Physiomics Plc (PYC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Physiomics plc Interim Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. And I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Dr. Peter Sargent. Good afternoon to you.

Thank you. Hello, and welcome, everybody, and welcome to our company update. As an introduction, my name is Peter Sargent, I'm the CEO here at Physiomics. I'm joined here today by Jim Millen, who is our Non-Executive Chairman. So as part of our presentation today, I will provide a short overview of the business, certainly for those of you who are less familiar with Physiomics. I'll then provide an update on this year's interim results we published last week from both a financial but also an operational perspective before then going on and talking a bit more about our strategy and how we are progressing against that strategy. After the presentation, we'll be sure to leave plenty of time to answer as many of your questions if you've posted to us. If you didn't have a chance to post any questions ahead of this presentation, I think, there's a functionality for you to ask questions as we go along in the presentation. And we can -- Jim and I can see those questions, so we will try and get to those at the end of the presentation. So for those of you who are less familiar with Physiomics, Physiomics is a company based just south of Oxford, primarily providing consultancy services to support the development of new drugs. Over the years, we've built capabilities across these 3 main areas shown here in the Venn diagram. So that is quantitative pharmacology. So this has been able to look at how drugs behave within biological systems, such as within humans. data science and biostatistics. So this is the ability to curate, analyze and interpret a wide range of data and then an understanding of disease biology. So this is understanding the mechanisms of disease certainly in relation to what the drug is being targeted towards. So with these capabilities, we offer our clients a range of consultancy services and to support their drug development efforts. And on the right of this slide, you'll see the 3 consultancy areas listed. So that is mathematical modeling and simulation, biostatistics and data science and bioinformatics and I'll provide a bit more detail to these in the coming slides. In addition to our consultancy services, we also are utilizing these capabilities we've developed to develop more kind of asset-based products in the personalized medicine dosing space, which falls outside the consultancy services. But again, I will provide a bit more detail to how we've got on with those up into to this point and I guess, our strategy going forward. So drilling down into the various services and explaining how we support our clients. Our core service is our mathematical modeling and simulation service. So up until recently, this has been our main focus as a business, and we've been able to establish a very strong brand and around it. So in this service, we support our clients across the drug development continuum. So as far upstream as discovery through to the clinic by developing mathematical models to help them better understand, firstly, the disease biology they're working in and then the behavior of their drug in relation to that disease. So ultimately, our kind of modeling helps our clients utilize their data. So whether that's the data they've generated as part of the R&D efforts or data in the public domain to make predictions about their research outcomes, which in turn enables them to reduce the number of experimental permutations they need to explore, therefore, ultimately accelerating and derisking their drug development. So one example of this is an area we -- I guess, it falls within our wheelhouse, and that's in the translation of drugs from preclinical to clinical phases, helping our clients kind of predict what dose and dose schedule they should use. So the ability to make research outcome predictions is not only important to accelerate development and derisk development programs, but there's also an ethical element to this as well. And this is one of the reasons why regulators are kind of guiding biopharma companies to use modeling. So for example, within clinical trials, using some sort of prediction kind of outcomes and modeling methodologies allows patients who are involved in those trials to be more likely to get an effective dose of therapy, unlike what was perhaps -- before modeling was really well used within drug development where patients could quite likely get ineffective doses of these drugs. As well as helping our clients better understanding their drugs and potential effects, modeling is also an important tool in supporting our clients' investment decisions. So support them either internally looking at which assets they should be focused or investing in or evidence in their drug when speaking to external investors themselves. The second service line is biostatistics. So this is a service the company has been building capabilities around over the last year and was officially launched in October last year. So this service leverages much of our existing expertise in mathematics and applies it towards the design, conduct and reporting of clinical trials. So an example here could be helping our clients calculate how many patients they need within their trial so that they can be sure that if their drug works, then this can be detected with statistical significance. So one major reason for building this service is the fact that biostatistics is essential across all clinical trials regardless of therapeutic areas. And therefore, we see the opportunity of a much bigger market for Physiomics, making it a more scalable service and helping with our growth aspirations. The third service, which both stands on its own and also underpins modeling and biostatistics is data science and bioinformatics. So this is actually a capability Physiomics has had for some time. However, as there is an increase in volume and complexity of data generated through R&D, the ability to select, curate, analyze and visualize data, helping drive insights from that data actually is becoming a much needed capability. So we at Physiomics see this more of a stand-alone opportunity going forward. Another important point to make is that actually all these 3 services I've just described overlap. So for example, the types of output we generate through our modeling and simulation are actually inputs into our biostatistics service. So this we hope will actually help us offer our clients a more integrated solution and actually as a business allows us more chance of follow-on work with those clients. So as I mentioned earlier on -- in an earlier slide, in addition to consultancy services, we also have been developing software-based assets in the form of medicine -- personalized medicine dosing tools. So this was initially conceived back in 2017 when we started developing a tool to support chemotherapy dosing decisions, so focused initially around docetaxel. And the reason for this is that typically, when patients undergo chemotherapy, they are often given the same dose of drug as everyone else. However, as patients, as we all know, are all very different, people end up with more or less of the same drug circulating in their body and therefore, their treatment has varying levels of success. So the idea behind this tool, therefore, is to help determine personalized dose for each patient to optimize treatment and ultimately increase patient outcome. So as some of you may be aware, this kind of initial prototype was first evaluated as part of the trial based in Portsmouth, the PARTNER study where we use data generated from the trial to help refine and further evaluate the prototype. This trial, the work did suffer a bit from delays due to the pandemic. But actually, off the back of this trial, we determined a second use case of the tool, and that's its use in supporting the dosing decisions of an expensive drug called GCSF, which is actually used to treat some of the side effects of chemotherapy in terms of neutropenia. So this second use case is being trialed as part of the current Innovate grant in collaboration with Blackpool and Beyond Blood Diagnostics. Again, this trial, which is being run at the moment will generate data to help us refine and further evaluate and validate the tool. So in parallel to these trials and continued development of the tool, we've also been thinking about how we ultimately commercialize this asset and what that looks like. So this is where our partnership with the U.S. firm DoseMe comes in. So DoseMe has a software platform already in use across the U.S. and parts of Europe that utilizes algorithms such as the one we're developing and provided to clinicians as a tool. So they work in a variety of different therapeutic areas from infectious disease, cardiovascular and oncology. So our drug will fit quite nicely into their kind of portfolio of tools. One of our announcements late last year was the reengagement with DoseMe and commitment to upload our tool on to their platform initially for research-only purposes, but with the ultimate aim to implement paid for functionality later -- at a later date. And again, I'll give an update on how we're tracking against this in the coming slides. So I hope that gives a good background to the business and also how we've evolved over the years. The next few slides, I'd like to talk to our performance so far this year during the first half before moving on to how we're getting on this second half and in the first 2 months, but also talk a bit more about our future strategy and how we're tracking against that. So I hope you all have seen from our interim report posted last week, our revenue and total income was slightly down from the same period last year with revenue being GBP 329,000 and total income GBP 354,000. This slip in revenue didn't fortunately impact our operating loss with losses being GBP 13,000 higher than the same period last year. So just to note, all revenue is currently being generated from our modeling and simulation service line at present and with grant income making up the difference between revenue and total income. So even though there was a slight reduction in total income primarily due to client-driven slippage in project time lines, you'll see in the next slide that some of the slippage has put us in a stronger position for the second half of this year. Following the successful fundraise back in July, we ended up the first half with GBP 269,000 worth of cash and cash equivalents and shareholder funds of GBP 418,000. So post period, so this is -- in this second half, you will see that we've had another successful fundraise, generating GBP 500,000 gross really to help us continue this momentum, which I'll go and describe in a bit more detail and help us with continuing to grow the business. So looking forward, the Board believes that even though the first half total income was lower than hoped due to project slippage. This revenue will have moved into the second half, putting us on a good footing to have a strong second half. So we therefore believe as we announced early on in the year that we as a company are tracking against the market expectations. In addition to this, we already have revenue contracted into the year ending June 2026, so that's next year. And we also have several late-stage positive opportunities in the BD pipeline, which if converted, will only add to this and next year's income. So from an operational perspective, much has -- certainly has happened in the first half of the year. We've won 4 sizable contracts with -- some in new areas for Physiomics. One of those contracts was in the immunology space, so outside oncology. Another was within discovery, so supporting candidate selection, so a bit further upstream than where we normally play as a business and support our clients. And then another was in oncology, which is our -- I guess, our historical strength as a business, but actually focusing around a combination therapy that includes a new kind of -- type of therapy called antibody drug conjugates, which is a very exciting area in the oncology space. With biostatistics, you might have seen that we have been making progress recruiting expertise from an operational standpoint, including bringing Dr. Ghebre on board, but also we've been executing on our go-to-market strategy with creating materials, updating our website, all accumulating into the official launch of this service back in October. We've also made good progress with our personalized medicine tool, firstly presenting the output of the PARTNER trial. So that was the output of the trial we ran in Portsmouth and we presented that at a prestigious oncology event called EORTC-NCI-AACR. And we also put a lot of effort to kind of progress in the setup of the new PREDICT-ONC trial. That's the trial which we're running out of Blackpool NHS Trust. Finally, we also, as we announced finalized an agreement with DoseMe early on in the year to implement our tool on their DoseMeRx platform, enabling us to eventually kind of get the tool into the hands of clinicians. From a leadership perspective, people perspective, we are also delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Mark Davies as our Head of Modeling and Data Science team. Mark brings significant modeling and data science experience across pharma consultancy, but also from both a technical and BD perspective. And we're already seeing positive impact from him helping us open up opportunities with companies we've never engaged with before. So following a busy first half, the momentum certainly in the second half and the first few months has continued. We have -- as you have seen, we've published 2 fantastic papers with partners, Astellas and Merck KGaA. This ability to publish like this is really important for companies such as ourselves as it really credentializes our work. And these 2 papers specifically helps really evidence the power of our virtual tumor platform. So that's our own internal proprietary model, which we use to support oncology for development companies. We've also been awarded a contract extension by one of our clients. And then from a biostatistics perspective, since the launch of the service and the campaigns -- the marketing campaigns being run off the back of it -- back of that launch. We started to identify some of the first BD opportunities in the biostat space with some really interesting conversations taking place. So hopefully, these will start materializing into contracts, which will be great because these will be the first contracts in the biostats -- for the biostats service line. As announced as part of our latest fund raise early on last month, we've also started efforts to explore strategic options to kind of accelerate growth. So not just in biostatistics but across our consultancy services. So far, we've kind of focused on growing the business organically, which hopefully you can see is starting to pick up momentum. But thinking about how we can really accelerate this growth needs to also consider kind of more inorganic options, so potential acquisitions of revenue-generating businesses. So regarding this, discussions have already been happening with potential targets and potential partners. And as we make progress within this initiative, we will certainly update the market. For the personalized medicine initiative, after much back and forth with regulators and ethics bodies here in the U.K., we're also pleased to announce the approval of the PREDICT-ONC trial and the start of recruitment. And even with some delays in its start, the trial is now progressing at speed with over 10% of patients already recruited on to the trial within the first few weeks. So really good pace of recruitment. Regarding progress on DoseMe, tool has now been implemented on their platform, and we're just in the final testing cycle to finalize that implementation. So just to expand on that a tiny bit more. And as we implemented the tool on to their platform, we've had to do a number of reviews and debugging cycles just to ensure that the tool is working effectively both from a technical and also a user experience perspective on the platform before we can then hand it over and put it in the hands of clinicians. More broadly, so -- from a people perspective, we're also pleased to announce that so far this year, we've recruited 2 fantastic individuals into the team. So Emily, you see her picture on the left, has joined us as a junior modeling scientist and then Misba on the right, who brings decades of experience in pharma delivering clinical pharmacology and modeling projects. And even though they've only been within the company for just over a month, they're already getting stuck in and having a real impact. So building on how we are currently progressing and kind of looking at kind of BD and marketing and things from a project delivery perspective. So as announced kind of previously, the business has been investing more in business development and marketing across the consultancy service lines, so across modeling, biostats and data science. We feel that these efforts are definitely paying off. We've got a healthy pipeline of opportunities, including over 90, what we call [ long ] leads. So these are kind of active leads, 16 opportunities, these kind of at more late stage and 19 of those -- 9 of those opportunities, sorry, are in late-stage proposals, so kind of negotiating contracts with clients. And obviously, there will be some level of attrition through that pipeline as there always will be within sales pipeline. But hopefully, some of these late-stage opportunities are going to convert very soon, which will only help with both this year's income, but also thinking more about kind of the next year, 2 years. From a project delivery perspective, the team are also super busy. We have 9 active projects ongoing with a variety of clients, including both kind of mid and top-tier biopharma and some projects working with research institutes and charities. So the team are super busy, and we're in a very strong position going into the rest of this year and next year. So thinking more about the future, I'm sure some of you will recognize this slide from previous presentations. I just wanted to repeat the main areas of focus for us as a business and how we are progressing against those growth areas. So from a consultancy perspective, a big part of our focus has been on BD and marketing and looking at how we can grow our pipeline whilst increasing that conversion rate of opportunities into contracts. We also set out to broaden our offering, diversify our client base, including the launch of our biostatistics service. And all of this is underpinned by building the operational capabilities. So we've set out to recruit the necessary expertise and developing or acquiring the kind of the necessary systems and processes to ensure that we can actually deliver on these new service areas. Hopefully, with the update I've given so far, you can see that we have maintained a focus on these growth areas and have taken steps to address each one. There's certainly been an increased focus and investments around BD and marketing, utilizing key sector conferences to engage with new and existing clients. And some of the team are going to a big oncology conference later on this week and have a presentation there, and we are actually one of the conference sponsors. And so utilizing events like that are key for us generating new leads and ultimately opportunities. We've also recruited expertise to help us better develop impactful solutions for our clients. So this is not just recruiting deep technical modeling expertise, but recruiting expertise of kind of more broadly across drug development. So from starting to shift from being a kind of more reactive cell in saying what models would you like us to develop to being able to better guide our clients to what they need to be doing themselves and what regulators are expecting from them. I mentioned previously about our efforts -- about how our efforts are already materializing into new types of projects in some areas where Physiomics previously hasn't supported before. And finally, we have made progress in implementing a number of new processes and tools in our operations really to help drive from operational excellence and efficiency in our project delivery. Moving over to the right of the slide towards the personalized dosing tool perspective, the data has started to be generated from the PREDICT-ONC trail, meaning that we can continue developing and refining our asset for the GCSF DoseMe use case. The project with DoseMe is progressing well. And now that tool is implemented on their platform, we're in the process of identifying clinicians in the U.S. to conduct initial evaluations under research-only purposes. But as we receive this feedback and following the data from the PREDICT-ONC trail, we can then move closer to implementing paid for functionality and ultimately commercialization of the tool. Across both the consultancy -- consulting and personalized medicine initiatives, we're also, as I mentioned, exploring strategic options. So we've conducted market research to help expand our consultancy service with initial conversations with targets underway. But then from a personalized medicine initiative, we're also in talks with DoseMe around a deeper relationship beyond the current tool in development. So I hope you can see that we're addressing and progressing all these growth areas. And this recent fund raise completed last month has been really pivotal in ensuring we can maintain this momentum and invest further in these key areas. So before we move to the Q&A, just to summarize the presentation today. We've had a solid first half of the year with total income tracking in line with market expectations for the year, which would be a significant growth on last year and actually the year previous to that. We've won 4 new contracts in the first half with a new one already this half and momentum on the late-stage BD pipeline. We're delivering on our strategy to broaden our consultancy offering to new therapeutic areas, drug development phases and also through the launch of our biostatistics pipeline. We've recruited new expertise across modeling and biostats to help drive forward our pipeline and also deliver projects in these new areas. So far this half, we published 2 papers with partners, Astellas and Merck. We've obtained regulatory and ethical approval for our PREDICT-ONC trial, and we're recruiting at speed. And finally, our tool has been implemented on the DoseMeRx platform, and we're starting to explore deeper relationships with DoseMe beyond our existing tool. So I will stop there, and I think we can now move to Q&A. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Peter, Jim, as you can see, we received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. And Jim, if I may now hand back to you to chair the Q&A and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Yes. Thank you very much. Hopefully, you can hear me okay. So we'll start off with the questions that were submitted prior to the meeting today. And I can see there's just a couple that have come in during -- over the course of the meeting. I guess actually, before we go into the questions, I'd just like to acknowledge that clearly, we had a lot of communications from shareholders expressing dissatisfaction with our performance following 2 fundraises within 12 months. We'll talk about that in a bit more detail, but I just want to acknowledge that the company's performance is not what Pete or I or the Board want and that we are working as hard as we can to try and turn things around. I think it's only fair to acknowledge that and as that was the thrust of a large number of questions that we received both by e-mail over the last months and also immediately prior to this meeting. So with that having been said, that is a great segue into a variety of questions. I won't read them all out, but on the theme of the fundraise, the timing, the value, Pete, would you like to try and address these to the extent that we can, please?

Yes. So I think the first question is around the reason why we've had to do 2 fundraises in quite short succession? So as you all have seen in our annual report last September and the interims we published last week, the business is operating at a loss and has been doing so for some time. So in order to turn this around and scale the business so that we can ultimately cover our operating costs, which also includes the large cost of being a public company on the alternative investment market, we know as a business, we need to scale. Ultimately though, to be able to do this is there's no real instant or quick solution to this. And this is why in my first year of being a CEO, I've been focused on making those necessary changes, those key changes in the business to position us for growth. So that is new expertise, new ways of working, investments in BD and marketing and the other growth initiatives I kind of touched upon in the presentation. We knew things had to change. Unfortunately, change is just never as quick as you hope. There's no instant solution. But we, as a Board, believe that we have made the right changes. And we've seen -- we see the kind of green shoots, key metrics. So we've reported on last year having the -- was a record year for the total value of new contracts won. And these kind of metrics are showing that we are on the right path. And then looking forward to this year and our announcements earlier this year regarding meeting market expectations. If we are to achieve market expectations, which we as a Board believe we will be able to do, this would represent a significant increase in income compared to the previous years. However, we do acknowledge that there's still a lot more to do, and this is why the 2 recent fundraises has been necessary. I hope I answered why we've had to do these 2 fundraises in my presentation. We as a business need to invest to make the changes to unlock the growth potential, keep momentum going. And I guess the reason why -- the reasons for this investment and the reasons what we put in the RNS is as part of the justification of these fundraises, they haven't changed from 7 months ago to what they were a month ago because this is still driving those key growth initiatives we, as a Board, believe need to be invested and continued with.

Thank you, Pete. Then we have a set of questions. And actually, Pete, if you don't mind, maybe I'll take this next block. There's a whole set of questions relating to Board participation, which obviously we get asked every year. And I apologize in advance if the answer that we can give isn't fully satisfying to people. I will break it into 2 parts. In terms of the nonexecutive participation, AIM and the Quoted Companies Alliance code that we adhere to basically encourages nonexecutives not to participate directly in fundraises in order to maintain their independence. It's not an absolute rule, but it is something that AIM strongly encourages. In terms of executive participation, we do what we feel we're able to do, myself, my previous colleague, Christophe Chassagnole and before Christmas to a minor extent, Pete as well, have acquired shares on the open market and sometimes in previous years during fundraises. But we only do what we feel we're in a position to do. None of the executive members of the company are extremely wealthy individuals. We pay ourselves reasonable salaries, very modest salaries by public company standards. And we work hard for those salaries, but we're not necessarily in a position to make the sort of purchases that I understand the shareholders would like to see made. But we will continue to keep this under review. We have made such purchases at various points in the past, both during fundraises and in between times as well. And where we can, we will continue to do so. So that's our response. And again, apologies if that's unsatisfying, but I'm trying to be as honest as we can be in relation to that. Then maybe, Pete, if I push this next one back to you. There was just a question in relation to, would there be any more placings in the current calendar year? I think we can hit that one on the head perhaps.

Yes. So look, as a Board, our strategy, as I mentioned, is focused around scaling the business to the point whereby we no longer are making a loss and we can start reinvesting our income into driving our growth initiatives. If as we expect, we manage to hit kind of the market expectations at the end of this financial year. We feel our cash runway will extend potentially beyond the calendar year. Exactly how far, it will depend on the degree of which we can convert our strong pipeline into new contracts and also will depend on whether we can identify any specific investment opportunities. As I mentioned in the presentation, we are undergoing an initiative for some research to identify potential targets such as potential acquisition targets of revenue-generating business. So there's a lot of ifs there, but it will really depend on how we -- whether we find some investment opportunities to focus on.

Okay. Thank you, Pete. The next one, maybe I'll take the next one as well. So it's just around why should new investors invest in PYC when there may be further placings ahead? I mean, I can't give a definitive answer to this question. All I can say is that if you look over the history of the time that I've been with PYC, then we have had periods where we've had strong growth. We've had periods where we've taken a step or 2 backwards, obviously. So there are obviously -- there are clearly investors who have made some money and sold to take a profit. But obviously, it depends on the timing of when you invest relative to announcements that we may make in relation to the various initiatives that we have going on, which Peter has covered well during his presentation and during subsequent questions. So I think that's all I can say to that. Obviously, I can't make any definitive statements about when people should or should not invest in the company. All I can do is say that we are working hard to try and create value through the various different verticals that Pete has described during his presentation. There's a further question here around the process followed by arranging of placing and whether there's any government funding available that would eliminate the need for dilutive placing. So I guess that refers to the sorts of grants that we have won in the past. Pete, I don't know if you want to say a few words about that.

Yes. Look, we, as a business are always kind of exploring new grants and areas or ways of funding certainly our personalized medicine initiative. The business has won a number of grants over the years both from Innovate and the National Institute for Health Research. The latest grant, which we were awarded back in November 2023 from Innovate is still funding the PREDICT-ONC trial I mentioned and we're -- it's underway with Blackpool NHS and Beyond Blood. But yes, we are -- we'll always be looking at what government funding or other funding opportunities are out there to support our growth initiatives.

Thanks, Pete. So the next one, maybe I'll take this and maybe we'll alternate for the rest of the Q&A. So there's one relating to our guidance that was provided on full year results at the end of January, stating that we were trading in line with expectations. There was a question asking why we weren't making any predictions for the interims. Yes. So the answer to that is that we've never made -- we're a small company. Our earnings are quite volatile even in comparable years where our revenues are similar. Sometimes they fall more heavily in the first half. Sometimes they fall more heavily in the second half of the year. And as a result, we have never made predictions as to the relative levels of revenue in each half of the year, and it's unlikely that we'll do so going forward at least at this point in time. It is, however, quite normal for companies to provide updates on their full year numbers approximately halfway through the year. And we wanted to do that in advance of the fundraise that eventually happened to, I guess, to reassure people that irrespective of what our first year -- first half numbers look like that we are currently expecting to trade in line with market expectations for the full year, which, as Peter has said on a couple of occasions, would represent quite a big uplift around just over 30%, I believe, on the comparable full year total income from the last full financial year. So that is my response to that question. Next question, perhaps to Pete since it relates to a presentation that you made through Proactive last November. There was just a question about whether or not you felt like the timing of that was appropriate given that we've then completed placing later on. So if you'd like to take that one, Pete?

Yes. I think so we as a business have been looking at other ways of better engaging with the market. And we have the opportunity to present on the Proactive platform, just a very short presentation as I hope some of you have seen. I think that opportunity, it worked well. But I think at this point in time, presenting through the IMC platform as we're doing today meets our current needs. I think part of that question was around my enthusiasm and do I -- I think that's -- I suppose, I was a bit too enthusiastic during the presentation. I don't believe that. I think that Physiomics has a lot of potential and is starting to turn a corner. I think there's still a lot of work to do, but we are going in the right direction and I'm positive about the future.

Okay. So maybe I'll take the next one, Pete, which is around the share price, and it's kind of on the same theme as I mentioned at the beginning of the Q&A session. Do we consider the movement of the share price as a measure of our performance and what are we doing to reverse its decline? So let me just restate again, we do consider that the decrease in the share price reflects on us personally. We are as you, not satisfied with the performance of the company, and that is our responsibility. Some of the -- there are things that are outside our control. But at the end of the day, we are the directors of the company, and it's our job to try and create value for shareholders. So let me just take that one directly on the chin. The initiatives that we have in play currently to create value and reverse the longer-term decline of the share price, I won't go into again, but I think Pete has covered quite well over the course of this meeting, and we'll continue to provide updates on those over the remainder of this current financial year and beyond. So next question for you, Pete, specifically addressed to you around how do you think you've done over the first 12 months as a CEO with Physiomics?

Yes. Look, I think we've made a lot of progress as a business in the last 12 months. We have made some key changes and kind of starting to unlock that growth and change our ways of working. I personally stand by these changes we've made, and I can see that we're tracking in the right direction. Is the job done? No. Definitely not. There's still a lot more to do. And hopefully, this presentation I just gave gives you a feel for the areas we're focusing on.

Okay. Thank you, Pete. Next one, since it relates to the nonexecutives, maybe again, I'll take it. So what did the nonexecutive directors bring to the table, so to speak? I guess the implication there is also do we need all of the nonexecutive directors that we have? And the answer to that is that we do. We're mandated by AIM and the Quoted Companies Alliance code to have 2 independent nonexecutive directors. And therefore, we have. We did manage with a smaller Board for some years, but over the last 3 or 4 years, the guidelines and regulations, which apply to all AIM companies regardless of their size, have been tightened considerably, I guess, specifically to try and protect shareholders. However, as a result of that, we have had to increase slightly the size of our Board. Having said that, our 2 independent nonexecutive directors, Tim Corn and Shalabh Kumar both bring significant experience to their roles. And I believe that they do add a lot during discussions and Board meetings and in between by leveraging their network. So we've had consulting engagement through referrals from these directors. We have been connected to potential companies that we may consider business combinations with through these directors. And I would expect that they would continue to contribute in this way as well as just being a sensible business heads that can comment on our operational performance from month to month. So that would be my response to that question. Pete, there's a question here, a couple of questions about the value of the pipeline and the value of the dosing tool. I mean it's always a tricky one to give forward-looking statements, but I don't know if you want to say a few words on those.

Well, just [indiscernible], Jim. So yes, I'm not able to give any forward-looking valuation of the business or our assets. But as a business, we are focused towards revenue-generating activities and growth of our revenues so we can scale and grow the business. I think one of the comments around the value next year, obviously, I can't give you a value, but I hope that this year is going to end tracking in line with expectations. So it will be a strong year for us. And I hope that growth continues on an upward trajectory going forward.

Yes. And I guess I would just add, we're coming up to some questions on the relationship with DoseMe and the things that we're doing on the personalized medicine front. I would -- I guess I would just say, as that matures and we actually get our tool out and being used by potential customers who are currently DoseMe customers, then there may be some metrics that we can release in terms of the size of that market, which is primarily in the U.S. And as and when we can do that, we will do that. It won't be a sort of a dollar value, but it may be that we can put out some information about the sort of scale of the opportunity over there that we see. Okay. So moving on to personalized medicine. We may have to -- I think we closed at the top of the hour, Pete, so we may have to speed up a little bit, my fault probably. So there's some question about the DoseMe relationship and how it's evolving. Perhaps you could cover that.

Yes. So I think I touched upon some of this in my presentation around, I think the word deeper relationship with DoseMe. So as you all know, we are working with DoseMe around the implementation of our personalized dosing tool on to their platform. So we can get it into the hands of clinicians in the U.S. and those ultimate end users of that tool. But in addition to that, we are exploring kind of a deeper relationship with DoseMe around other tools outside the one we're currently developing. DoseMe works across a variety of different therapeutic areas, including infectious disease, cardiovascular and oncology. And we at Physiomics obviously bring a unique expertise around mathematical modeling and development of these software algorithms. So that is what I mean by a deeper relationship with DoseMe. And -- so that question. Go ahead Yes. Jim.

You go to the next one which is around how much -- what else is happening in the dosing tool, I think.

Yes, yes. Look, for the dosing tool for the current dosing tool, there's 2 main kind of streams or work streams ongoing with that tool at the moment. Firstly, there's the PREDICT-ONC trial, which as I said, has just been set up and is starting to generate data. And the second stream is with DoseMe around implementing the tool on to their platform. As we progress both streams, we can firstly finalize the tool using the data from the personalized medicine -- the PREDICT-ONC trial, sorry. And then once we've done that, we will already have it in a platform, which can then help us commercialize that tool. So we're trying to progress things in parallel to get it to market as quick as possible.

Okay. Fantastic. I think we'll move on, Pete, now to the section about the consulting business. First, there's a question about turnover. Do we feel like our turnover is high? There have been some changes in the faces on our staff page. Do we think that we're paying people appropriately? Yes, could you comment on these things?

Yes. Look, I don't actually think we do have a high turnover. We are a small team. We've got individuals within the team who have been here for longer than 15 years. We did lose 2 junior modelers late last year after a number of years working for us. This is always disappointing when people move on. I think certainly, those at the earlier end of their career typically do kind of move around a bit more frequently nowadays. But as a business, we have always been able to kind of recruit high-quality staff. And as I presented in the slides, we've already recruited 2 individuals into the business, each bringing significant expertise. So as we look to grow the business, we are looking at what expertise we need. So it also provides us with an opportunity to tweak our expertise and to meet our changing requirements.

Thanks, Pete. So next block of questions around how the company is being structured, the separate divisions between traditional consulting and biostats. How is that going? How is the development of the biostats progressing? And how might those sorts of contracts differ from consultancy contracts?

Yes. So as I presented in the slides, we have the 3 service lines. So the modeling and simulation, biostatistics and data science and bio informatics. From a financial element, we do separate out the biostats and the core modeling. So we have our internal targets against each one and our own kind of budgets against each one. However, from an operational standpoint, there is a lot of overlap. So for example, our Head of Business Development is out there selling both service lines. Our technical team being mathematicians and data scientists are flexible across both service lines. So there is a lot of kind of overlap and flex between the different service lines. Regarding how biostats is performing, as I mentioned in my presentation, we are starting to have some very interesting discussions with prospective clients, some of which I hope will convert into contracts very soon. At this point in time, though, all of our revenue has been focused around our modeling and simulation and service line. But hopefully, that's going to change...

Well, let me just -- there was one question that came in during the presentation around -- on the same subject. So just to address that perhaps, what has been the market reaction to the launch of biostats? And maybe if I can just give a top-level answer to that one, which is generally very positive, but expectation of additional revenue and contracts. So really very much in line with what Pete just said. We're putting the building blocks in place. But clearly, the market wants to see that convert into a strong revenue growth in that separate service line, which we are working on. Okay. So last question or 2. So there's a question around the sort of spate of recent publications that we've had and whether that would create any new opportunities for us, Pete?

Yes. I think the 2 publications have been a great success for the business. Publication, scientific publications in reputable peer-reviewed journals as we've managed to do really helps credentialize us as a consultancy service. And those 2 papers we published in the last couple of months actually did focus on our virtual tumor model and were published in partnership with 2 respectable large pharma companies. So the publications themselves have a lot of value for us and are going to be really useful in that kind of sales process in evidencing the impact of our service. I guess regarding opening new doors, in addition to kind of mention -- talking about our virtual tumor model, the 2 papers do focus around therapeutic or kind of new modalities in the oncology space, which are very hot topics, so the immuno-oncology space and the DDR space. So as a business, we are currently using those publications as part of the wider marketing campaign to target other companies working in that space. So I hope that the papers will be able to open up more doors certainly.

Okay. So I think we've just -- got time for one final question, which is actually going back to the dosing tool. I don't know if you can answer this off the top of your head, Pete. But if not, then we will provide an answer later on when we publish the Q&A. But just around the target recruitment number of patients that we're targeting to recruit for the dosing tool. It may be that we want to give a range here. I don't know, Pete.

Yes. So we are -- we've currently recruited -- we've just exceeded 10% in the first few weeks of getting approval from Ethics and Regulatory Board. So that's 10%. So we are targeting a range of between, I think it's about 80 to 120 patients recruited...

It's pretty substantial trial, to be honest, certainly the biggest one that we've been involved with. Listen, I think that -- I think we've addressed most of the questions that came in or at least the themes. If we didn't get to any of your questions, then we apologize. I appreciate your continued support and your attention today. And I think that concludes for now. Thank you.

That's great, Peter. But before we direct investors to provide you with their feedback, Peter, is there anything else you would like to close the meeting with?

No, just to thank you all for listening and those who submitted questions and thanks for remaining interested in the business. I hope by the presentation, some of our answers, you can see that we are making progress as a business. I know the first half was a bit more disappointing than what we had hoped for, but we do truly believe that we are on the right trajectory.

Fantastic, Peter, Jim, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatic redirected to provide your feedback in order that the Board can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Physiomics plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.