Novozymes A/S (NSISB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to today's Spotlight Session on Human Health, which is hosted by Ulrich Irgens, who is the Head of Novozymes Human Health activities. The call is expected to take 45 minutes, including time for questions at the end. If you have a question about Novozymes Human Health activities for the speaker, [Operator Instructions]. I would like to remind you that the information presented during the call is unaudited and that it may include forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and beliefs, and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in any forward-looking statements. And with that, let's start the session. [Presentation]

Thank you, and good afternoon, and welcome to this Spotlight Session on Human Health, or Novozymes OneHealth, as we decided to name the Human Health business of Novozymes. My name is Ulrich Irgens, I'm the Head of OneHealth at Novozymes. I've been here for 5 years with a singular focus, together with an extraordinary people, an extraordinary team of talented people to create what is now OneHealth today. Prior to that, I spent 20 years in the consumer health industry. Both sides of the fence if the fence is what separates the consumer industry from our side of the industry. I look forward to talking you through over the next 30 minutes, what OneHealth is today and what the outlook for OneHealth is going forward. Before doing that, maybe just a reminder of the updated or refreshed Novozymes strategy that we shared with everyone last year. The strategy is anchored around 3 pillars, so to speak, all with a focus to help us strengthen the core and use the strength of the core to expand and explore into adjacent high-growth areas. Evolve, as you see on the slide here, is what is our core business today, is by far the biggest part of Novozymes, and is really what allows us to dream to invest into new adjacencies. The expand bucket is where we find mainly 2 things: BioHealth and human nutrition. We'll come back to what those 2 things are, in particular, what BioHealth is in a second. And then explore is where we really are looking at early stage initiatives, things where we believe there is an opportunity and a path to high-growth segments in the future, but they are the nascent states. Examples of this could be carbon capture or sustainable plastics, which we don't expect to generate any material revenue in the short term, but holds high potential going forward. Expand is really where we have either a developed -- somewhat developed business or we have a clear line of sight to significant value creation within a not-so-far future. Human nutrition, which is not OneHealth, that's our venture into alternative proteins, is 1 part of it, and then BioHealth is the other part. And BioHealth, more specifically, is where we're looking at creating solutions to health holistically, not just in consumer health, but into other adjacent industries where we believe the technology foundation and the capabilities of what is Novozymes can play a major roll, our biodiversity and our huge capabilities in R&D can create a meaningful difference. It's built on the vision that what we have already created in OneHealth for the consumer health markets in terms of portfolio and technologies can travel into other adjacent industries. An easy example, not easy to execute but to visualize is functional foods, where we believe there are a number of the value propositions that we have built in OneHealth could be applicable in a food setting, in a food matrix. And that is really the vision, is the core focus to start with when we look a little bit further ahead, and there are certainly opportunities around companion animals and animal health to share same set technologies, portfolio and underlying capabilities, which are really all built around understanding, the link between microbiome science, microbial science and technologies and enzymatic and other biological based solutions to deliver meaningful value. Finally, just to put this in context, OneHealth last year was somewhere around DKK 0.5 billion in revenue, delivering solid digit growth numbers. With that, I'll jump into talk to you about what OneHealth is and why we're looking at it. It all started with an insight that we believe current products are not meeting the aspiration of the consumers of today when we talk health and when we talk in particular consumer health. We see an increased activations among consumers wanting to take a stronger control of dictating health for themselves and also preventing health outcomes or deteriorating health outcomes as opposed to just going for a fixed treatment when we are facing a health challenge. Something like COVID has, we believe, only accelerated the activism of our consumers and hence, the need for our customers to find solutions that will really satisfy our demanding consumers with new solutions. What that means and what the gaps we see are, is all coming from changes, paradigm shifts. So we've been overusing antibiotics for decades. We have effectively treated an infectious disease with the use of antibiotics and vaccines, but they have come with side effects. They come with an increasing rise in antimicrobial resistance, meaning we need to look for alternative ways of preventing disease outcomes and health opportunities, enabling them. It's created a paradigm shift in health to more chronic and lifestyle-related diseases. It could be immune-related disorders, so it could be things like diabetes as examples. We've seen a shift, and this is not a new shift, the shift to prevention from cure. I think we talked about that in the industry for 20 years, but it just means it's relevant and it's probably as strong as it ever has been. And again, I think COVID potentially pushed it a little further to this mindset. And then when we look at the consumer side of things as much as anything, we see an explosion of choices. If you go to a pharmacy, say, in the U.S., you go down to Walgreens and you stand in front of the supplement isle of 40 feet, there's going to be literally thousands of products calling out at you. And it's very hard to navigate as a consumer, with products that are built on strong science, which deliver benefit, which are perhaps a bit more dubious in what they deliver. And there's very little innovation going on. Consumer health care companies have, over the last years, been reducing their investments in R&D. And we see a clear opportunity to improve the offering for consumers in the health care categories. And that's allowed us an opportunity. And it's meant for Novozymes to create an ambition around helping people to live healthier and happier lives, and really look for what we call the one-in-a-trillion solution, which is a link or reference to where we believe most of the mode of action is going to occur. So that's in our communal microbiota composition, where we think we're going to create a meaningful difference in delivering a number of health outcomes where we literally have trillions of microbes, but it's also a reference to the extent that we go through in our research and we'll talk to that a little bit later. But this is not about creating shortcuts. This is about lifting the bar in delivering new science. It's not pharma, it's consumer health, that's very clear. But we believe there are real opportunities to create meaningful differences and at the same time, deploying being technology-agnostic and deploying the full technology toolbox of what Novozymes possess based on biology. And we think if we do that and we link that to real insights from health care practitioners and consumers and we look for unmet needs, and ideally, if you can find unidentified unmet needs, we can create real breakthrough innovations that's going to help us to solve profound health challenges often linked to some of the paradigm shift that we've seen around modern lifestyle. That's the ambition of OneHealth in a nutshell. Now just to check in on the journey, this started just ahead of my time here when Novozymes acquired a small group in Berlin called Organobalance. It was 25-odd researchers, exceptional talents. And then a bank of more than 7,000 probiotic strains that hadn't really been developed and researched to a large degree, but there were strong capabilities and strong pipeline. It was a vision to create a first microbial platform with views into animal health and human health and food application. But when we started working with the capabilities and the technologies in Berlin, we realized quickly that the biggest opportunity was probably anchored around human health. And therefore, we over time, merged what is now Novozymes Berlin and the human health business of Novozymes, the OneHealth business. And that became the very first real adventure into human health. This is back in 2017 into 2018. We learned quickly that it's exciting to have a pipeline and an innovation, vision and a strong strategy and a strong storytelling. But at the end of the day, you need critical mass. You need critical mass to create an impact in your supply chain and your development capabilities and you need a critical mass to be relevant and interesting for potential customers. And therefore, we decided having met PrecisionBiotics out of Cork in Ireland to make the acquisition in June 2020. PrecisionBiotics was, again, a small, more research-based organization than a commercial organization, with clear links to the APC Microbiome institute in Cork, which is known to be one of the leading microbiome research institutions globally. A number of professors from APC were also founders of PrecisionBiotics. So we've got access to great products that was a good fit to our strategy, clinically proven in the likes of irritable bowel syndrome, IBS, in certain parts of brain health, but we also got access to a pipeline and incredible talent of research and development capabilities. Later that same year in 2020, we then were introduced to Microbiome Labs, which on surface, perhaps was not the most logic fit for a business like ours. But when we looked at what MBL is, it's all about market access and it's all about innovation. So they build a business where they target HCPs, health care practitioners in the U.S. and more the functional part of that segment. So we're talking dietitians, nutritionists, [ naturopaths ], chiropractors and so forth and less so traditional doctors. The consumers that are engaging with these functional health care practitioners are early-adopter consumers. Often, they are consumers that are asking much bigger questions about health and how can I take control of my own health as opposed to going to a doctor and just asking for a solution to a current challenge. And when we realized that, we realized that this could be a great channel to take innovation into before taking that to our customers in our B2B businesses in the mass market. We can create case studies here. We can create science and value propositions, working closely with these HCPs. MBL had a big part of their portfolio built on microbes and other technologies that were owned by a group in India called Synergia Life Sciences. And it was only a natural step for us to complete, I would say, the first leg of a long journey to acquire Synergia, and we completed that by the end of last year in December 2021. Getting with that, microbial portfolio, IP manufacturing capabilities. We have 3 sites in India now. And also, very importantly, an adjacent technology in the vitamin K2, a natural vitamin that we believe is a strong fit to our future strategy. In our minds, that sort of closes the first chapter. We have a solid business, a solid foundation, both from a portfolio, pipeline, revenue and capability point of view, and it's about growing that into the future. And we're doing that by taking this to market in a matrix of health categories that we have divided into these here: gastrointestinal health; protective and immune health; metabolic and cardio health; cognitive health; and oral and skin health. These are all categories where we believe there is significant room for innovation. There's a lot of head space. We see adoption rates amongst health care practitioners and consumers increasing in all these categories. And we also see increased investments in new science, new IP. And they are always clear science that these are categories that are in strong growth momentum that is likely to be a sustainable high-growth segment. We have created what we call small ventures around them, with our little category teams, and this is where we drive all our innovation. So our innovation are driven by little businesses in their own right. They need to be able to deliver and scale small portfolios in their own right before that then goes into our 3 business models that we take our products to market through. So all the portfolio can flow into either the HCP channel through Microbiome Labs, it can flow into our B2C model, but that's really only B2C in a small home market in U.K. and Ireland, where we're building all the mechanics and the global collaterals and the portfolio and we build case studies again. We scale it in a B2B2C model where we find distribution partners, B2B partners around the world that maybe don't have strong innovation capabilities, but are looking for plug-and-play portfolios to take into their markets. And then finally, we, of course, have a big footprint in our B2B business, where we partner up with global CPG companies around the world selling the same portfolio. The vision of this, we've spoken a little bit about this, but the mandate from Novozymes when we started this was really to really think human health tomorrow. So I think Novozymes, we never enter a new category with the vision just to participate. We enter a new category with the vision to change and impact that category. And I really think that's what we're doing today in OneHealth, both in the way we address our scientific research, in the way we deliver solutions to market and in the way that we go-to-market with those solutions. It's all around the one-in-a-trillion vision which is anchored on a few things. It's anchored on this elasticity around technology. So we never married to a microbiome enzyme having to be the solution. We look for the best solution for a given outcome. And often that tends to be a little bit more difficult than perhaps what we had in the portfolio already. But that's the commitment to our customers, and it's a commitment internally as an organization that we go for the best possible solution in our portfolio and in our technology toolbox as opposed to something that we might already be manufacturing. The second part of it is that we refuse to have a black box around our mode of action. So this is understanding how our products deliver the benefit that we demonstrate in clinical trials. You can sometimes be fortunate enough to demonstrate a clinical outcome without understanding in your research how you deliver the outcome. We don't like that for a couple of reasons. A, a lot of education opportunities lies in understanding the mode of action. Doctors are looking at underlying root causes of a health challenge, and they want to understand how they can help tackle that root cause. And they can only address it if they understand what a given product does and how it delivers a benefit. It's also where a lot of our IP sits. So microbes are inherently difficult to patent, but you can create IP around specific mode of actions linked to a certain technology. So it becomes important for that. And then finally, it's just credibility, it's lifting the scientific bars. We see a number of studies out there that often don't get repeated. And usually, that's because the groups behind the studies perhaps haven't understood the mode of action, and then there's a risk in doing a second trial if you don't know how you actually delivered success in the first trial. Knowing the mode of action and using data science will allow you to recruit effectively for your studies. It allows you to understand the right cohort and maybe even sub cohorts in certain populations that are meaningful to target with your solution. It's built around a vision of combining everything I just said. The cutting-edge technologies of Novozymes are a massive pool of biodiversity, 1,500 people in R&D, et cetera, et cetera, with strong insights. We invest almost as much as we do in clinical research into consumer and health care practitioner insights. It's super critical for us that we understand not just the unmet needs, but also what language does consumers want to be spoken to. What solutions are they not seeing today in what's in the current marketplace? Can we find unidentified unmet needs that consumers don't even realize today are unmet needs? But if you help them, they'll get great value from it. Matching those 2 is really what is the one-in-a-trillion solution. And what we mean by cutting-edge technology is all this. It's the deep understanding of physiological systems. It's investing and understanding the medical science. We may not be a medical company, but we want to understand the human physiology. We want to understand which biochemical pathways, which microbial changes do we need to impact to deliver an outcome. We have a biodiversity toolbox, I think, second to none. We are talking tens of thousands of microbes and millions of enzymes, peptides, other small molecules at our disposal. Proteins are something that's being invested significantly. So the toolbox and what's available to us from a technology point of view, is vast. So is our research commitment and our capabilities. There are a few companies, I think, at the size of Novozymes that invest proportion as much as we do into research. And using all that and combining that with data science, AI and machine learning to really accelerate the insights into outputs and into new innovations is critical for our journey. All that allows us to find ways of combining some of these different technologies. So it's not just a single technology play. So it could be a combination of probiotics and enzymes, which I think the one is better positioned globally than us to deliver. And an example of that, simplicity placed, could be looking at how we deal with food sensitivities or certain intolerants, which a high number of consumers today are battling. Could be gluten intolerance, could be lactose intolerance, it could be sugar alcohol intolerances that drives gastric discomfort, gas production, bloating, abdominal pain, diarrhea and so forth. If we can help to alleviate that, you really improve the quality of life for a great deal of consumers. In the example here, we're looking at a carbohydrate as a random example. And if you have a carbohydrate digested and it reaches the gastrointestinal tract, the residual microbiota is usually not in a position to break down these carbohydrates into smaller glucose molecule chains. And that means that what is the current structure of these maldigested carbohydrates will be taken up by the conventional microbiota. And these are often strains that produces significant amounts of gas and that leads to then bloating and undigested discomfort when eating these. If you were to create a combination of a probiotic that would produce a metabolite or an ability to metabolize the same carbohydrate, if you combine that with an enzyme that in the first place, breaks down that carbohydrate into smaller chains which allows this to become simple sugar, so smaller chains of glucose, it's a different part of the micro floor that suddenly begins to take up these smaller bits. And these are strains, either the probiotic that has been in the product, it could be a [indiscernible] germ as an example, or part of the -- a different part of the communal microbiota. They produce -- they metabolize this by producing less gas and lesser bloating as a result, and lesser discomfort. We have lots of evidence at the moment into different parts. This is an example. But we have a number of studies in similar areas where we see huge benefit of combining a multitude of technologies, it could be enzymes and microbes that often makes sense, it makes sense in many other health applications, but this is a simple example to share. If you look at the way we innovate, I've spoken to some of these parts, and I just want to reiterate that every process we do when we talk one-in-a-trillion innovation, it starts with a fresh green. It starts with an insight, it starts with an understanding, the opportunity that we're addressing and the opportunity to create an impact. We then apply quite a bit of data science capabilities and investment into really understanding the links between potential technologies, physiological outcomes, benefits, symptomatic release and consumer insights. With that, we begin to think about what could a clinical trial look like. If you're going to address this health outcome here, what would the study look like? What is the language that we need to talk to a consumer to about this health outcome? What will resonate with the consumer or the health care practitioner? Usually, some of that sits in the secondary outcomes of a clinical study. So it's important to understand this minutia. Once we understand the clinical trial that we need to execute, we have it on paper, we then begin to look at what are the preclinical models we need to have in place to allow us to comfortably invest in the clinical trial we have just decided and designed. When we understand that, we begin to understand the mode of action, what mode of action do we think we need to have in place to deliver the preclinical models that we think we need to enable the clinical study. Once you understand the mode of action, you can begin your screening process. You can begin to look at technologies. What are the right candidates to do the job? Then you start screening and you start executing, forward-looking in your innovation chain. We never start with a technology as the starting point. We always start with an insight, and then we map backwards before we execute forward again. It takes a little bit longer, but I do believe that trial success and outcomes are way bigger this way. We're derisking parts of the innovation. And I think the outcome and the impact of the innovations we deliver is greater. An example of this is a strain that we created years ago called Pylopass. It's going through an exponential growth phase at the moment in a couple of key markets, including China. We can barely produce enough to keep up with market demand of this strain, focuses eradicating H. pylori. H. pylori has been linked by a number of health challenges, including the development of gastric ulcers, gastritis and just gastrointestinal discomfort and functional dyspepsia in combination with diet and food intake. So it's a strain that's also having an increased antimicrobial profile. So it's something that WHO has recognized as something we need to begin to address. Health care practitioners when they see this and when they understand the link between H. pylori and health outcomes, they understand the need to address this. Today, we do it with -- if it's a severe infection, it's typically antibiotics and proton-pump inhibitors. But more and more, doctors and consumers are looking for natural ways of addressing this in a daily setting, and Pylopass is exactly that. There's a small animation that will give you an insight into how Pylopass works. It's more than 50% of the population globally that has a level of H. pylori in there. When it comes into -- when Pylopass enters into the gastrointestinal tract, it finds H. pylori and was selected specifically for its ability to bind and co-aggregate with H. pylori cells. This core aggregation becomes big enough that they are simply flushed out of our gastrointestinal systems, and we reduce the load of H. pylori very significantly. And by that, you reduce the symptoms of the H. pylori infection in a natural way. We're not going to treat ulcers, but we're going to help people with elevated levels of H. pylori have a more comfortable everyday life. The strain was selected as one out of more than 700 strains that we screened, and we screened it for a single activity, and there was the ability to bind to H. pylori. And here you will see that we have screened I think it was somewhere around 750 strains of a similar species. One stood out with a significant co-aggregation activity, more than any other strains. And that became the one -- it was a new strain, there was not one we had in the portfolio. We had to go through the entire process of doing process development, upscaling, tech transfer, manufacturing upscaling and so forth. But the clear case study today is that it was the exact right thing to do. The commercial outcome and the impact that we see delivering on consumer lives is significant. What that means from a clinical setting, so this strain has been with us for 5 years plus now. So it's a dear product that we know well. It's been through more than 11 period clinical studies. Here just 2 simple examples of what the results of the studies look like. One shows the eradication of H. pylori. So here, we're just simply looking at can we reduce the load of H. pylori. It is something that infects people quite easily in particular, in a Chinese setting where we share meals and we share -- we have sort of these family dinners where we're sharing the dishes, but that also takes place in Southern Europe, where you're sharing a lot of your food items. And it allows for a larger spread of H. pylori. And hence having a daily reduction of the load of H. pylori becomes very meaningful in some of these markets. And we show clearly across 2 studies that there's a reduction of the H. pylori load with the use of Pylopass. The graph to the right is more symptomatic-based and shows gastrointestinal symptoms linked to consumption of food when you take your Pylopass supplementation on a daily basis. Now we're sort of getting to the end of giving -- I was given half an hour, and I could talk for at least 3 times that much, getting to the end of the presentation. Main takeaways, I want everyone to hopefully remember is that this is all about us, OneHealth, but also in the BioHealth context, leveraging the scientific platforms of Novozymes, our incredible biodiversity, toolbox-based portfolio, our research capabilities into finding and creating this one-in-a-trillion solutions that we can verify with good clinical-based science. No black boxes around mode of action, no flagship ingredient strains in our portfolio, but truly novel solutions. We're looking to create unique combinations we're using to be technology agnostic using the entire toolbox of Novozymes and ideally using them in combination to create better and stronger solutions. And we believe all this will allow us to continue to outgrow the market. We are in a market segment that does somewhere around 7%, 8% market growth. So high single digits, we believe we can outgrow that and deliver at least double-digit growth between now and 2025. And to do that, it's really all about continue to harvesting the synergies from the acquisitions that we made. We've done most of the integration for the early integrations. We are in the midst of integrating Synergia. But even for those, we have acquired 2 years ago now is PrecisionBiotics, there is still integration work ahead of us in driving more synergies into market access and cross-selling between business models and geographical markets. We're going to continue to launch our innovations. We're going to continue to invest in creating new innovations. And then with BioHealth we're going to begin to see some of these OneHealth technologies evolve into functional food solutions. This completes the presentation. My watch says 30 minutes and 53 seconds. We're now ready for Q&A. And with this, I'm going to hand it over to the operator to take it from here. Thank you very much.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of André Thormann from Danske Bank.

The first I have is in terms of these probiotic supplements. And maybe if you can elaborate a bit on how you see the pricing power of these products. I mean we know, as you also mentioned, there's a lot of competition out there, especially in markets such as the U.S. So how do you see the ability to actually increase prices going forward in these products?

Thank you, André. Sorry, I was taking notes. I thought there was a second question coming, so apologies for that. So I think historically, probiotics have retained a fairly strong pricing capability of price market. We don't see a lot of erosion in the probiotics segment in general. We haven't really seen a commoditization to a large extent of product. And it also some comes back to this old question of IP and patents. And what you often see is that unlike other -- if you compare vitamin C, which of course, in its nature, is generic. So once you have a vitamin C, you have a vitamin C -- probiotics are strain-specific. So even though you have a strain of a similar species, if it's not the same strain, there will be genetically-based differences, which means that the science that's generated on the original strain as an example of this strain that we possess in this case, is not applicable to a generic version of that strain. And it means it's very difficult to commoditize a probiotic market. Now there are solutions out there with no science and that definitely do some level of commoditization. So far, we don't see that. It seems to be a consumer choice and a health care practitioner choice. A health care practitioner will often never pick such a commoditized solution. They're looking for data and science, and that's why we like the -- obviously, the health care practitioner model and access with Microbiome Labs because it rewards investing in science significantly. But even in consumer markets, there's a clear choice from consumers when they understand the underlying science and the value proposition of what you bring to market, that they stick with the original strain. And you can look in the market at strains that have been out there for 20 years and where IP has expired a long time ago. And the bulk of the revenue, even though you see in generic molecules in market, the bulk of the revenue remains with the original strain. So we see a fairly strong price position of probiotics, some markets, certain channels, more so than others. That's clear. Health care practitioner channel is one of strong pricing power because you get the highest return on investment in science. Italy is another market where the pharmacist plays a critical role in endorsing the choice of products. So strong pricing power, little risk of commoditization is how we see it.

Okay. And just maybe just 1 more question. In terms of these health care practitioners that you mentioned which you really got access to, as far as I understand, through the acquisition of Microbiome Labs, I mean can you elaborate a bit on how the synergies have been with some of the other acquisitions you made? So for example, have you gotten some of the products from PrecisionBiotics into the channel after you acquired Microbiome Labs in these health care practitioner clinics?

Thank you, great question, I'd love to talk about that so thank you so much. And yes, so we have launched both OneHealth products as well as PrecisionBiotics products into the health care practitioner channel. So we have launched -- in the second half of last year, we launched what PrecisionBiotics calls Zenflore. It's a product that focuses on -- well, it's 2 products really that focuses on cognitive brain health. One is on stress and coping better with stress and the other one is on sleep. Not that you sleep faster or longer, but that you sleep better. You wake up with a greater feeling of vitality. Both these 2 products have been launched into the health care practitioner with a high degree of success when we benchmark against what is called MegaSporeBiotic, which is by far, the #1 selling product of MBL that was launched 6 years ago. We sort of look, of course, at the trends versus what happened back then. And here we are superseding the early trends. We are 6 months into this journey. So I'm cautious calling too much success yet, but signs are healthy. Similarly, Pylopass that I just showed as an example before, was launched 2 months ago in the health care practitioner channel with Microbiome Labs. And the feedback from the doctors has been overwhelming, to the extent that, again, this becomes about stock prioritization. So it's been a great success that we look to unleash further once we ramp up our capacity over the next couple of months. And that's the underlying vision for some of these business models, is to drive these synergies that the portfolio is available to any of the business models. It's for a given region and market to decide, how do I get the highest return on investment in my market? Is that by taking x part of the portfolio into a B2B2C partnership? Or is it to take a part of the portfolio into a health care practitioner channel play? But there's nothing -- it is all shareable, it's all synergistic. And that is the vision for bringing these business models together, is to increase the return on our investments in innovation and science.

And the next question comes from the line of Alex Jones from Bank of America.

Two, if I can. I guess, first, following up on the prior question on sort of route to market, could you give us any idea of the sort of current split of sales into the different -- the 3 different channels you mentioned, and maybe where you think that's likely to evolve or which one is likely to grow faster? And then just a second question on the portfolio. I think you mentioned that you've sort of finished the first building block of this portfolio through the 3 recent acquisitions. But when you think about the next wave, whenever that might be, are there any obvious gaps you see today in the portfolio that you'd like to fill?

So route to market and share, I probably can't go into the absolute detail. Fair to say that our health care practitioner channel currently is a bit more than 50% of our business. MBL proportionately, out of the size of the business, just made that happen overnight when we acquired them. So how that will develop going forward, we believe there's a strong growth in the health care practitioner channel, absolutely. It's one that's geographically a little bit more limited than the other place because not many markets have a strong opportunity for health care practitioner. Not a lot if you rebase in Denmark. There's not doctors here selling products to their patients and consumers. These would be markets like Korea, Belgium, and there's a handful of other markets where you traditionally have this channel as something specific. So we will see strong growth in the U.S. in this channel going forward. And we will see opportunities to expand the channel into certain other markets, whether that proportionate will hold its share going forward versus a B2B model, which obviously has a global appeal. And we have many big partners globally that we're working with on current portfolios and also new innovations. It's probably hard to predict, but all I can say that it will be a while before the HCP channel will not be our biggest channel, if it won't be that for a long period of time. To your second question on portfolio, so we've closed the first chapter in terms of, I would say, building portfolio and capability routes to market and so forth. But a lot of the initial pipeline investments that we did when we started investing in OneHealth 5 years ago, it takes us somewhere between 4 to 5 years to create from the first ideation to actually then delivering the first clinical outcome. It takes us usually 4 to 5 years. So we're now at the point in time over the next 18 to 24 months. But a lot of that innovation that we initiated before the acquisition is actually beginning to come to market. So it's not about building a new pipeline necessarily. We will continue to fill the funnel from the top like any good innovation-based company needs to do. I used to come from a company where we forced every year and we deleted the bottom 20% of our portfolio just to force innovation. I hope we can get to that point here where we can do that. But right now, we're not there. So it's about having a discipline to fill the funnel with new innovations. But the bottom of the funnel is by no means empty, it is very full with innovations. Now success rate of those, we're going to see clinical studies come through and time will tell, but there's quite a bit ahead of us. I probably can't speak to specifics. I can point to the categories and say we have real innovations in all 5 categories around the corner. We've just launched, we can speak about that, SereneSkin, which is a patent solution for acne, it's an oil supplementation, but that delivers a significant impact in dealing with acne as an example. We just launched that into the health care practitioner channel to build a case study and a use study. And then this hopefully will go into mass markets over the next 1 to 2 years with a partner of choice. And like that, we have innovations that are slowly coming through for all our 5 categories.

And we will take the last question from the line of Lars Topholm from Carnegie.

One question I had was if I look at your patent portfolio, you have a patent pending for using lysozymes for treating bowel syndrome, and that really triggers 2 questions. One is do you see a synergy from your animal health business to your human health business? Because I understand you also sell lysozymes for, I think, it's for pigs. And secondly, if you come up with enzymes for treatment, so not as a probiotic or a dietary supplement, what kind of sales channel would you need to use for that? Would you need to partner up with pharma? Or can you sell it via health practitioners?

Thank you, Lars. Okay. So you've been deep in the IP bucket which is awesome. And you're right, so it actually started as a synergy. So you are completely right that lysozyme is something we've used for years in the animal health business. In animal health, we used it as an example, in chickens. And we use it to remove that microbiota for the intestinal cell walls, which this microbiota creates a low-grade but chronic state of inflammation. So in chickens, you do it because you want to increase the absorption of nutrients and create healthy and fat chickens. That's obviously not exactly the value proposition that we look to deploy in human health. But removing that same low chronic inflammation is a key enabler in helping IBS for us. Because IBS, of course, comes in different forms or shapes, which is why it's so hard to deal with for a health care practitioner. And to give you the sense of how difficult it is to deal with, is that you define and you diagnose IBS through an absence of other health challenges. So it can take you up to 4 years as a consumer to be diagnosed suffering from IBS. That just gives you a sense of how complex it is to help an IBS sufferer. But 1 of the places we can look to is definitely need to decrease inflammatory responses and low-grade inflammation. We have Alflorex there in the portfolio from PrecisionBiotics where we know exactly the DNA bracket of the strains composition that helps us reduce downwards certain inflammatory responses. But if we can also deal with this underlying low-grade chronic inflammation that comes from this -- the microbiotic residing in the intestinal cell walls, we can enhance the solution and an impact for those consumers that suffers from this type of IBS. So it's spot on, but we are actually taking in this case, the synergy from animal health as opposed to giving something back, which is the ambition in the BioHealth play. And then on pharma, I think important just to say that we, from the beginning, said pharma is out of scope for OneHealth. We don't have aspirations to be a pharmaceutical business. Sometimes, we have solutions that are supplement and regulatory in nature, but maybe deserves a focus on, say, the hospital channel as an example. And there, we then look to partner up with players that are having access to those channels and are ready to take on a supplement solution. And we do have a couple of projects that talks exactly to that. If it talks into specific pharma, then it would be potentially a license opportunity with a pharma company. It's not high in priority, and we don't do any innovation specifically for that. But if we were to find a mode of action, that was relevant and meaningful, but would require a full medical registration we would seek to out-license that. We don't have the capabilities to develop it ourselves.

That makes perfect sense. And in terms of lysozyme product for humans, what's the time frame? And of course, I know filing for a patent doesn't necessarily mean you'll ever enter having a product, but what's a realistic time frame before you could launch such a product, if everything works?

It's difficult to speculate. So I can -- it's not in clinical stage yet. So that gives you a sense that we still have some years ahead of us, yes, somewhere in the preclinical phases, understanding, as I said, the mode of action. So everything I said to you, I think we know. But we need to document and be absolutely certain that this is how the enzyme delivers its benefit. And when we do that, then we need to take it into the clinical program. So it's probably not around the corner, but we are not in pharma, so we're also not talking 10 years.

And there are no further questions, I'll hand it back to the speaker.

Thank you so much. Great questions. Thank you, everyone, for participating. We love telling our story. So thank you for giving me 45 minutes of your time to do that. Happy weekend to everyone, and I think this is over and out. Thank you.