Repligen Corporation (RGEN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to day 3 of the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference. This is Julia Qin from the life science team at JPMorgan, and it's my great pleasure to introduce you to our next company presentation by Repligen. Just as a reminder, if you have a question, you can submit it through the website. And with that, let me turn it over to Tony.

Great. Thanks, Julia. It's my pleasure to be here. here at JPMorgan in 2022 and really talk a little bit about all the advances that have happened at Repligen in the world to bioprocessing over the last 12 months. I think the presentation today, my goal is to really walk everybody through the evolution of the company, especially as we've migrated through the world of COVID vaccines and cell and gene therapy. Also I want to really talk about the expansion of our strategy as we create new verticals for the company, and then set the stage for the next 5 years. We really believe that we have a very bright future ahead of ourselves and want to make sure that people see the vision and the opportunities that lie ahead for Repligen. So I'm going to move to Slide 3. And so I think everybody knows that the last 3 years, we've seen tremendous growth. I think our CAGR for Repligen has been close to 50% on the revenue side. And we've been really successful for a few reasons: one, we've been able to deliver single-use solutions that drive efficiency and flexible manufacturing in the manufacturing of biological drugs. We've also been first to market with many of our products, and that gives us first-mover advantage. And I would say as we enter 2022, our customers see us as the innovator in bioprocess among all the players in our industry. And when you look at the performance of the company, if you go back to our guidance at the end of October, beginning of November, looking to finish 2021 around $660 million, we're really differentiated in terms of the products we bring to the market and that shows in terms of the revenue growth we've seen. We're growing through innovation, right, and through acquisitions. And if you look at the last 5-year revenue CAGR, it's close to 45%, 37% ex-COVID. One of the things we focused on really since 2017, 2018 is diversifying our customer base. And when you look at our revenues in 2021, 38% of our revenue is coming from what we see as sort of a new customer base, the cell and gene therapy markets and COVID. Also, when you look at the products that we've launched since I joined in 2014, I see really about 10 disruptive technologies that we've brought to market, products like TFDF, FlowVPX, single-use ATF, just to name a few. And those products in 2021 represent 25% of our revenue. An overarching kind of theme here is when you look at the way Repligen has evolved, if you went back maybe 3 or 4 years ago, 80% of our revenue is coming from clinical drug manufacturing, and 20% was coming from commercial. When you get to 2021, 55% of our revenue is coming from clinical drug manufacturing and 45% is coming from commercial, and that's with COVID. If you take COVID out of the equation, it's really 65-35 clinical to commercial. When you see that progress that we've made, and obviously, there's a very healthy pipeline of clinical drugs that can make their way all the way through to commercial, you can see that our TAM has also increased. We're over $8 billion in TAM here in starting 2022. And a lot of that is coming from COVID, new applications, companies we've acquired over the last couple of years, puts us in a very strong position to take share in what we see as a very important and expanding global biologics market. So if we go to Slide 4, let's talk a little bit about the biologics market we divided into 3 areas, right? COVID vaccines and therapeutics, obviously, a very new entry into the whole world of bioprocessing, 6 FDA-approved products as of the end of last year. And we have about 26% to 27% of our revenue coming from COVID vaccines and therapeutics. When you move down into the world of cell and gene therapy, 25% market growth projected over the next 3 to 5 years, 7 FDA-approved products, a significant number of drugs in clinical trials and about 11% of our revenue coming from cell and gene therapy. And then you have monoclonal antibodies, still the biggest part of our industry, growing in the region of 10% to 12%, 120 FDA-approved products, 800 clinical trials and representing 62% to 63% of our revenue. Now we shouldn't forget about some of the emerging modalities, whether it's mRNA outside COVID, oligonucleotides exosomes. We believe we have a lot of the right products that can be used in the manufacturing of these important modalities as we go through the coming years. So expect to hear more from us on how we play in this world in the next 2 to 3 years. okay? So if you look at our biologics market, how does that translate into our addressable market, which is on Slide 5. So as I said earlier, our addressable market has almost doubled to greater than $8 billion. But we play in a bioprocessing world now that's $22 billion in size. And we have 4 main franchises. So when you look at our biggest franchise, which is filtration, the addressable market is a little north of $4 billion. Our market share is about 9%, but probably more impressively, our 3-year CAGR has been greater than 60%. If you look at chromatography, again, it's almost $1 billion in terms of addressable market. We have about a 12% to 13% share in this market with a 3-year CAGR north of 30%. Now a more recent entry for us in terms of businesses is our process analytics franchise. Again, a little bit north of $1 billion in terms of addressable market. Our market share is 4% to 5%, but growing very rapidly with a 2-year CAGR greater than 30%. And then finally, our fourth franchise is really proteins and affinity resins, and we've lumped affinity resins now in with our proteins business, given the amount of revenue that comes from affinity ligands. Again, almost a $2 billion addressable market, and our market share here is close to 6% and the 3-year CAGR greater than 25%. So you can see in all 4 franchises, really strong revenue growth, resulting in us now having about 8% of this total addressable market and coming off a tremendous year in 2021, where we had almost 80% revenue growth. So moving to Slide 6. Let's talk a little bit how Repligen is winning in the world of bioprocessing. So we have three elements to our strategy. The first one is strategic M&A, and this is where -- we'll talk about it in a few minutes. This is where we have strict M&A criteria and we focus very carefully on driving growth of the companies that we acquire, especially in the first and second tier. We want companies to get off to a strong start. The second element of our strategy is around R&D innovation and partnerships. As I said at the outset, it's all about being first to market with product introductions. We want to be that market leader and known as the market leader when it comes to new technology. And then we collaborate with industrial leaders, especially in some key growth areas, and we'll talk about that in a few moments. And then this is underpinned by operational excellence. It's so important for us if we are making progress in the marketplace, that we have the capacity to meet the demand, that we have multi-site manufacturing, and that we're truly providing our customers with business continuity. And then that plays right into our commercial footprint because as a smaller company 5, 6 years ago, we were very much focused in North America. But as you'll see we've really expanded and we now have a global commercial footprint. So we'll go through each of these elements of our strategy in the next few slides. So on Slide 7, we'll talk a little bit about M&A. It's clearly one of the key accelerators for us. It's elevated our presence in the bioprocessing market. We have 5 really key acquisition criteria. It starts with technology leadership. We're always looking for companies that are -- that have technology leadership, and it could be in one specific area, it could be also regional in terms of their ability to be successful. Second one is around strengthening existing markets within Repligen. Typically, the companies we look at are underinvested in a key area. Usually, it's commercial, it could be operations. Always look for companies that have strong revenue growth and their margins are in line with our corporate average, and then finally, the potential to be accretive within the first year of doing a deal. So we picked four examples of companies we've acquired, and I just want to walk through a little bit of the thinking on what we got and what we needed to invest in. So C Technologies, a company we acquired in the middle of 2019, a real leader in drug concentration measurement. We realized very quickly that they had a very small commercial team and we really needed to focus on building that team out, and then to focus also the R&D efforts on some key products like the FlowVPX product line. And it's been tremendously successful during the 2 years of -- first 2 years of ownership. We acquired ARTeSYN Biosystems (sic) [ ARTeSYN Biosolutions ] in December 2020, just a little over a year ago, a real premier player in the world with filtration and chromatography from a system and flow path point of view. We could see straightaway that the big investment we needed to make was on the operations side. That's what's happened. We've also invested into the R&D part of ARTeSYN and expect to see, as we saw a little bit in 2021, but more so in 2022, products sitting in the marketplace. We acquired Polymem in June of last year, really a world-class manufacturer of hollow-fibers. It had an immediate impact for us in terms of our capacity. So our investments here really have been on the operations side. But equally important is the fact that they have a great R&D engine. And so we've been pivoting a lot of the efforts within that R&D group towards solutions in the bioprocessing industry. So again, expect to see some products come through over the next couple of years. And then finally, Avitide in September of last year, leading content provider in affinity ligands. We honestly have to invest in all three areas: commercial, just to bring BSS specialists into the fold for chromatography; operations, really more integration into our operations environment and then R&D. And probably the biggest investment here is in R&D, so we can bring more affinity ligands and resins into the market that are Repligen owned. So if you move to Slide 8, I want to talk a little bit about how we've created the verticals within our Repligen. And the first part of this was really the period from 2014 to 2019. We focused on building out filtration and building out analytics. So on our filtration business, there is really three key acquisitions: Refine in 2014; TangenX at the end of 2016; and Spectrum in the middle of 2017. If you look at the cumulative revenue that those three companies brought to the table, which is about $53 million, you can see that in a very short period of time, really honestly 5 years or so, we've been able to build that $53 million into a $400 million franchise, which is what the filtration business ended up at the end of 2021. If you look at our strategy of getting these companies off to a fast start, you can see also the growth that we observed for each of these companies in the first full year of ownership, so 48% for Refine, 37% for TangenX and 37% for Spectrum. That's a function of having the right integration strategy, knowing exactly where we need to invest operations versus commercial versus R&D. And that's what's resulted in just a fantastic franchise for Repligen. And then in 2019, we acquired C Technologies, as I spoke about it a few minutes ago, $25 million in revenue. It's almost doubled in the 2 years of ownership and up over 30% in the first full year. So again, I think a good endorsement of our ability to identify really important technologies, and then be able to do the integration and make the appropriate investments. So that was 2014 to 2019. On Slide 9, we're going to talk a little bit about what we've done in the last 18 months. So there's a bit of a pivot that's gone on. The first one was we wanted to create a new franchise for the company, which we're calling fluid management. And there's really four deals, honestly, that contribute to the fluid management business: EMT, which is the silicon piece; NMS, which is a plastic fabrication and bottle-top assembly; and then the BioFlex Solutions, which is the clamps and adapters. But there's also a component of ARTeSYN over on the right-hand side that is very much fluid management. It's the flow paths, it's the components. So's bringing that all together creates a new franchise for Repligen, which we'll be rolling out here in 2022. In terms of our proteins business, I think the Avitide deal in September really adds differentiated content and sets us up now to introduce affinity resins into the marketplace, which are going to be Repligen owned and Repligen sold. Polymem, again, strengthens our filtration franchise. And then finally, ARTeSYN, which gives us our chromatography and filtration systems, again, filling out the portfolio. So you can kind of see the progression of our M&A strategy over the last 5 to 7 years. We started with building out the franchises. And now we're adding back into each of the franchises, addressing some of the pain points that we see in our workflow so we can address that either through R&D projects or through M&A. So speaking of R&D on Slide 10, I think when you look at the portfolio of companies and technologies that we have acquired, you can see then why we can really focus on this first to market innovation and being known, and we are known now as the technology leader in the marketplace. So if you think about technology leadership and you think about the last 5 to 7 years, we're firmly the leader now in perfusion and process intensification. We are absolutely technology leader in harvest clarification. We are market and technology, either in prepacked columns. Viral vector process optimization, we're making huge inroads. We're just jumping into our journey in best-in-class affinity ligands that are Repligen owned, and we're very excited about our in-line process analytics. By having this type of leadership, you can jump in and be first to market. And I think two good examples of that are the TFDF technology and the FlowVPX. TFDF being used in harvest clarification both in [indiscernible] and in viral vectors and FlowVPX, which can be used downstream in many different applications on the manufacturing floor. But you can't do this alone, right? You have to be able to recognize when you need partners and you have to have the right partners. So I think three good examples here, Navigo, in terms of what we've done in developing Protein A ligands, which we've now partnered up with Purolite to bring to market with best-in-class affinity resins, and so that's been very successful. And then the partnership we had with Oxford Biomedica on the development of TFDF and viral vector manufacturing. And then just this week, I think another endorsement for Repligen and I think shows why we are strong in technology leadership. You'll see a paper either later this week or next week published by Oxford University, really the Jenner Institute there, where we worked with them on their Moonshot program, which is to really show that you can develop a process for COVID vaccines and develop that and scale it in 100 days. And they use the ATF technology, and they were able to show that they could get fourfold improvement in viral vector manufacturing. So that's just a really good example of being able to work with an external partner and create a new path, a new opportunity for ATF technology. So moving to Slide 11. When you take these products, we really want to be able to address upstream and downstream application. The trends that we see in upstream are really around process intensification N-1 the smaller footprint bringing single-use solutions to market. And we have some great technologies in ATF and TFDF. I think they're really become -- ATF is very proven in the marketplace. TFDF is really beginning to make some waves in terms of applications upstream. When you move to downstream, the applications tend to be in purification and ultrafiltration, diafiltration. The trends tend to be around single-use solutions, flexibility. And as you can see on this slide, there are a lot of products in our portfolio now that are very focused on downstream applications, be it affinity resins, single-use chromatography filtration systems, FlowVPX, chromatography comps like OPUS. Again, I think you can see a really strong portfolio of products to address these trends. So we have all these trends. You also, on Slide 12, now need to think about the third part of the strategy, which is capacity. And we've spent, in the last 2 years, almost $70 million on capacity expansion. And the capacity expansion has gone anywhere from threefold on some of our product lines all the way up to ninefold, and that's all been accomplished in the last 12 to 18 months. And by doing that, and obviously, there's more we need to do here in 2022, we will be able to provide best-in-class lead times. I think business continuity continues to be very important. I think it's really highlighted during COVID. And now having multisite manufacturing is something that I think is really important for our customers. We clearly focus on securing our supply chain. We do that in a number of ways, but also I think some of our M&As have helped us there as well. And then finally, it's around investing in expansion and improving our facilities. If we do that, on Slide 13, it makes it easier for our commercial organization. And when you look at our commercial organization, it's really expanded over the last number of years. we have almost 243 people in commercial now between sales, field applications, field service and then customer service. The customer facing in the field team is almost 200 people. This has resulted in a very balanced revenue across the different regions. And I think we're particularly happy that Asia-Pac is now at about 20% of overall revenue because we put a big effort into building out that team and making that region successful with our products. So moving now to our financial performance on Slide 14. As you can see, we've had tremendous growth over the last few years between '20 and 2021 and see we've almost doubled. Our gross margin have expanded, our operating margins have expanded. You can see that we've had a 3-year CAGR of 50%, that our adjusted EPS is up fourfold, really -- and with over $600 million in the bank, we are in a great position to continue to execute not only on our internal strategies, which are really around capacity and new R&D projects, but also around our M&A. So it puts us in a great position as we move through the next few years. So spending a moment on Slide 15 on 2021. You can see we had a tremendous year last year. Total revenue growth up almost 80%, organic revenue growth in the high 60s. We've been able to take COVID revenue for the company from $46 million up to $175 million to $180 million. We have $200 million plus, we believe, with COVID in 2022. So there's a lot of confidence around that number. I think more importantly about last year -- more important about last year is that our base business was up 37% through the first 3 quarters. that's a really strong validation of the technologies that we have, the effort that we've put in, and we're seeing quite a nice contribution from the gene therapy accounts. And coming in here into 2022, we have a very strong order book, which sets us up well for this year and I think allows us to think about where we go over the next few years. So on Slide 16, I think you can see we're well positioned for future growth. We have four great franchises. We'll be adding a fifth franchise this year in fluid management. So filtration, chromatography, analytics, proteins and soon-to-be-added, fluid management. You can see we have technology leadership. Our addressable market now is north of $8 billion. We have some great products, whether it's on the system side or the consumable side that gives flexibility to our customers. We have a strong base business, as I spoke about a few minutes ago. Our R&D engine is really bringing new products to market. We have this expanding manufacturing capacity, and I think over the next 12 months, we'll really set ourselves up from a manufacturing point of view for the next 5-plus years. And with $600 million plus in the bank, we are in great shape around supporting M&A and capital projects, and I think well on our way to accomplishing our goal of achieving $1 billion by 2024. So in summary, I think you can see how we've evolved, how we've really been able to jump into some of these new opportunities, whether it's in cell and gene therapy or COVID. Hopefully, you saw the expansion and the optimization of our strategy with the ability to add new verticals, and finishing up showing that we really believe we have a very bright future. We're well positioned with the technologies that we have and well on our way for another successful 5 years for Repligen. And with that, I'll stop and jump over to Julia for questions. Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Tony. Great overview. And I have to say, I'm continuously impressed with your execution through all the years we've covered Repligen. So lots to talk about here, but maybe let's start with COVID since that's top of mind for a lot of people. You've guided to -- you previously guided to $200 million vaccine tailwind this year with the entire amount already covered in orders, I believe. Obviously, given Omicron, there should be significant upside to this number. So tell us what you're seeing in the pipeline in terms of incremental demand for existing vaccines and development of next-gen vaccines, and how we should think about the upside?

Yes. So in terms of where we are, obviously, at the end of Q3, we talked about $150 million in orders and some high degree of confidence about being able to hit a $200 million-plus number for 2022. Obviously, we're a few weeks away from doing our Q4 year-end report out. But I think there's definitely confidence around the number that we put out there. There's a lot that's still going on in the marketplace. I think the good news, and I agree with you, Julia, there's a lot of good news that's come out over the last few months, whether it's the approval of boosters or different age groups now being open to vaccination, we'll see as we go through the year, how that plays out in terms of increased demand. But I'd say, at this stage, we're still in that $200 million range. In terms of next-generation vaccines, you've seen some of the reports I expect that you'll see some of the players coming through with specific vaccines for Omicron. And I think what we don't know right now is how long is it going to take to get the global population to 60%, 70% overall vaccination level. It's highly likely we're going to see more variants, how those variants really changed the landscape, whether it's in 2022 or 2023, will really play out, I think, over the next 6 to 9 months to give us a better sense of what the future holds. But yes, look, we're -- we see COVID as -- vaccines as a very important part of Repligen's future, be it in 2022 or 2023 and beyond.

Yes, it makes sense. One question we continue to get from investors is that what will happen with industry capacity post-pandemic. I know you mentioned on our CEO call last fall that there's still a huge demand in the industry, and Repligen's capacity expansion has been matching overall industry demand. So there's no real concern for overcapacity. But maybe I think it'd be helpful to just talk about how nimble the bioprocessing industry has become in adapting capacity to demand outside of vaccines, especially considering the growing use of single-use technologies and the demand pipeline you're seeing.

Yes. And I think there's almost two sides to that equation, Julia. One is the internal is all the bioprocessing players and what we've all done. And you can tell, if you look at all our peers and what we're doing, the amount of investment that's going on in expanding physical capacity is being huge, right? Every company in our space is doing it. I think, COVID really kind of highlighted that when something significantly -- significant happens in the industry, it's hard to pivot immediately and be able to increase your capacity 2x, 3x, 4x. I think we've done a good job and many of our peers are doing the exact same thing. As I showed in my presentation, we've increased capacity for the majority of our product lines, anything between 3x and 9x, and that allowed us to be a significant player in COVID. I think the -- your comment about flexibility is really important. I think everybody is trying to create flexible manufacturing, so you can serve not only the COVID vaccine customers, but also the regular customers who are not working on COVID vaccines. And I think the -- in 2022, I think that's a much better situation for all our customers. I think the challenges around -- on lead times is only going to get better as we go through the year. I think the other part of the equation really is our customers, right? And so when you think about COVID, it's really a handful of large pharma, biotech companies that are working on it, but then there's a big bolus of CDMOs that are working on COVID vaccine. So there's a lot of interaction with the CDMOs around balancing out COVID demand versus non-COVID demand and creating that flexibility that they need to be able to serve all their customers. So there's a lot of interactions between the companies to get through what's been, obviously, incredibly challenging 18 months in terms of keeping up with demand.

Yes. And just looking longer term, beyond COVID, with the recent developments in Alzheimer's treatment and mRNA therapeutics and other new modalities you noted earlier, how much incremental bioprocessing demand do those add? And does that provide a meaningful offset as vaccine demand tails off eventually?

I think there's a lot of upside that's going to come, whether it's Alzheimer drugs or it's the additional work that's being done on mRNA outside COVID expect that you'll also start to see -- we saw this back in 2009, 2010 after H1N1, the pandemic responses that different countries had. So I wouldn't be surprised as we go through the next few years if that doesn't become a tailwind for us. So I think between new modalities, whether it's mRNA, exosomes, oligos, new blockbuster drugs coming through, I think all of that is going to be a really important tailwind for the industry. Look, I feel that sitting here in 2022, the future is brighter now than it was 10 years ago, 5 years ago. So I think pretty much the whole bioprocessing industry is pretty bullish about the future.

Yes, that's great. So back to Repligen's growth strategy, I know multisite adoption is a very important piece to your growth strategy. So give us an update on what percentage of your largest customers now have achieved multisite adoption? And what are the key factors that can further accelerate that process? Does the expanding portfolio help? I'm sure it does.

Yes. And I think I would start there. I think the expanding portfolio really helps. And I would say, where you -- where we see multisite adoption today is more with the more mature products that we've had in our portfolio for 5, 6, 7 years. So you take technologies like ATF, a lot of examples of multisite adoption. And obviously, prepacked comps like OPUS, lots and multisite adoption. When you get to more newer products, right, like TFDF and Flow, they are in their infancy of getting established. But you can imagine that as we've now really created this and put a lot of effort into it as well, but we are the technology leader in our industry. And I think that then allows us to be able to promote new technologies into companies that have already accepted products that we have and start to roll them out multisite. So it's a fair amount of trust at the customer level. And I think that's definitely a driver of growth for us for the future. And you're absolutely right, a broader portfolio of products and is only going to help.

That's great. I want to touch specifically on gene therapy, which is another hot topic for the industry. Your gene therapy business grew, I think, 25% to 30% in the first half of last year and then accelerated to over 50% growth in the third quarter. Obviously, we know there's been a lot of industry momentum in terms of CDMO capacity investments and trial activities. But on top of the industry overall growth, right, Repligen now has a much more expanded portfolio to address the gene therapy opportunities, and not just with filtration and chromatography, but also with systems, analytics and ligands. So what kind of growth momentum are you expecting for gene therapy in the next few years?

Yes, it's a little -- I totally agree with your analysis. And you look at the market, it's growing 25%. We obviously had a great Q3. We'll have a strong 2021 in overall growth for gene therapy. A lot of our success has been based on a few products, right, that we had in our portfolio, whether it's prepacked columns, ATF. And it's only in the last year or two that you start to see opportunities for our systems, for our hollow-fibers, for our VPE technology that comes out of C Tech. So I think we're -- and if you look at what we just did with a company like Avitide, right, so we believe we can get affinity resins into the market. So I see 2022 as not too dissimilar to 2021 in terms of our ability to be successful in the gene therapy market. There's going to be a lot of seating. We have a lot of new products coming through. We've got a lot of products on the system side. We're beginning to build out fluid management, as you can tell. That's another consumable stream for us. And we're just getting going with products like TFDF and VPE, whether it's Solo or Flow. And obviously, the Avitide products, it's going to take a year to see. So I think 2022 is going to be similar to what we've seen in the last couple of years, but then I think there's acceleration after that, just simply because we have a lot more products that we can push into that marketplace. And we do solve a lot of the pain points that customers are focusing on.

Let's do a quick round maybe hit on some of the key product segments. With protein, you launched a high pH Protein A ligand last summer through the Navigo partnership, and you're launching AAV ligand for gene therapy this quarter following the acquisition of Avitide. So how much revenue potential do you see in these new ligands? And more importantly, given these pipeline developments, do you think high single-digit long-term growth might turn out to be too conservative for the protein business?

Yes, it's a good question. Look, as I said a minute or two ago, the Avitide impact is not going to be in 2022. It's going to be 2023 or 2024. We've done a lot of work on the Infinity ligand side over the last number of years, whether the work we did with Navigo and then partnering up with Purely on the resin side. But you don't go from 0 to 100 in a year, right, in terms of speed. We have -- you have to go through the process. They're seeding, there's evaluations. And I fully expect that avetide and the residence that we bring to market are going to be successful and they're going to drive future revenue growth for us. I think that's really the main message here that it's just going to take a little time to get it ramped up, but it should be -- for the proteins business I think there's probably two factors that we will be dealing with over the next couple of years. One is we'll still continue to see some drop down in terms of volumes from Cytiva. That's pretty clear as we've gone through the last few years. And as you know, we signed a contract extension out to 2025, which is based on minimums. But that's offset then by the work that we're doing with Avitide, the work that we're going to be -- that we are doing with Navigo and Purolite. So if I went out 2, 3 years from now, I think you've got -- definitely got the ability to be moving into double-digit growth for proteins business, but it's going to take a few years to get there.

Got it. Moving on to systems. ARTeSYN, strong momentum since the acquisition. So maybe talk about the importance of having system portfolio to complement your consumables. What's the timeline for launching the systems for TFF and OPUS? And do you expect to see meaningful benefits in terms of customer win rates or cross-selling since those are on the market?

Yes. The system strategy really evolved from the knowledge that we gained by doing the Spectrum deal back in 2017. We -- the team there had really focused on building out a new a new product line, right? So the benchtop hollow-fiber systems and the, obviously, clinical production scale, hollow fiber systems. As we saw the traction in the marketplace coming from those systems, we could see that we had other consumables in our portfolio, and you highlighted a few of them, whether it's OPUS Prepacked Columns or it's Flat Sheet Cassettes, but we weren't really providing the customers with the system solution. And I think by doing the ARTeSYN deal, that allowed us to now add both chromatography and filtration systems and media prep systems into the equation. The journey we're on right now with ARTeSYN is really the building out of the portfolio. They were more custom shop than they were standard systems. So we're -- we still want to serve those customers with custom solutions, but we also want to have standard solutions as well. So we've made some really good strides in 2021 with chromatography products. So I know you asked about OPUS, but we probably look at it more like a chromatography [ skids ]. So we've got those [ skids ] into the marketplace. We'll be finishing off the filtration portfolio this year. I think when you hit 2023, we have a very complete portfolio of systems coming from ARTeSYN. And now, on top of that, you get the fluid management piece. So the flow paths that ARTeSYN had, we're making some significant investments in building out manufacturing to continue to increase there. And then some of the deals we've done on fluid management allows us to have another consumable stream. And so it all comes together, you need consumables like filters and chromatography coms. You need fluid management solutions and you need systems you can wrap it around. So I think we've got a more complete portfolio as we move forward.

Great. Last question before we run out of time. M&A, everyone's favorite topic. You've been very active and you now have a much more expanded portfolio. So how should we think about your M&A focus going forward? And has the recent market volatility opened up more opportunities for you?

Yes. I think M&A is -- I don't think it's that different in 2022 than it's been over the last 2 or 3 years. I definitely can tell you it's a lot more competitive than it used to be, a lot more banks bringing companies out. At the same time, we have a compelling business proposition when we talk to potential companies we want to acquire. We're going to continue to do that. Pace is -- every year is a little different, right? So it's great that we've been able to get to 6 deals done during COVID. We continue to look for companies and technologies that we think fit into our portfolio. And I don't think that changes. We have a strategy for proteins. We have a strategy for filtration, chromatography. We have a fluid management strategy, the system strategy. So as technologies become available, and we think it makes sense for Repligen, I think you can see, from the cash we have on our balance sheet, we're nicely positioned for the smaller medium deals. And we'll see what happens over the next few years, but I expect that we'll continue to be -- to do acquisitions and stay active in that part of our overall strategy.

Great. Well, this has been fantastic. So thank you so much, Tony, for joining us today, and good luck with the rest of the conference. Thank you, everyone.

Thanks, Julia. Yes. Thank you.