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eXoZymes Investor Presentation (April 2026)
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Well hello everyone thank you for joining us today I'm George Brandon president of MDB Capital and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's management presentation of eXoZymes. Exozyme trades on NASDAQ under the symbol EXOZ. Before we begin though I'd like to note that MDB Capital is serving as the lead underwriter for exozymes current follow on offering. MDB Capital Holdings and its affiliates hold an equity and warrant position in exozymes. As a result MDB has a financial interest in the company and this presentation should be viewed in that context. Today's discussion is for informational purposes only does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. Any investment decision should be made only after reviewing the applicable prospectus, prospectus supplement, and other filings with the SEC including but not limited to the company's S3 shelf registration materials and risk factors. Forward looking statements and disclosures will be covered by the company's management shortly. There will be a short Q&A session following management's presentation. Please submit any questions in the chat feature found at the bottom of your screen. Okay, joining us today from eXoZymes is Michael Heltzen, Chief Executive Officer, Tyler Corman, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer, and Damian Perriman, eXoZymes' Chief Commercial Officer. So with that, Michael it's all yours. Thank you, George. Well, let's start by saying good afternoon to everybody. I'm Michael Heltzen, I'm the CEO of eXoZymes. We trade under the NASDAQ ticker symbol of EXOZ. From a top-down perspective, eXoZymes is building a new generation of biomanufacturing. What does that mean a little bit more concretely? Well, we can basically make rare and naturally inspired molecules that are incredibly valuable, but historically have been impossible to produce at the quality, purity and scale that is needed to make it a business. So that's our advantage. It's relatively simple, but at the same time, it's the most sophisticated biotechnology in the world. So we'll dive a little bit more into that. So let's just start with reminding people that enzymes in nature is how all the chemical work is done in biology. But it turned out when humans tried to genetically engineer enzymes to do work for us inside of the cells, then we had this major pushback. Cells don't want to be chemical factories. We'll go more into that later, but basically we have found a way of skipping the cell entirely, and we can run enzymatic pathways outside of the cell. That's a major technology breakthrough and it allows us to basically build with AI-enhanced cell-free enzymes that allows us to make these very hard to make molecules with precision of engineering level control. It means we can make clean, predictable and scalable biosolutions. Today, we will talk you through our platform, our business and our two flagship product programs. They each address a couple of total addressable markets in the $100 billion range that is, needless to say, very large market potential. We will, in the end, talk about why this is the time for eXoZymes. But let's go to the next slide. As George said, please read this safe harbor and more importantly, please review our SEC filings, the business description, the risk factors and all other relevant elements to understand us as a business, as an investment thesis. And if we go to the next slide, there we go. It's obviously a thing that didn't happen overnight. So already before 2019, eXoZymes as a concept really started back at UCLA. The academic discovery work and research work was done by Professor Jim Bowie and Tyler and Paul, basically on this idea of like, can we make cell-free enzymatic pathways happen? And that way basically makes synthetic biochemistry. So for years, those fundamentals was worked on, invented, understood and built with. And in 2019, it was spun out as a company that is our company. And in the beginning, the early chapters, it was really a discipline focused on grant funded R&D projects to make sure the platform works at scale and pressure testing it. In 2024, we did a gear shift. I joined the CEO. We went public on NASDAQ and we did a narrowing of our strategic focus. So going from doing all kinds of chemistries, we decided to focus on this nutraceutical and pharmaceutical double dip opportunity. We'll talk much more about that later. But basically, it allowed us to also get the parameters in place that allowed us to find what have now become our flagship programs. We have built this proprietary AI driven enzymatic engineering platform that allows us to frankly brute force evolution, make sure that we get the Superman versions of the enzymes to build these very rare products. That is, at its core, our competitive moat. But it's also backed up by 10 issued patents and many more patents in the approval process and many, many layers of deep trade secrets. So today, we're not just an R&D story. We operate out of this facility here in Los Angeles, 100, sorry, 10,000 square feet for the headquarters and the R&D lab with approximately 30 full time employees, plus a small army of service providers that are helping us out. So the takeaway is simple. We are very capital efficient, high performance, innovative team that are now entering into the commercialization phase of this tech breakthrough. And with that, over to you, Damien. Thanks, Michael. G'day, everyone. We are currently advancing to product platforms and they share something special we want to make sure we underline and you all understand. That is, they are hard to make nature inspired small molecules that target pathways to master regulators. And these regulators are central to health span and longevity. These are the pathways that farmer and nutraceutical companies have struggled to unlock serving markets that they are all today scrambling to address. On the left side, you'll see N-trans-caffeoyltyramine (NCT). This is a master regulator of cellular metabolism. It turns fat into energy. In nature, it exists in only vanishingly small amounts and practically impossible to farm or to source. Exozymes has cracked this limitation and can now produce NCT at scale. On the right, rare and new-to-nature cannabinoid molecules. These are master regulators of cellular signaling. Cannabinoid receptors sit on virtually every cell in the human body and yet, manufacturable, non-intoxicating variants with relevant therapeutic potential have been elusive. Until our platform made it possible. Each of these two platforms addresses a massive market potential With pathways we can call our own. Synthetic biology promised to revolutionize manufacturing, replacing petrochemicals with cell-based chemical production. But the foundational approach, that of genetically engineering living cells into chemical factories, it worked well in the petri dish, but it struggled at industrial scale. Living cells have their own agenda, including survival and a thousand other things. They resist becoming repurposed production machines. Exozyme solved that bottleneck by proving we can liberate the enzyme-based biochemical production pathway from within the cell. The proof point, we went from idea to pilot in under 12 months with a cell-free method for producing NCT and with a fraction of the budget other synbiocompanies typically require. Our scale-up is being third-party validated at 100x volume and our commercial production launch is scheduled for the first part of 2027. This is no longer lab fiction. It is scalable technology shepherding new categories of valuable products into the market. Cell-free is fiercely innovative, but elegantly simple. We take the target enzymes out of the cell. We use AI to optimize the source code of the enzymes to have them become superhero versions of themselves. We apply our proprietary methods to allow these enzymes to function as a pathway, and now they do exactly what we designed them to do. We call these optimized enzymes exozymes. The result is scalable, controllable by manufacturing. No cellular resistance. No toxic intermediates or end products. Just clean, efficient biochemistry. It's like running the chemical plant, but powered by nature's own catalysts. And to put this technology into competitive context, there have been three typical ways companies have tried to make complex natural molecules. And generally, they all hit a wall. Plant extraction, unscalable, and environmentally destructive. You'd need to harvest enormous volumes of plant material for only trace amounts of product. Chemical synthesis struggles to achieve the exact same molecule structure as natural molecules. And petrochemistry pollutes. Cell-based fermentation, low yield, low purity production, high costs, and a disappointing track record of profitability. Our exozyme platform breaks through all of these barriers. No living cells. No off-target metabolites. This means high yields and high purity. This unlocks a cost and profit profile that makes commercial production appealing. The speed of developing new biomanufacturing tech transfer packages is one of our most powerful competitive advantages and has direct implications for capital returns. The full commercialization journey from idea through to deployment either in our own production or virus commercial vehicle, joint venture or a licensing deal. This is a journey that takes 12 to 18 months. Compare that to traditional biotech, which typically requires many years and tens of millions of dollars per candidate molecule. We're compressing timelines by an order of magnitude at a fraction of the cost. This development means we can evaluate more molecules, rapidly test milestones, fail fast on the ones that don't clear our market and techno-economic bar, and double down on winners. And here's where we get excited. And let me show you what a biomanufacturing winner looks like in practice. This is a picture of pilot-scale production of NCT. That vessel may look turbid, but that is N-transcaphyl-tyramine suspended in solution. The beginning of this reaction four hours ago, it was clear. Four hours later, you have a vessel filled with valuable product. That valuable product is 99% reaction yield on raw material and 99.6% purity. It runs 18 times faster than conventional manufacturing approaches. The bottleneck that we solved in nature, NCT exists at less than 14 parts per million trace amounts. We isolated over half a kilogram at 99.6% purity. That is, i-pharma grade purity material. These results are now redefining industry benchmarks. It gives us something to boast about and to be proud of in the effort deployed last year. This tech transfer package of NCT is being evaluated by over 10 contract manufacturing prospects today. It's undergoing some optimization work, learnings from the pilot run, and will go into production next year. Let's go a little deeper into the NCT commercial opportunity. NCT is a rare plant-derived compound with compelling preclinical data in mice supporting weight control, liver, and gut health. Its unique value lies in its mechanism. NCT activates the cell's master metabolic switch, improving energy efficiency at the cellular level. This mechanism is different and potentially complementary to GLP-1s. Where GLP-1s influence appetite, appetite desire, HNF4-alpha actually boosts the individual cell's ability to burn fuel. This unserved mechanism is what's driving interest from both nutraceutical and pharmaceutical players. It creates two very clear commercial paths. First, a nutraceutical opportunity built around NCT itself. Partnerships that allow us to drive a formulation rapidly into market to build a human database, a human use consumer group that gets to first exploit and understand the use of NCT. Being able to build upon that with larger brands to drive into distribution and to drive into retail really boosts the volume and the potential of NCT. It also lays the foundation on the pharmaceutical side because we're going to rapidly increase the awareness of this very important mechanism around HNF4-alpha. The pharmaceutical upside by our Bioclick platform, which allows us to create optimized, patentable, new-to-nature analogs of NCT, allow us to address therapeutic potential across multiple billion-dollar metabolic indications. These molecules have clear acquisition relevance for pharma companies competing to lead the metabolic health space. There we go. I was basically wanted to give a little bit of my personal perspective on NCT. I'm so excited about this part of our business. This is not just the first product of all the work on the platform. NCT as a business opportunity in and of itself is an amazing opportunity. And I really encourage you all to go to our webpage under the investor tab. We have a video basically doing a deep dive into NCT as the business opportunity as it is. And we have a couple of podcasts and other things as well that really unpacks the opportunity. So I encourage you to go and learn for yourself how big that business opportunity is. Another thing I would encourage you to do is basically sit down with your favorite trusted AI agent and ask the question, basically what the potential for self-free biomanufacturing is and what the potential for NCT specifically is and see what your own analysis comes up with. So you can start unpacking how big this market opportunity is. Okay. This is not just our first flagship. It is also what leads the way for our second flagship. So why don't you talk about that, Damian? Great transition, Michael. Our second extraordinary business opportunity is cannabinoids for medicinal use. See, here's what many people don't fully appreciate. Cannabinoid receptors are present on virtually every cell in the human body. It's one of the most broadly expressed and well-studied receptor systems in pharmacology. And yet, despite decades of research, very few cannabinoids have actually become approved drugs. Why? Well, for our perspective, two critical manufacturing bottlenecks. First, purity. The naturally available cannabinoids are a complex mix and it's been difficult and costly to separate. And furthermore, it's been impossible to isolate just the non-intoxicating variants. Secondly, this question of selectivity. Plants and cell-based synbio have been unable to produce new to nature versions that are patentable with sufficient efficacy and safety against target diseases. We've overcome both bottlenecks with exozymes, unlocking a rich pipeline of clinical development candidates to address obesity, pain, and central nervous system disorders. And the market timing is extraordinary. There is a once-in-a-lifetime convergence at multiple levels of government as cannabinoids are being rescheduled and agencies working together towards reducing the friction for clinical development and commercialization. Folks, our first two production platforms were no accidents of science. They came from a deliberate selection methodology, which sits at the core of our strategy, fuels our future pipeline, and was honestly one of the things we really were proud of having developed in 2025. This procedure allows us to make go, no-go decisions based around four pillars, and we apply this to candidates that enter development, and we reassess the candidates against these pillars at each and every stage gate. First, uniqueness, critical, that we choose molecules that our technology is uniquely suited to make, and they need to address real unmet needs. I think NCT is a very strong example of us applying that principle because it allows us to target, in the example of NCT, what is considered previously undruggable master regulators. And that's, I think, a clear distinct advantage of our product selection. Second, IP ownership. Michael's already touched on that. Third, the molecule must serve markets where we can create a meaningful exit potential. Finally, every decision is grounded in techno-economic reality. We must be able to deliver a full tech transfer package within two years of starting development that supports profitable sales. That's the engine that we're trying to keep firing. Our AI-enabled idea management system helps us make disciplined choices because not everything interesting is worth commercializing. We apply these tools to make sure the juice is worth the squeeze. With now an understanding of our development pipeline in place, let me touch on our business model. It is deliberately capital-like. Fast R&D cycles and leveraging of existing contract manufacturing operations to approach scale. Firstly, Exozymes develops and validates a complete biomanufacturing tech transfer package while retaining all of the platform IP. We move teams quickly onto future programs to keep that opportunity engine firing. Secondly, we transfer that tech transfer package to qualified contract manufacturing organizations, avoiding the need to invest in factories and to assemble infrastructure projects and manufacturing tactics. Thirdly, commercial partnerships, commercial vehicles to market. They pick up our technology, they make the product and they drive it either into the market or into the clinic. We get to capture value at every step through equity, through licensing and through royalties. We gain exposure to multiple billion -dollar opportunities without building each business from scratch. This is a platform of platform strategy. It's not a single product platform. There's an important list of milestones that investors should be watching for the next year. In NCTE and 4, we expect to announce a manufacturing partnership along with complete GMP-ready tech transfer to a selected CMO. And advance use in human studies alongside the finalization of our GRASS approval for nutraceutical use. From 26 through 27, we plan to commit. Michael, we need to go into cosmetics too. I reckon there's a derivative opportunity on NCT. So we can make the inside of the body healthy. Surely we can make the outside of the body healthy. But I digress. We need to put that back into the idea management hopper, right? And that'll be a future opportunity for us all. I'll take notes. Yes. So we do plan a launch in 2027 of this product. So we're building the partnerships to support the channels to direct-to-consumer. While in parallel, we're picking up biotech and pharma companies right now to plan out clinical trials using new-to-nature NCT analogs from our Exozymes Bioclick platform. We want to push into nutraceuticals and we want to be able to invest in the upside value in the pharmaceutical. In 26, we are building a dedicated NCT team. That will have the systems, the experience, and the culture that can focus on drive-to-market. In cannabinoids, we aim to partner with pharma to move novel, non-intoxicating cannabinoids into the clinic. In the clinic, we can measure milestones. They are well understood. That's a way of increasing the value opportunity or the value recognition for Exozymes. We intend to expand and patent our rare cannabinoid library and execute licensing and JV agreements around specific, compelling indications. Each milestone is a potential re-rating event, giving us multiple shots on goal across large healthcare and wellness markets. Michael, I will gratefully hand the speaker back to you. Sounds good. I'm going to talk about one of my favorite topics, being capital efficient. We raised $15 million at our IPO back in November of 2024. We operate a business that basically spends $10 million a year on creating these assets, that is the technology transfer packages and the business opportunities and competitive advantages that represents. And this is exceptionally lean for us being a technology leader in this area of biotech and only spending that kind of money creating all of that asset. Others have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and have, frankly, less to show for it. So one of the ways we stay this lean is basically that we have been good at securing grant funding, non-dilutive funding, and we'll keep pushing for that. Finding the right balance is, of course, important, but it's a good way for us to basically expand and build on the Exoscience platform and get our R&D not just being theoretical things, but very concrete things we develop towards. And that results in new product development as well without shareholder dilution. So we aim at these multi-billion dollar markets in the biomanufacturing space, but we are taking a slightly different path than anyone else has done. That's why we have it proprietarily to us. You can argue that we are delivering on the original promise of synthetic biology, but with scalable high-purity biomanufacturing tech transfer packages, where other people can then have those technology packages and go and run the daily production of the individual small molecules. And that can be done at a fraction of the cost and much, much faster than before, and with products that otherwise often wouldn't exist at all. All of those things are real competitive advantages while staying capital efficient. Here is one of my favorite slides. It's a representation of some of the people on our team. There's 30 talented people behind us, but let's just take a quick overview. I'm the CEO. I'm a serial tech entrepreneur that have basically been building in this cross space in between computational power on the one side and molecular biology on the other side. And I head up strategy company building and our performance culture, ensuring we are doing it all with disciplined execution. Damien, as you have heard from today, is our chief commercial officer. You're one of the few people in the world that can actually say that they have been in biomanufacturing and biosolutions and brought things to market at scale. So we're really happy to have you on the team and you will be heading up a lot of the NCT efforts. So people will hear much more from you. Tyler, that is with us as well, is our chief scientific officer and co-founder of the company. He basically co-invented the exercise platform at UCLA together with Paul and Jim. And we are happy to have you lead our biosolutions development. Paul, as I pointed out, is also a co-founder. He's our VP of development, a pioneer in the cell-free space and really one of the architects. It's due to Paul and his part of our team that we can make all the insights that are needed to build the biosolutions that we do. Supporting the leadership team is Amy and Folart that runs our operational and financial backbone. They are the real heroes together with the whole team that makes us able to keep being high performers, capital efficient, executional focused and company compliant. All inside of this slim, lean budget that allows us to be nice and focused. If we go to the next slide, this is use of proceeds. So as we talked about already, we raised $15 million before we have a burn of approximately $10 a year. We are therefore raising somewhere between $10 and $15 million max, $15 million in this offering. Because we really don't need more capital to get to the next value inflection point. Making sure that the significant value growth that will happen in a relatively short amount of time goes to our loyal shareholders that are with us now, instead of just diluting them out by taking a lot of capital in. Despite that, it would probably make our jobs a little bit easier. But we're not looking for easy. We're looking for good. So we are capital efficient as a platform making assets. And we are also, in this round of funding, allocating a significant amount of resources and focus onto NCT, that is the flagship event, and icebreaker for the whole platform. If we go to the next slide, it's basically why exercise and why now? So do you solve the favor, if you want to invest in our company, to sit down and have a conversation with an AI agent or one of us that knows about this market, about why cell-free biomanufacturing is so different than cell-based biomanufacturing, the old kind of synthetic biology? And what opportunities that brings forward? Also, maybe poke at it and ask why it's fascinating how we can AI optimize enzymes nowadays. We can computationally do evolution, simulate it, and then we are the experts in going and making sure that it's actually also what happens in reality and training the algorithms to get better and better. Ask your AI agent why that's important. We have focused here in the beginning of a couple of very large total addressable markets of each $100 billion plus. And we have validated at scale and that we can do these things in months instead of years and with purity and economics that otherwise have not been possible. Another thing I'm really excited about when we took this strategic choice, it was really not just because it's such a nice technology market fit, but also because of this mega trend that is happening. Big pharma is facing a very large patent cliff. Go and Google that or ask your AI agent. But basically what it means is that within the next two to five years, there will be an extraordinary window for pharma companies looking for buying new drugs that they can take to market because the old drugs are going to fall off patent and therefore off the revenue cliff. At the same time, all the big pharma companies have had less success in in-house development of new drugs compared to how it was before. And all the biotechs of the world have not been funded the last couple of years to be there, to be exit worthy. So we are really pressing forward to delivering some big exit potentials in this window. So that's obviously one of the reasons why we can be excited about the future. We're doing a capital light. We're doing it without a lot of CapEx investments. We don't need to build a lot of new facilities. We can use existing infrastructure and we're doing it all without a large R&D burn. So the platform is real. It's time to commercialize. And we hope you would be interested in conversation about investing. And if you are, then we can have that in a parallel conversation. I would turn it over to you, George. Well, thank you, Michael. Nice job. So again, a summary on the offering, we're raising $10 to $15 million. The pricing is yet to be determined. We're going to be marketing to this over the next two to three weeks as broadly as possible. We want this story to go out. As many people as possibly could hear it. We believe it's QSBS 1202. You'll have to check with your accountant with that. If you don't know what that is, you should Google QSBS 1202. There's massive tax advantage for individuals and other entities that invest in this and hold it for three, four, five years. If you would like, you can hit the indication of interest right here. And if you leave and come back, you can always go to mdb.com and email anybody on our community team. We'll get back to you and send you information that you'd like. Or if you can't remember to do that, my email is very simple. It's b at mdb.com. I'll make sure you get in touch with the right people there. So with that, let's go ahead and get to the Q&A. Again, if you have questions, go ahead and just write the question out. We'll do our best to answer those questions. But I'm going to go ahead and start with, you know, we're going to really look in two areas here in this Q&A. From the last three Zooms we've done, a lot of these, obviously, these questions are less on the platform. And it's more on the go-to market. And, you know, one of the questions over and over again is, you know, on this NCT, the average Joe out there that would be buying this has probably never heard of NCT. Although they've heard of the GLP-1s. And, you know, MDB or PatVest had just done a report about the, I think there's 40 or 50 new GLP-1s that are coming to market. It's a massive move. It's one of the biggest pharmaceutical drug, you know, sectors in the history of pharmaceuticals. What is, again, and you've talked about it, but can you go back and then we're setting this up for on a go-to market question. Maybe, Damian, you can give us a little bit of a juxtaposition of GLP -1s versus NCT in layman terms so we can understand it. Michael, do you want to start with a high level there or should I just dive into that juxtaposition? I think you should just dive in, but feel free to play it over to me as well. Yeah, no, you're free to jump in. It's a big subject, right? Yeah. Look, here's the exciting thing about GLP-1s is we now have for the first time a real treatment for two-thirds of the global adult population that's suffering with chronic disease or on their way towards suffering with chronic disease. And the thing about chronic disease is it just doesn't happen, right? It's a 40-year journey, right, that so many of us are on because we're in front of laptops or computers most of the day. And so you think about GLP-1s being that opportunity to kind of arrest the problem. What do you do for the other 35 years? How do we help people not be in a position where they need to be rescued? And I think that's where folks are leaning into additional treatments that can help people be sort of better prepared along their journey. So, NCT, as opposed to GLP-1s, GLP-1s affects appetite. NCT affects that mechanism that helps your cells to burn energy more efficiently. And when you have these types of chronic lifestyles, your cells stop burning energy efficiently. So, people will say it's lifestyle changes. Change your lifestyle, you get better. That's actually not true. You need a combination of both. So, we think NCT has this very complementary role with GLP-1s. GLP-1s have their moment of rescue. NCT can aid that greatly by slowing down the number of people that need to be rescued. Maybe I can build on top of that. Yeah, please. Basically, where I think from a strategic perspective where the GLP-1 and NCT conversation is very interesting. You have the two large companies that have basically brought GLP-1s forward, Lila Lili and Novo Nordisk. And they are obviously taking markets here, this booming market. But there's also, as you also described, George, a lot of other pharma companies that don't want to be left out when you have the biggest growth market in pharma history. But when you enter into that market as number three to number, what did you say, 40-some, then you have to have something that differentiates yourself. Otherwise, you're literally not going to be picked by the doctors when they recommend medicine, despite you might have FDA approval on your drug. So if you want to differentiate yourself, you need to have something so you have a value proposition where you stand out. And I actually think NCT is going to be one of these combination factors that could be used together with a GLP-1. Maybe so you can also dose yourself a little bit less with GLP-1s because there is a lot of reporting on how people use GLP-1s. They do start losing weight, but they also start losing muscle mass. And they start having problems with lack of bowel movement and other things that are really troublesome. And then there's the financial burden of GLP-1s that are still relatively high. So you really want to be on such a drug for the rest of your life. So from that perspective, stepping off GLP-1s, there's also a large conversation about people bounce right back to their normal weight. And then it has all been for nothing, or at least it's been an expensive ride. We would very much like to see if there is an opportunity in letting people be on NCT as a mitigator of such a stepping back. Such a bounce back. Yeah. So is NCT kind of a known molecule in the pharmaceutical industry? Are they aware of it, or have you had to kind of bring them along? So I will start mapping that out. And then, Tyler and Damien, you are both welcome to step in. So it's definitely been a known molecule for like a long time that it's valuable, but it's been very, very hard to get hold of. The drug receptor that it's working on has definitely been known for a long time, but it's been very difficult to address. So Damien, maybe you can unpack that a little bit afterwards here. But basically, it's a really good fit for us because there's plenty of people that have spent a lot of time and effort in showing that this is super, super valuable. We don't really need to convince the people in the market about that because it's probably more than $100 million that have gone into just convincing the world openly about that this is a really intriguing molecule. With that little asterisk shop in the corner that doesn't scale with fermentation, you can't harvest it out of the natural sources, hence you can't get hold of it. So that's been one of the barriers to why it's not been finding a way to market. And then also the element of that from the pharmaceutical side, we are a very unique platform that can even make the natural product version more potent and more specifically focused on sub-disease indications. Such that it becomes pharma-worthy. So these capabilities have just not been present before. Damien? Okay. I think that answers the question sufficiently. I want to go into another commercialization question on the product itself. So I know you've got 180 days or so before you deliver the package to your contract manufacturers. In the end, if you look, you know, in the first quarter of 27, when I'm buying this product to get skinny someday, am I buying a pill? Am I buying a powder? Am I buying gummies? How do you guys view this product of being delivered? What makes the most sense on the discussions you've already had? Yeah. The physical properties of NCT lean very nicely into supplement form. You could also press into a tablet, but supplement is easy. It means we can deliver it exactly into the bloodstream as we'd want to. So part of the partnerships we explore right now, Jordan, is like, sorry, George, is that... I'll go by anything. It's okay. Jordan, now, it's better than the last name we gave you on the last call, mate, is, you know, let's go and put some of that material we made in pilot scale with chemo chemicals, let's go put it into some capsules. And then we'll go and run some human studies, and we're going to generate a lot of interesting data of how the human experience marries up against the animal experience. And we've got a compelling data proposition for our launch in 27. Okay. Tyler, I've got a question on the scale up. Can you, for non-science people, can you kind of explain the 100 times scale up from a third party that we felt that was a huge thing, that it's not just in your lab, it's somebody else doing it. What do we got to do to get to the point where you give the package? What kind of scale up needs to be done by the time you, in the third or fourth quarter, you're delivering that tech transfer package? What are we looking at going forward to get to the point where we can deliver product in scale? Yeah, that initial third-party validation was a really good milestone, an inflection point. It demonstrated that we could develop the recipe, all the conditions and instructions for making this compound, and give it to somebody else, and they could replicate that exactly, and it worked fantastic. So now as we embark upon this scale-up journey, it's understanding the supply chain, but it's also how you get all the inputs to do that at scale. But it's also equally as important to understand what's the manufacturing infrastructure look like, both domestically and globally, right? And so we have an active program right now for requests for information followed by requests for proposals from CMOs to understand what their capabilities are, and we're down-selecting now to a couple of those that check all the boxes or multiple boxes depending on kind of where they're located. And so that's an active process, and we're looking to close on and execute here soon in the coming months. How many in the end do you think you need to be able to fulfill whatever the demand might be? Do you need a handful, or do you need a large number? I mean, it's somewhere between one and more. And so, you know, that being said, a little tongue-in-cheek, but I think… And with more, he means always more. Of course. It depends on how the growth also plays out. Right. Okay, so we're going to get the cannabinoids as well, but I want to talk about the pharmaceutical version here and ask you, because I just got a question on, you know, on these value inflection points, you had a slide talking about the pharmaceutical end. I can understand the nutraceutical end. You announced the, you know, the partners are going to sell it, how many bottles you're, whatever pills you're selling, you know, the number, the mass, the math. How would shareholders view the pharmaceutical side of these molecules? What are the inflection points that shareholders could recognize some value? How would you communicate that to shareholders? I think, Michael, that's probably your question. I'm going to start by saying that overall, our individual products, when they're spun out as either individual companies, joint ventures, or licensing deals, it will be much easier for people to sit down and wrap their head around, because that will look like a normal biotech. So it's all the normal biotech value inflection points that will fit to that. But we as a platform will be an aggregate on that. And of course, then there is some math that goes into like, if we are 100% owner, it's one-to-one. If we are 50-50 joint venture owner, then it's split in the middle, and someone had better had to come with a significant and equal amount of value to the table in that partnership. And if it's a licensing deal, then that follows whatever those terms are. We will, with time, help map that out for people. But it's because we haven't signed them yet that we're not communicating what the exact terms are. So if you had your capital efficient, and you're really hitting molecules that you can get to market on, and make some money, and have some margin, if you had zero concerns about capital, and you just had as much capital thrown at you as you needed, how many molecules could you launch in a given year if it was unlimited? What's possible that hit your criteria? I think we should all give short-form answers to this. George, you keep surprising us with new questions. Yes. Or maybe a countdown, and we all have to say a number. We all like, hold up. Well, I mean, that's a good question. What are you capable of if you look at your filter of what these molecules, what do you think? The answer is like, there's one answer this year, the next 12 months in front of us, and then there's an answer a couple of years down the road. So as long as we remember, there's those two perspectives. Right now, we are probably running at the right mix of like two leads, and we are working on the tail. There's a couple of days, I had a, together with the team, look into our idea management software here just like a couple of hours ago. And if I remember correctly, Tyler, you said like 31 ideas in the idea management internal program that people would like to work on or customers or partners have proposed that we should be working on. So that's a large number. There's no way we can honor all of that interest. And frankly, if we opened up back to just like playing the ball out to the world and saying like, what would you like us to work on, we would fill that in an afternoon. So I mean, hey, look, that's a great answer, which means it was a wonderful question. So let's go over to cannabinoids, and let's talk a little bit about what's possible there. What's been done already? Are there any comps that you can talk about in the cannabinoid space? Because I think I'd mentioned on a prior Zoom that, you know, like SynBio, it had an amazing run up, a lot of capital, and then kind of imploded. Same thing in that space, a lot of hope and kind of an implosion. But, you know, what's going to resurrect that particular vertical? And what are the comps that you could kind of point to and say, hey, here's a good example of what we would try to do? Maybe I take the first part, and Damien, then you take the comps. So basically, it's not random that you see that we are going into things where other people have spent a lot of time and energy, and then not been able to deliver a goal. Because we love those markets. We love when other people have done the pre-work on the science side, on the clinical side, on the market education side, when it's super clear, as it is with cannabinoids, that there's an immense medicinal opportunity. We have known that for a thousand years. We human kind of have known that for a thousand years. But there has been this whole problem with things being intoxicating, and therefore, because there's so much THC in the plant, despite you can take a trace amount of your medicine out, you also get this intoxicating molecule on top of. And that's obviously not something that you want to make pharmaceutical business on. Us solving the ability to be very precise about what we build, and we only make the rare and ultra-rare cannabinoids, or neutral nature versions of cannabinoids, is what makes this platform special. Damien, from a comps perspective, why don't you take that one? Mark, why don't you keep going? I'm just having a small glitch here on PowerPoint. Roger that. So, GV Pharmaceuticals was sold to Jazz for $7.2 billion. Which one was that, Michael? GW. GW. Sorry. Okay. GW. So, that's basically a cannabinoid drug that, honestly, when we look at it, we can't help ourselves and talk about what a version 2.0 should look like, because we can work on such kind of molecules in ways that is not possible before. And frankly, despite that, it's a very large exit and great that they brought that medicine to market from the side effects and delivery mechanisms of that specific drug. It's not an optimal drug. So, look into Jazz Pharmaceuticals, cannabinoid drug. There was a year and a half ago, basically, a compound sold to Novo Nordisk for $1.1 billion. There was a cannabinoid that was supposed to help with weight loss. And it did, and it performed well. There was just a little problem where it made people depressed because it had psychoactive properties. And same story here. It would be wonderful if we could get to operate in an area where we could deliver the value proposition without the problems. And, George, just really quickly to throw on to that, right? I mean, when people encounter these problems in clinic with cannabinoids, they kind of give up. And they give up because their toolbox doesn't allow them to address the problem that they've encountered yet. But when you've got a toolbox that allows you to make these variations and to create really pure, be able to isolate out from the other cannabinoids, now you can actually address the bottlenecks or you address the efficacy or you address perhaps the other indications that they're encountering. You can take those problems off the equation. And we think that's the unlock here for a lot more pharmaceutical, clinical development potential for cannabinoids. Okay. Well, you brought up toolbox. So, I just got a question on toolbox. Can you explain how your toolbox, how that works? Is it in vitro, the in vitro toolbox? Are you doing that internally to figure out the molecules? Or you work with somebody externally? Can you talk a little bit about that process or the combination of both and, you know, what that systematically looks like on a molecule by molecule basis? Tyler, do you want to go first? Yeah. So, you know, the toolbox is there's many components to it. So, in terms of the small molecules, we tend to start with nature as our inspiration. There's a wealth of natural products that are already used in some cases as, you know, in health and wellness space. The problem is, is that maybe they're not efficacious or there's a difficulty in accessing them. What we can do is come in and figure out what's the best and easiest, most cost-effective way to put those molecules together from kind of widely available, kind of inexpensive feedstocks. We then look at it also and we have this other component of our toolbox where we can say, okay, this natural product is used as a great template. If we just modified it, now we can make the properties better. That has some implications in the pharma space. And so, just by putting in different inputs, we don't really even have to change the system. We can get to new molecules with better properties that have opportunities in the pharma space. As we're developing these capabilities for these different natural products, we're continually learning and we keep these modules of kind of catalysts, the ability to make and do these modifications that we can then apply to another new molecule. So, it makes the development timelines that much faster when you're trying to do now a similar modification on a different molecule. And so, it really spans the breadth of molecule focus, module capability focus, and then just our knowledge around enzymes and being able to convert them into exozymes to make these robust catalysts. It's kind of a really all-inclusive toolbox. Okay. I want to go back to NCT and the go-to-market on that. And so, I'm going at you, Damian. Buckle up here. So, you know, when you're talking to a marketing. You know, and I think, look, on the pharmaceutical health side, I'm thinking of a multi-level marketing company. My wife buys stuff for me all the time from these pastor's wives that want to sell some kind of powder that you're going to lose weight on. To go walking into GNC. What's our go-to? What's the perfect partner to bring, you know, NCT to the market in your estimation? Yeah. The perfect partner right now is the partner that can create a very direct conversation with a large consumer group. And actually can present the features of NCT and how it can treat or how it can lean into supporting the wellness objectives of that community. And why? It's because technology ready. We're going to be ready for manufacturing, ready for launch at the end of this year. Yeah. So, what's the next step? Let's get into market. Let's see how big the market opportunity is going to be. And a fast-moving company is going to create a lot of feedback from consumers. Why they love it. Why they don't. Why they're buying it. How much they want to pay for it. That sets that business case foundation for the much larger volume. Much more global strategic brands. Who will come in and formulate and put their own strategies for launching NCT inside. The ingredients that they want to take to marketplace. It's how you bridge from that direct-to-consumer digitized online segment that's so easy to access to retail. And that distribution into retail is where the volume and where the exit scenarios will come. That's how we bridge to that market potential. So, when you're talking to these guys, what's kind of the standard pushback that you get and how do you handle it? Yeah. I mean, everyone wants to know more about, well, what does this do when you put it inside humans? That's sort of an obvious question. But the preclinical results and the safety features we've been able to show are sufficient. Are really compelling for starting to put forms, formulations, and pre-marketing strategies in place. I mean, they just want to know it's backed by good science. And it's credible. And it's real. And it's going to do what they claim it's going to do. And that's a key distinction to a lot of these nutraceutical products that are out there, George. It's one thing to say you're in the market. It's another thing to say you're in the market and you're credible and you're science-based. Well, you know, so, you know, you've sent people over to take a listen to your NCT presentation, which is fantastic, by the way. And on that, you've got a slide. I think on the first year, I think it's a couple hundred thousand bottles of NCT. Yeah. Can you give us your thinking? I know you're just pulling it out. I'm assuming you're pulling that out the best you can. But does that scale up or down depending on your marketing partners? I would assume it would. How did you kind of get to that number? It's a pretty easy number to hit, actually. I mean, that's less than 500 kilograms of NCT. We could probably turn around and produce that right now. But we're doing some optimization work. So that's an easy volume to hit. It's an easy target volume for if you give a partner a year, they can generate that kind of turnaround relatively easy. And it's less about the volume there. It's more about the information that we collect from the market. Sorry, Mark. I like that. That's a good answer. And it's important to know that we have put those indications out in a conservative fashion because we want to always deliver on what we say. The reality is we're talking to partners that says, like, if there's so little available, I want to price it extremely high. So it's only the few and really, really longevity interested people that are willing to pay that price. And then when the volume in manufacturing comes up, then we can take the price down to where we're proposing it is. So there's a lot of these kind of elements. It's not just like a fixed price kind of game. It actually depends on which of the partners we go with. That's the puzzle we get to work on when we're not here pitching the future. Yeah. That's a great. I mean, that's a that's a great answer. Again, it's a wonderful question. I'm going to end with, is there a question you've had? This is your fourth presentation. Is there a question that you haven't been answered that you, you know, wondering, well, why hasn't anybody asked this question? Because I'd really like to be able to answer it. Or you feel like you've it's pretty, pretty been pretty well been covered. Hmm. I stumped them stumped the team. Yeah. Good one, George. OK, but you know what, Michael, you ended on a note that I thought was really good on the bio manufacturing. Like what's your kind of thoughts for, you know, biomanufacturing in the world when you look out in the future? And I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit because it's a good way to end this conversation. Absolutely. And I just want to thank everybody first for the time and attention. But you're right, because we have also known each other for a while. You know, I have a vision for the future where there is enough for everybody. And basically, we are working on this as a serious answer to how humankind can generate new natural resources that are today not available. But we can basically take this scalability of chemistry, but the wideness and breadth of biology itself. And we believe in a bright future. We're working for a bright future. And this is just the start of that. But the potential of this platform is a new generation of chemistry. Well, with that, that ends our presentation. Thank you for joining us. And we look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you.