we are very lucky to have Sonic as a major partner and shareholder. That partnership is global in its ambition, but we have started our work together in Australia with MetaPanel. This collaboration with Sonic in Australia includes the development of evidence of clinical utility, coordinating on sales calls to certain doctors or clinics and promoting MetaPanel in shared cosponsored events. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I love to include photos whenever I'm doing a presentation. This slide shows a range of different engagement formats for our sales team. Our sales teams are very active. Their message is resonating with our target customers, and they are developing deep relationships that are driving clinician behavior change and importantly, improved patient outcomes. For us, sales is not a dirty word, it's a pathway to delivering patient impact. And finally, on this slide, you can see examples of our active collaboration with our key partner and shareholder, Sonic Healthcare here in Australia, co-promoting and activating clinicians to create behavior change and drive referrals for MetaPanel. With that, I'll hand it over to Lutz, who's going to provide insights into our clinical generation activities.

Thanks, Eric, and thanks to everyone who has joined the call today. I would first like to introduce myself. I have been with Microba for the last 6 years, where it has been incredibly exciting to see all our hard work translating into the clinic and make a real impact on patients' life. I've been at the forefront of the intersection of medical genomics, metagenomics and the microbiome for the past 20 years, and I had a career in both academia and industry. During my PhD in Germany, I was one of the first researchers in Europe to use metagenomics and next-generation sequencing, which are the core technologies that we are using here at Microba to power our tests. And I also spent some time during my PhD in San Diego, where I was introduced to these techniques. I was then recruited by Nestlé, Switzerland, where I researched the human gut microbiome. And before joining Microba, I was Associate Professor at the University of Queensland in the area of medical genomics. Now as Chief Scientific Officer at Microba, my primary role is to further advance the clinical value of our tests together with Chris and the product team and to demonstrate their value in improving patient outcomes. We have a carefully designed evidence generation road map that is aligned to our growth strategy and focus markets, and that supports our goal to move our tests into standard of care to have them integrated into clinical guidelines and to get reimbursement. And as you can see here, our evidence generation road map has 3 distinct phases. In the first phase, we rapidly deliver evidence of utility in small- to medium-scale clinical studies, and these studies are designed to accelerate the clinical adoption of our tests. This is followed by expanded larger clinical studies that generate major evidence of clinical utility and health economics, and these studies are designed to support reimbursement. Then in the third phase, we aim to broaden the application of our test. And here, we will generate evidence for additional patient populations and markets. Here's an overview of ongoing and planned clinical studies. So on a very high-level summary, we have a growing number of microba-led, clinician-led microba-funded and grant-funded clinical studies. They are designed to rapidly and robustly demonstrate the clinical value of our tests and their ability to improve patient outcomes. And here, we are working with some of the key opinion leaders in the field who can help us to drive clinical adoption and change clinical guidelines. The evidence that we are generating here is really a key accelerant for Eric and the growth team to scale our business and a cornerstone for our path to reimbursement. And finally, I would like to highlight that we are rapidly making progress on this road map. So for example, in this quarter, we have already published one article and have submitted a second one, and we expect to deliver at least 4 publications across 2025. On that note, I will hand back to Luke to round out this section.

Perfect. Thank you, Lutz. So just to round out this section, I want to share a few key strategic principles, which flow right down from the Board and executive team into all of the functions of the business that guide how we lead, innovate and grow. These principles ensure that we stay ahead of the market, build trust with customers and drive what we call sustainable expansion. So I'll walk you through them. First, with established leadership. So first and foremost, we are defining and owning the new diagnostic category for clinical microbiome testing. And this means setting the benchmark for excellence and ensuring that Microba is the leader in this space. And to do this effectively, we focus on intelligent capital allocation, investing ahead of our growth to solidify our market position and capture the market. The second is deliver scientific credibility. So trust is at the core of what we do. We demonstrate real efficacy in microbiome diagnostics, ensuring that clinicians and patients have confidence in our test. And our commitment to rigorous science and transparent communication reinforces our credibility and quite frankly, differentiates us in market. Then global expansion. Microba is built and designed for scale. Our platform and business model are designed to operate efficiently in multiple markets, but we don't expand for the sake of expansion. We take a disciplined data-driven approach, evaluating each new market based on its scale, commercial viability and strategic fit before we enter. Next one, focus and win. We believe in winning small before we win big. That means prioritizing and aligning our efforts to dominate narrow market segments before expanding. So by focusing deeply, we ensure successful execution and lay the groundwork for sustainable long-term growth, and we take markets then one slice and one bite at a time. Empower patients. So as a diagnostic, we're inherently a product utilized by clinicians. But as Chris mentioned, patients are not just end users to us. They are the key beneficiary, and they are the ones suffering and they are the ones paying. So they are a critical driver of adoption and growth here. By leveraging patient activation, so patient education, engagement, accessibility, we can accelerate adoption and create a patient demand-driven pool for our products. Products, not services. Microba is not a services company. We are a product company. We build, own and sell our first-party diagnostic products. Ensuring control over quality, innovation at the forefront of this space and overall customer experience. And that allows us to scale efficiently and maintain a defensible leadership position in this market. And then diversify go-to-market strategies. So finally, we take a multifaceted approach to reaching our customers. As Eric outlined, whether through brand building, clinician education, product-led growth, direct sales or strategic partnerships, we ensure that our go-to-market strategy remains dynamic and adaptable. We have multiple tactics and tools in our tool belt. And we also ensure that the product and sales strategy are kind of set and internally driven, allowing us to maintain control and consistency in our execution. And importantly, to me and the executive team, these operating principles are much more than just words on slide. They are the foundation of our growth strategy. So by staying disciplined, investing wisely and leading with credibility here, we think Microbial is positioned to define the future of health care through this new category of microbiome diagnostics and deliver long-term value to our customers and to shareholders. To close out on this part, after people see and understand the size and scale of the opportunity that we're pursuing, I always get the same set of questions. So how big do you think you'll be in the next 3 to 5 years? How much revenue will you be generating? And when will you be profitable? So I want to address those points, starting with the size of the opportunity and revenue expectations. And you all know we can't put out forecasts at this stage. So in the absence of that, how can I best guide you? Well, first, we've outlined our North Star metric of 1 million tests. And internally, we have a time frame set for reaching that North Star metric. The second is I can guide by outlining these companies here on the slide, which have gone before us in defining major new diagnostic categories. And I preface this is all in U.S. dollars. So I'm going to start at the top with Ariosa Diagnostics. They pioneered the major new category of noninvasive prenatal diagnosis of genetic abnormalities from a pregnant mother's blood. And they did that with a test called the Harmony test. Many of you may have used it. And this category, this novel category of diagnostic was called NIP test -- NIPT testing. It's now become a major diagnostic category. They grew to around $50 million in revenue. And very early in their growth journey, they were acquired. They acquired in 2008 for $600 million. The next in the middle is Foundation Medicine. They pioneered cancer companion diagnostics with their FoundationOne test. There's some really interesting parallels to Microba there. They grew to around $200 million in revenue and were acquired in 2010 for $2.4 billion. And then the last one, which has an incredible amount of parallels with what we're doing at Microba is Exact Sciences. And they made colorectal cancer screening broadly accessible, particularly in North America via an at-home test with their product, Cologuard. And once they won that first market, they said, we're not just a colorectal cancer company. They've then used their growth engine and operations to execute into logical adjacencies and developed an expanded test portfolio and said we are an early-stage cancer detection company. They're listed on the NASDAQ and last year, they generated $2.7 billion in revenue. And so the model here demonstrated by all of these companies is a relentless focus on product adoption, growth and shareholder value. And Exact Sciences, for example, is doing this really clearly, executing an Amazon-style growth model going into logical adjacencies and continuing rapid growth. So that then sets the foundation to respond to the question of path and timing to profitability for Microba. And to answer that in the best way that I can, we are a growth company, reinvesting cash flows to unlock this multibillion-dollar opportunity and impact the lives of millions of people across the globe. And so there are 2 aspects to profitability when we look at our Diagnostics business. First, when can we be profitable? And the second is when is the right time to be profitable. So taking it in those 2 parts, when can we be profitable? Well, we could get there quite quickly. So the unit economics support it and are growing. So then the second part is, when should we choose to be profitable? And if we choose to focus the company on driving to profitability today, it would come at a significant expense to growth. This would really be letting go of that $25 billion market opportunity that we're in a position to take and choosing to have a very small but profitable business. And frankly, I've not had one shareholder tell me that, that is a good idea not to go after that $25 billion market opportunity and focus on driving to a small profitable business in the short term. And if our aspiration was small like that, I would say Sonic most certainly wouldn't have invested in Microba. And it's our objective here to leverage our competitive advantage to capture this major new diagnostic category globally and see the benefit of our products realized for the millions of patients across the globe and the economic benefits of that realized for our shareholders. So I hope what you've already taken away from this so far is that clinical microbiome testing is set to be a major new diagnostic category and could be worth more than $100 billion. Our focus today is patients with unresolved gastrointestinal disease, that first slice, a $25 billion market opportunity. We have 2 world-leading diagnostic products addressing these patients in MetaPanel and MetaXplore, a world-class product engine continuously improving product and shipping value, one iteration at a time, a scalable growth engine with multiple channels and tactics and staged approach to customers and regions, and evidence generation road map, putting wind in the sails of the growth team. And so now let's update on our traction. The key milestone we have everyone driving towards internally is 1 million tests. That's the next big milestone we're chasing. And we can't forecast timing here publicly. We have an internal date we're driving to for this, but sharing this metric externally, if nothing else, highlights the scale of what we're executing to. So on path to that, let me take you through the opportunity and do a quick sales update midway through Q3. Firstly, sales of MetaXplore in Australia are continuing to accelerate with another record month in February, and you can see the growth for the quarter already. So just with Jan and Feb data on the right. This is again underpinned by growth in ordering clinicians and orders per clinician. And important to call out, developing a market for a novel test like this takes time. As you can see here, it's not a straight line up and to the right every quarter, quarter-on-quarter, but we really have momentum here and a growth formula that's working aligned to all of the details that Eric shared. And I'll highlight this because it's relevant for the MetaPanel update next. And a key metric that we wanted to surface for investors here is the number of referrals for a fully converted clinician account. So in our sales and product marketing engine, we have a funnel and associated personas. And the focus of the team is supporting and driving clinicians down the funnel to fully converted when they have fully adopted the test into their practice and clinical protocols. And once they are there for MetaXplore in Australia, the average test referrals per clinician per month is currently 7.3, which is a really exciting number. Keeping in Australia and switching to MetaPanel. So transparently, looking at January and February data, we expect this quarter to be about the same as last, potentially slightly higher. But referring back to the prior MetaXplore slide, we had the same journey there in the early days, not always up and to the right every quarter. But if you zoom out to look at the halves and years, we delivered strong, consistent growth. And that's where we are for MetaPanel, but we're making good progress. So we've placed 2 new field sales reps in New South Wales, which were trained and deployed into market at the end of last year. The activity of those sales reps in New South Wales already is delivering between 6 and 8 clinician meetings per day aligned to rep targets and industry best practices, as Eric outlined in our sales model. And importantly, the team are receiving consistent positive feedback from clinicians on the unmet need and the clinical value of the test. And so we all feel we're making progress on developing this market and can see the bigger numbers ahead, not too far away. And importantly, we have a great team working on this. Aligned to that, we have lower test referral rates per month for that fully converted clinician base, but can see the path to much bigger numbers there. Now jumping to MetaXplore in the United Kingdom, some really exciting numbers here. So strong month-on-month sales growth from only a limited set of clinicians, which we've engaged in the early access program, which commenced just a handful of months ago in October. So halfway through the month of March, and we've already outpaced Feb. The referral rates and momentum that we're seeing here has provided us the validation we need to expand, include additional clinicians in the early access program and focus all of our U.K. team and energy on this and accelerate full market access of MetaXplore by the end of the financial year. And as you can see here already, strong monthly referral rates from fully converted clinicians getting up close to those levels that we see in Australia. So well and truly on path to replicating our growth in Australia into the United Kingdom. So we're making strong progress here at the start of unlocking this $25 billion market. And to ensure we have all of our energy and resources focused on that market and our 2 core diagnostic products, we've been migrating from our legacy product lines. So let me take you through that evolution of our product and revenue mix. This is a high-level summary of the overall evolution of our testing business into a next-generation medical diagnostics provider. And that started with our foundational nondiagnostic consumer test Insight in 2018 and has gone all the way through to the development and launch of our next-generation diagnostics. So this is really a slide for people reading, not for me to present step by step, but some good background. So with this $25 billion market here right there for us to take, we have multiple legacy products that were a part of our journey to get to this point. And now it's time to double down and ensure all our energy is behind our core diagnostic products, MetaXplore and MetaPanel. So what does that look like here? Well, we have Ecologix, which is a basic range of microbiome and other tests that were acquired in the U.K. Invivo acquisition. And all of those revenues are being replaced by MetaXplore across calendar year 2025. Then we have Insight, which was our nondiagnostic consumer microbiome test. We launched that as our first product in 2018. And that enabled Microba to stand up an advanced metagenomic microbiome test. No one had ever done that before globally, develop our leading databank and develop our world-class diagnostic products. And so revenue has already been replaced in Australia by MetaXplore there, and we'll continue some international partner Insight revenues. And then finally, Research Services, our contract research services product, we divested in October last year. And so all of this clears distraction and allows Microba to allocate 100% of its testing business resources to the growth of its core diagnostic tests and keep bending that growth curve up and to the right. And here's what that test portfolio evolution looks like in terms of 100% of testing product revenue. And you can see the growth of our core diagnostic products taking over as we phase out and migrate from those legacy products. And there's a bunch of details in here that people can read later. And we've also shown it here in total revenue, which includes the supplements business, which is one for another deep dive as we plan for the next phase of growth of that business. And the key take-home messages here are we will complete this product mix transition in calendar year 2025. The first half of the year saw strong revenue growth and the second half of the financial year is expected to experience strong growth of those core diagnostic product lines in conjunction with the migration from these legacy product lines. And finally, we've provided some detail here on how we're transitioning the product and revenue mix in the U.K. over the course of this year. So we have a small suite of legacy testing products in the U.K., which came from the Invivo acquisition, as I mentioned before. We are already well underway with the migration of customers over to MetaXplore. We expect to complete that by the end of the calendar year. So the natural question people might ask is, can you really replace those revenues that quickly? And the answer would be yes. We have a clear growth plan for MetaXplore. And in fact, with all of our focus behind MetaXplore, we aim to go quickly past replacing those revenues and into a full next phase of growth in the United Kingdom. And I hope the month-on-month growth provides you with some confidence here, and we've already consumed over 25% of the U.K. GI Ecologix legacy product sales in just a few months. So to close out again with the key take-home messages. The market for novel -- this novel diagnostic category of clinical microbiome tests, we expect could be worth more than $100 billion. Our focus today is on that first slice with unresolved GI disease, a $25 billion market opportunity. We have 2 world-leading diagnostic products addressing these patients, MetaPanel and MetaXplore. A world-class product engine continuously improving product and shipping value one iteration at a time, a scalable growth engine with multiple channels and tactics, as Eric outlined, and a staged approach to how we tackle customers and regions, partnerships with 2 of the world's largest medical diagnostic companies and most notably, Sonic Healthcare, who are both a major partner and a major shareholder. An North Star metric of 1 million tests with the whole diagnostics business driving towards that. And we have accelerating traction in our first 2 markets of Australia and the United Kingdom, setting the foundation for what lies next in the U.S. And we're doubling down and focusing on these core diagnostic products that are designed for that global scale, replacing old product lines, putting all of our energy and focus behind those core diagnostics in that $25 billion market opportunity. And on that, I will stop there, and I'll go to our Head of Investor Relations, John Polinelli, to moderate questions. John?

Thanks, Luke, and thanks again to everyone for joining today. [Operator Instructions] So there are a number of pre-submitted questions, which I will run through now. So Luke, the first one is, can you please give us an insight into how you arrived at the figure of $25 billion for the market opportunity?

Yes. So we worked with a Boston-based consulting firm called Veranex that a specialist in diagnostics. We looked at primarily data in North America first. So that's what led to that $15 billion calculation that we originally did. And that was all based around a core set of patient populations that sit under that GI disease category and that we are targeting with our tests and an assessment of a range of different data sets, both reimbursed and other triangulated bits of data that we can flow in there. So that gave us that overall calculation. And then we did some translation of that data and population scaling and incident scaling into those other markets. It was built from the bottom up with a deep model and done with experts in this space.

Thanks, Luke. The next question is, what areas, especially of your flywheels, use AI or plan to use AI and for what purposes?

Yes, that's a great question. What I would say is we have started implementing components of AI in those parts of the organization and integrating into those flywheels, but there's a huge amount of opportunity there for us to tackle. So I'd open to the other execs and maybe, Chris, if you want to kind of add how we're thinking about AI and even Lutz.

Yes. I would say the story on AI is early, but there is obviously applications and opportunities to supercharge everything at every level and every part of the stack, starting with simple business process automation like engineering, marketing and so on. through to actual medical breakthroughs and correlations from the science team through to feature breakthroughs in the product, recommendations and more intuitive user experience, interpretation support, so smarter insights and AI ChatBot to help with interpretations and so on. And then operational optimization around customer support and so on. So we're thinking about it very, very broadly, and we're in the early days of rolling some of those things out. But of course, AI needs to be used with caution in the medical field given some of its limitations and hallucinations and so on. So we always want to be doing that in a very intentional and deliberative way.

Great. The next question, I think we did cover it in the pack, but just briefly, what does the patient see? Is there a patient portal or report?

There's both. So there is an interaction with the report, and there is a kind of, I guess, a growing toolkit around supporting the patient. Chris is best placed to kind of talk about that.

Yes. So we want to meet the patients and the clinicians where they are. And so some clinicians are in practice management systems and the report can be ordered right from their normal workflow in their standard tool and the report is delivered right into their standard tool, and they don't have to think about our portal very much at all. And yet other clinicians like using the portal, and they can refer from there and then they get a very interactive and visually rich report in our web portal. And then over time, we want to make it easier to refer from multiple places and read the report from multiple places. And so yes, it can take a number of different forms, but probably the first best place is going to be the Microba apps, the Microba web experiences and later, you might imagine some more native experiences as well.

And following on from the clinician experience, Chris, on the patient side, I know we're early in that journey, but also excited about. I think it bleeds through everything that we've said, our patient-centric thinking.

There's a clinician app and then just the early inklings of a patient app as well. More to come.

Perfect. For the next one, I'm actually going to merge a few questions together into one. And I'll pose it as if I -- how do I get a test? How much is the test? Is there any rebate on the test? And then off the back of that, what does the margin look like packaging, the shipping point and lab work?

Yes, there's a whole bunch in that. I will just take it in the order that naturally flows. So start with the price. So currently, MetaPanel is $345, and there's a couple of different options in the MetaXplore suite. And so let's just roughly say, around $500. They are accessible and full out-of-pocket pay, no reimbursement today. And it's really interesting with Microba because typically in diagnostics, you don't have really a market until you have reimbursement. But because of the number of patients that are out there with these chronic issues, the deficiency in standard of care, the idea of paying $345, $500 for a test to potentially getting a life-changing solution is a really affordable cost for many. So that's the first point. How do you access with a health care professional. So going -- this is a diagnostic product, what we call an in-house in vitro diagnostic. And therefore, it does need to be under a doctor referral. And so talking to your health care professional or coming directly to Microba if you don't have an appropriate health care professional, and we can make that connection for you. We actually see us playing, as you saw the stages laid out from Eric, we see enabling the patient to come in and access and then utilize our help to find the right clinician is a future part of the growth strategy, but today focused exclusively on health care professionals. So that's pricing access. And then one of the questions was around margins, right, John? So margins is not something that we've kind of put out and put all of the details out on. But what I can say is margins are healthy today. But more importantly, we see the opportunity for them to grow through time, both through reduction in lab input costs and through volume and scale. And we also have the opportunity to add additional products or points of value to extend and grow lifetime customer value. And so a reference when I can't actually give you the raw numbers that you want is that those companies that I referred to earlier in the presentation, so your Ariosa, your Foundation Medicine and your Exact Sciences and others, Myriad Genetics, et cetera, that have opened up entire new diagnostic categories like this have achieved margins, particularly in the U.S. of up to 80%.

Great. And just a follow-on from that. Is there a point that you see in the future where the test will be bulk billed to Medicare or subsidized to the patients here in Australia? And then a comment that the cost of the test to the patient are a barrier to them being able to get them in the first place, let alone repeat tests.

Yes. So a couple of things there. So first is to look back where I was before to say, if you are chronically unwell, many of these people have been unwell for 10, 20, 30 years, that for a significant slice of the market for this first part of growth, that out-of-pocket environment is actually incredibly rich for us, which is not the case for many traditional diagnostic companies. But there is no question that you can open up a next part of the market with reimbursement. And there, our focus is entirely on North America. It's the biggest health care market in the world, and it is also the most accepting reimbursement environment. It's not simple, but it is the fastest route to reimbursement and it's the biggest market. So that's why everyone focuses all of that attention there. Obviously, we care deeply about everyone in Australia and way out in the road map. We would love to have Medicare adoption here and have it reimbursed in Australia and in the United Kingdom. They are long journeys and the core thinking just purely commercially, that opportunity really needs to focus around North America.

Thanks, Luke. And again, just to merge some questions together. How does your direct sales strategy perform versus the channel sales strategy? A comment on the margin on that? And then how many salespeople do we have on the road in Australia and the U.K.?

Yes. So I'll start and then I'll bring Eric in on this. So we have -- like any company, we have tested and trialed a range of different channels and tactics through time, and we'll continue to do that. We want to find the best channels and tactics that are fit for these different slices of the market that we're unlocking sequentially. And so when we talk about, I think, what was embedded in that, which was direct sales and then kind of partner enabled, your Sonic, your SYNLAB's, et cetera. What we found is the right formula is a direct sales model with fantastic leverage and collaboration with those partners that provide access to clinicians, direct referrals to us of customers and also can help to move, educate and develop the market. But as Eric outlined, the core model is Microba building this market and leveraging those fantastic partners that we've got now. There was a last bit to question though that I've just...

So yes, so how many salespeople are on the road in Australia and New Zealand? And then there's actually a second part to that, which was -- I'm sorry, I missed it, which was how many tests per minute do you target for each rep?

Test per minute.

I just read the question. That's how it is, yes.

John, I took that second part to be how many tests per month.

I'll hand to Eric on the sales team and how we've been scaling up.

Well, first, about how many salespeople. I think it's important to remember our partners and particularly if you think of in the MetaPanel situation, Sonic, a very big organization. So they have resources that are working for us. That's really valuable. About a specific number, we haven't put out that data yet to the public market, but we plan to keep sharing more about these metrics in the future. But the biggest thing is we're still in a scale-up mode for sure. I think we'll remain in a scale-up mode for quite some time. We're growing our sales organization in a sale in a staged way. In the last 4 months, we've added 4 new reps in Australia and 3 in the U.K. And we'll keep adding reps aligned to their ROI and our regional coverage ambitions. About the second question, how many tests per month? We have targets for each of our sales teams, and those targets correspond with our growth ambitions. So we haven't provided guidance about Q4 F '26, but just suffice it to say that the targets would be quite intuitive if you consider the growth ambitions that we have.

Thanks, Chris. Just a follow-on from that. How long does the clinical clinician conversion take? And what level of clinician drop-off is there to drop out of the funnel?

Great. So how long does it take to win a clinician? I think the key insight there is that there's a road map. We don't win these health care professionals with a single visit or a single webinar or a single mentoring program. And the big idea is often, it takes several repeats. And there's an adult learning principle that for many concepts, it takes an adult 3 times, 5 times, 7 times to hear it before they can digest it and change their behavior. The same applies to this sales paradigm. And John, I'm sorry, I forgot the second part of the question.

It was -- I have forgotten it as well. That will be fine after the answer then I'll come back to it.

Just to extend off of that, safe to say that in a cross-functional collaboration through the organization, we have been continually shrinking that time to getting full adoption of the test. And maybe to bring you in, Chris, how do you think about that kind of shrinking exercise from a product perspective? It's not all just on sales growth and touching clinicians. That's a big part of it, but there's other dimensions.

The goal is to create a standardized evergreen customer journey that is constantly being observed, monitored, refined and improved to increase the conversion rate and collapse the time to conversion and the time to value, the time to a -- and so that underlying product experience, product marketing collateral and corresponding funnels sit underneath the sales process and enable the sales process and supercharge the sales process. And so at all times, we're trying to get better and better at that to collapse those time lines and increase those conversion rates as well. There was also a metric in terms of how much -- there was a question about how many referrals per month do we expect from a clinician. I think the answer depends entirely on the clinician and how many patients they see and how large their practices. But our metric internally is monthly active clinicians and then the average referrals per active clinician. And so we're always trying to drive those up into the right. And to the degree that they are going up into the right, which they are, we know that we're creating value retention and ultimately heading in the right direction.

Thanks, Chris. I'll just note, we do have 10 minutes left, and there's a lot of questions sitting there. So if we do not get to you, please e-mail [email protected], and we will come back to you. So if we don't get to you, please e-mail [email protected], and we'll come back to you. Just one question on the target clinicians. So a couple of questions which are merging together. What's your key target clinician? You mentioned 2 channels, GPs and gastros, integrated health, what is the latter? Perhaps Eric or Luke, do you go into those?

I'll take that. And then I'll hand to Eric. We ultimately are serving the patient. And so there's a multitude of different practitioner types that are dealing with these patients, some which sit in kind of mainstream medical doctor land, general practitioners, gastroenterologists, infectious disease specialists to get into the hospital environment. And then we have a range of what we call integrated and functional medicine clinicians that are quite actively dealing with these patients because individuals go through the standard of care, don't get a resolution and then need people that will practice root cause medicine and spend a much longer time trying to get to the root cause of the issue. So we service all of those clinicians. But importantly, Eric hinted that we have a unique design to the sales team because they speak slightly different languages. And so Eric, how do you think about that? And we've got these kind of 2 little pods.

Yes. So indeed, you nailed it, Luke, the integrated functional medicine clinicians have a very different practice model, different training and different economics underlying their business. And therefore, the type of relationship we have with them or the way we engage them is different than for a GP or for gastros. In general, we think GPs and gastros speak a similar language. So we have that medical sales team. But one example, just right on the surface is if you think about a GP model, many GPs need to see a patient every 15 minutes. And that creates a different interaction with our tests compared to integrated functional medicine doctors or health care professionals might spend up to an hour or even more with some of their patients. So in general, 2 different teams, 2 distinct channels at a high level.

Thanks, Eric. Just going to the U.K. now and a question, how mature is the pre-existing U.K. market? Is there much scope for further U.K. growth once the legacy Ecologix products are replaced?

Yes, definitely scope for significant growth. And I want to make sure that, that question, I don't miss something underneath there. So the current or existing U.K. business there is not representative of the total market. In fact, it'd be a tiny little slice that they've got, but they have a fantastic foothold in that market and a great team, and that's our launch pad into the U.K. with our fantastic test. So we see a very rapid path to growing well beyond the existing revenues with all of our focus behind MetaXplore, but then significant multiples of expansion as we unlock the different slices of that U.K. market. And if you weigh it up against Australia, there's some interesting counteracting factors. It is at least as big as Australia, but probably bigger because of the increased population size there.

Thanks, Luke. A question, why don't you allow a customer to order a test directly from you and avoid the cost of a physician visit? Why not operate a backup telemedicine provider for patients that want to go to you directly?

[indiscernible] asked the question, we like your thinking. And again, focus, focus, focus, one slice at a time. And if you look back to that customer segment road map, it's on there. It's on there. We definitely -- I think Chris outlined the principles, removing friction through the process is exactly what we want to do. And it's getting more and more convenient and preferred for people to actually engage with these type of health care experiences on their terms. Now it's a diagnostic. So it's a doctor-led experience, but it flips the engagement model. You don't have the gate of the, as you say, the consult and the cost of the console upfront can be brought in as a part of the package and say, I want this test. I want this information my health. I have this problem. Great. Well, we'll pay you up with the doctor and bring them in.

Great. A couple of questions about competition. What gives you confidence that you'll gain significant market share against competition? And who are the worldwide competitors? What are their sizes and price points?

That's a long question, which might need a deeper dive on e-mail. But if I take it up to the high level, we have multiple different types of competition spread across this market. We have kind of the incumbent routine testing, which isn't direct competition. It's just moving people from their standard habits to something that is going to enable them to service their patient in a way that they couldn't before. So it's not direct competition, but there's always the laziness of just staying with the status quo. And there's ginormous companies that are doing that. But if you look at someone like Sonic Healthcare, they see the need to move into this high-value and impactful testing that goes beyond that kind of standard baseline basic PCR testing or otherwise. And then you've got a market of tests for things which we have gathered a name, which is like comprehensive digestive stool analysis. And I put the original kind of Invivo basic microbiome testing into that category. And you've got a bunch of companies really led out of North America that have build a market around that comprehensive digestive stool analysis testing there. So you can go and have a look at that and see that the companies that come up, Genova Diagnostics Solutions Lab, et cetera. And I can say, anecdotally, just from our core focus in Australia, they're very unhappy with us. And we've gotten that direct feedback on the basis of the traction that we're gaining here in the Australian market.

Great. Thanks, Luke. How does your product identity and orchestrate appropriate education for ecosystem participants? Can you elaborate on what programs are in place?

I think that was how does the product team identify and orchestrate these kind of educational programs. So actually, that's more on the growth side of the house, although product, as I said, is involved in a lot of things. But Eric, do you want to take the lead on that perhaps?

Yes. Well, Chris, I think, would characterize our company as product-led for sure. But underneath that, there is the notion of customer-led. So we're constantly listening for signals about how we can add more value to our customers and to what extent are there barriers for broader use among customers. And we have a variety of channels to address those frictions, often which those frictions include educational issues. So an example of some of the channels where we address educational challenges are we have a webinar series called Clinical Conversations. Next, we have a mentoring program and a mentoring alumni support group. Next, we have an educational portal where our customers can find resources to help them understand questions that they may have about our products or this class of tests. And then finally, our sales reps and our clinical support organization have a very important role in evolving how the customers see our products and bring them along a journey, as Chris mentioned, which often includes getting over certain educational limitations or concerns towards having high confidence about the value of our product.

Yes. It's also important to note that while education will always be a critical part of building a market, educating people about the limits of the current products, educating people about the differences and benefits of our products and even up-leveling people's understanding about the microbiome. So that's always going to be play a critical role. But our ambition also is that the test result in order to interpret it and act on it requires less and less education over time. The word we use internally is self-describing. So our ambition for the product is to make it so delightfully designed, so intuitive using vocabulary design metaphors, interpretations and abstractions that make it very, very easy for people to read with little to no education, including the patient, which just makes it better for everybody all around so that the clinicians don't have to catch up and keep up with the state of-the-art and the patient can be -- feel involved in their own care.

And we'll have time for one last question before I hand back to Luke to close this out. A question for you, actually, Chris. What's the most valuable point of difference for Microba in terms of platform and product versus alternatives in the market?

Oh dear, I'll try to be diplomatic. I think it's kind of all up and down the stack. I think the deep scientifically rigorous assays we do in the lab and kind of based on the work that the science team does led by Lutz, up through the Bioinformatics pipelines we have, which are just I would describe them as superior and incredible to the additional layers of abstraction that we create for easy interpretability. So there's a feature we have called the expert summary, which helps just explain what's going on without all that education and deep knowledge to increasingly superior design, superior user experience and superior collaboration. And so if you -- it's all the way from the bottom of the stack to the top of the stack. And I would say even our intuition around the patient being a first-class citizen and being a product-led company that there is a continuous journey of iteration and innovation in the product itself, I think all of those things are differentiated from many companies in the health care space.

Thanks, Chris. Just to remind everyone, I can't see there are more questions there. If we didn't get to your question, please e-mail [email protected], and we'll be able to come back to you. And I'll hand back to you, Luke, for closing remarks.

Thanks, John. And as I close out, just to extend on that last question from Chris, we have, on the basis of our founding, world-leading technology, and we can do things and deliver diagnostic performance that others just can't. We've then got those flywheels that we're building out, where we're extending beyond the technology and the intellectual property that kind of sits within the company, and we're delivering a number of moats and execution edges here. So we're extending our competitive advantage beyond just the core IP, which is a barrier and challenge for anyone trying to compete. So thank you, everyone, for taking the time out of your day to deep dive into Microba's Diagnostics business and how we are executing on this significant opportunity to, as we see it, revolutionize health care and impact to the lives of millions of people across the globe with our next-generation diagnostic products. So I'm going to close out by, again, drilling home the key messages here. The market for this novel diagnostic category of clinical microbiome testing, we believe can be worth more than $100 billion. Our focus today is the first chunk of that in patients with unresolved gastrointestinal disease, a $25 billion market opportunity. We have 2 world-leading diagnostic products addressing these patients in MetaPanel and MetaXplore, a world-class product engine, continuously improving product and shipping value one iteration at a time, a scalable growth engine with multiple channels and tactics and a staged approach to customers and regions, eating the market one slice, one bite at a time and with the science team putting wind in the sails of growth with continuing shipping of evidence. And we have partnerships with 2 of the world's largest medical diagnostic companies, most notably, Sonic Healthcare, a fantastic partner and major shareholder, a North Star metric of 1 million tests with the whole diagnostics business driving towards that metric. We have accelerating traction in our first 2 markets, Australia and the United Kingdom, setting the foundation for what lies ahead in the U.S. and we're doubling down by focusing on these core diagnostic products designed for scale, replacing those old product lines, putting all of our energy and focus behind that $25 billion market. And I have to say at the end here, after many years of hard work at the forefront of this field, I feel the real exciting part of this journey is well underway now. We have growing sales, scaling operations and increasing patient impact every day. I think we're all finding it incredibly rewarding to see that patient impact coming. And I want to close most importantly, by thanking all of our loyal shareholders for their ongoing support. So thank you, everyone.