Hello everybody, I'm Robert Sassoon, Managing Director of Healthcare, Neurosciences and Special Situations at Watertail Research. And today I have the pleasure of hosting Michael Heltzen, CEO of eXoZymes, in this fireside chat. eXoZymes, whose equity trades on the NASDAQ under ticker EXOZ, is a development stage biotechnology company that uses AI engineered enzymes to produce molecules outside living cells. Its cell-free biomanufacturing platform is designed to produce naturally occurring molecules that are valuable but difficult or uneconomic to source at commercial scale, through extraction or conventional chemistry, with the potential to improve production efficiency, consistency and cost. In this respect, the company's lead asset is a compound called NCT, a plant-derived activator of HNF4-alpha, which is a master regulator of metabolism, responsible for regulating thousands of genes that are central to the functioning of the liver, pancreas and the gut. Before we begin, please note that Exozymes' safe harbour statements can be found on the company's website under its investors tab. Also, this fireside chat may not be reproduced or written transcripts distributed without the expressed written consent of Watertail Research. So with those housekeeping items covered, let's jump right in. First of all, welcome, Michael. Thank you, Robert. Thank you for taking your time out of your busy schedule and to join us today. And I'd like to kick off with the first question. If you can give us, for those who are less familiar with the Exozymes, a 30,000-foot overview of the company. Yes, absolutely. And thank you for having me. The short version of what we do is that we identify super valuable natural molecules somewhere out in nature that have been understood to be super valuable, but are inaccessible. So it's something about you found it in a plant somewhere and you can get a tiny amount of it enough to prove that it's super valuable, but you can't get it at scale and you can't, via petrochemistry, basically synthesize it. So that world that lives in between those realities is where we specialize because, as you said in your nice intro, we basically have a unique capability to take the power of nature via the enzymes and run with them outside of living cells, use AI to optimize from a genetics point of view to make these Superman versions of the enzymes that we call Exozymes. And that enables us to build things at scales and purities and at cost levels that no one else can. Thanks for that overview. And let's get into it a little bit deeper. So one of the key questions, and I'm sure you've had this asked of you more than once, about cell-free manufacturing is whether the economics work at scale, particularly when the enzymes themselves still have to be reproduced. Your pilot program has shown NCT to be 35 times more productive than the conventional methods, and you've reported a more than 100-fold improvement in manufacturing cost equivalent relative to your initial process. So can you tell us what the biggest drivers of those improvements were and how much came from enzyme efficiency, enzyme utilization or enzyme lifetime versus other process improvements? Robert, I love your questions and how you like to get into the detail of things. I'll give you as much detail as I can, but overall, I want to basically start by saying, yes, you are absolutely right. This is the biggest unlock we are going to do as a company here in our early years is to take this new way of doing things and proving it out with our first product, NCT. So it's super important for us, and it's obviously an unlock opportunity when you do pioneer work like this and you show the proof. The reason why we are very confident that the economic scales is basically also, and the reason why you ask and the reason why this is a conversation is because everybody saw how cell-based biomanufacturing burnt their fingers on the scaling. They got it to work at research scale. And then when you basically tried to take it up in volumes, that was where the living organisms pushed back. And that was just because a living organism doesn't want to produce anything it doesn't benefit from, definitely not in quantities that is toxic to it. And frankly, also from a financial point of view, if you have a living cell, you also have a million of other things going on. And that means your cost and your purity takes a major hit when you need to isolate your compound out of that soup of a thousand other things. So cell-free at its core is about making things simple by leaving out the complexity from the beginning. So we get into a design control state. So the reason why we are good at predicting at different scales and getting the same performance without changing things is because it's cell-free, because there's nothing alive. There's nothing with its own will in our biomanufacturing. And people do say that we have taken bio out of biomanufacturing, but that's fair. But it's still natural product and natural product-inspired molecules we are making. Yeah, we had some very nice improvements happen between our pilot scale and what we have learned from the pilot scale. Some of that comes from that, yes, we can optimize enzymes by sitting down. And maybe that's worth a little study here. The thing we do is we basically sit down and brute force evolution. We say, this enzyme has this gene right here that expresses this enzyme. If we want to make a Superman version of it so it can live outside of the cell and it can become much faster and better at the specific function it's going to do, we use the AI platform. It's not large language models. It's protein language models and similar algorithms like that to predict what are the genetic optimizations that could lead to a better enzyme exocyme. And when we do that, then we are in a unique position because we're cell-free experts to not have to do the long journey of taking that DNA, putting it into a cell, harvesting the enzyme, testing the enzyme to know if you're right or wrong. We can express cell-free. So we go from the computer analysis to the DNA expressing into enzymes in the laboratory in a record amount of time and performance testing that enzyme and that data coming back to the algorithm in a closed loop that's much, much faster than anyone else can do and much cheaper than anyone can do. That means we can basically brute force evolution. We can take many more shots at goal and find the right optimization. So yes, a lot of things come from the enzyme optimization and that is not as costly for us as it is for the rest of the world. The other perspective is, of course, that when you start getting up in solutions that are running, then you either want a long running solution so you can kind of continue the production and find a way of taking it out. Or if you want to do it bad size, you want it to be fast so it doesn't take up a lot of CapEx inventory. What turned out to be an optimization opportunity that our team unlocked was that we could speed up our super fast solution that only took 20 hours. And we got it now down to four hours by basically realizing where the bottlenecks in the conversions were. And with that kind of talking about a few hours instead of days and for some people weeks for their bio solutions, that's really where a lot of this improvement came from. I have a hard time going into more detail about where the improvement comes from because obviously we don't want to give our trade secrets away. But it is a combination of the bio solution. And I know from questions we will get into later, it's also about when you then mass manufacture it. It's not just making the enzymes and exosymes, taking them out and putting them over and running these very controlled biochemical reactions. It's also the practical job of having the right material standing ready in a supply chain and having it set up so that it gets delivered at the right time so you don't take up space and inventory and so on. So a lot of the things we'll talk about later that is kind of like when can we do what has something to do with the supply chain more than the actual bio solution. Right. Well, that's whatever you said is down to this question was pretty useful. And I think it gives some sort of a sense and picture. And we look forward to further details as they come. Now, you haven't disclosed the absolute cost of producing a CTs, only the magnitude of the improvement relative to your initial process. So impressive as that sounds, if you could replicate the unit economics achieved in the pilot at a commercial scale, would that be sufficient to make NCT commercially attractive? Yes. Good. That's the sort of answer we were in here. Okay. And it doesn't mean we have a plan for making it even better because we can and we will. But do we jump the bar? Yes. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's get to the next question. Exozymes has demonstrated that its proprietary NCT manufacturing process can be transferred to an external partner research scale. And you've now selected Curia Global to support commercial scale. Curia Global is a major CDMO. So what exactly does Curia need to accomplish between now and launch? What must the work this quarter demonstrate? And what are the key milestones in 2027 to get from technology transfer to commercial production in time for a fourth quarter 27 launch? Now, just to add, you've also said that you're qualifying backup manufacturers. How far along is that process and how important is having a second source, both as a contingency if Curia's scale up takes longer than expected and to ensure supply continuity once NCT is on the market? So apologies for the multi-questions in that one question. That's a little bit more complex. It's going to have to be longer than a yes or no on that one. So let me just unpack that a little bit. We transferred to Cayman Chemicals a 100 -liter reaction that yielded half a kilo of ultra-pure NCT at a cost price that was kind of okay. But then we made it even better, and especially from getting the cost down because it moves so much faster is some of the things we just talked about. So I would say that pilot is closer to commercial scale than it is to reset scale. That's just a matter of pride for my team that I want to point that out. And also that half a kilo has been enough that we have been able to start doing formulations and work and so on. And we could, in principle, start brute forcing, just rerunning batches over and over and over again. That's not where the nice profit margins comes from, and that's why Curia is a much better scaling-up partner, because they have this capability of making the specific exercise and then moving them over in a solution where they also make the end product of NCT. And the work there is basically the tech transfer. This is new kind of technology we do run into when we come and present what we want to do. All our partners go like, why would you do that? And it's like, oh, because we can, and it won't mess up the way you think it will mess up. So there's a little bit of a tech transfer pre-education. Then there's the actual tech transfer, making sure that we have all of the exosimes cell lines that are making the enzymes, getting that set up. And we have things like cell banks and backup systems and making sure it's the right one for everybody. There's more work to this than people actually think. And that is then what leads to also having the supply chain ready to be set up. And we have to run some continuous batches to make absolutely sure, both from a regulatory point of view, so we can use the data for that side, but also so we know where the bells and whistles are on the system, both for us to future optimize in the future, but also just to quality assure the batches. And all of that dialing in work is then also dependent on having a supply chain of different feedstocks and materials, being able to contractually sit and ready at the right time. So that's basically first tech transfer and mapping out these things is the first things we're doing here. And then after that, we are basically going to log in a production capacity schedule, how often and so on. And that then comes and gets probably to one of your next questions as well with like, how are we going to sell this? And when are we going to sell this? And those things are obviously needed to know when we should produce it. So long story short, we have indicated to the market that it is basically set as early as the first part of the second part of the year, up to sometime next year. So Q3, Q4, if we are talking Qs, I noticed you said Q4, and that's up to Q4. And that's obviously from a planning perspective. And we are an early stage company. So we try to deliver faster. And we love when we can do that. And sometimes there are the unknown unknowns that then takes a little longer. What about, as the last part of the question was about whether you have any backup manufacturers, just in case things don't go as smoothly as you anticipate and expect? Yes and no. And let me fill that out a little bit. Yes, from the perspective of we have screened a number of manufacturers around the world. And pick Korea as the best of those with all the different parameters that went into that analysis. But there are others that can do the same. And that's both from an expanding capacity with time perspective and redundancy in supply chains and different locations around the world over time. Is it necessarily a direct backup to Korea? I would probably be kind of in a gray zone if I answered an easy yes to that. It is from the perspective of that. That is what you can do if there is any signs. But we are not starting tech transfer to other people and so on. And we have a high degree of confidence that we, together with Korea, are the right setup to do this. And it would be costly for me and my shareholders if we were to build redundancy in from the very beginning. And maybe also the whole idea of starting to build a safety net makes you not focus as much with your time and resources because you are putting it other places. We will lean in very hard to make sure that NCT comes out in the other end together with Korea. I'm sure you've done a lot of due diligence during the course of selecting Korea as well. Okay, so. On visits, spending endless hours and going through a very detailed analysis. So absolute yes to that one. Yeah. So one more question on the platform. Exozymes has a pipeline of other molecules, including rare cannabinoids, which belong to a different chemical class from NCT. So how much of what you've learned in optimizing NCT production can be applied to those other molecules? And can that experience shorten development timelines or reduce manufacturing costs? And what milestones should investors watch to see that platform advantage demonstrated beyond NCT? Good one. And this is circular. It's not just from one direction to another. But yes, every time we build something, the next molecule benefits from it. And this is why we decided to have this nutraceutical with pharmaceutical potential focus area, because the platform can, in principle, be applied to a lot of different kind of chemistries and products and so on. But especially because there's this nice thing with natural products that there's often a genetic code readily available or easily available to us as a blueprint for what we're building. We decided on this area. So to answer your specific question, will the non-intoxicating cannabinoids that we do have a program on, financed by the NIH, has that informed NCT? Yes, to some degree. And that degree I will dive into in a minute. But it's also been the other way around, that it's the cannabinoid work that happened, because it's a grant. So it takes a little longer process-wise. So we actually did a lot of the cannabinoid work first that have then informed NCT that is the reason why we can do these improvements. And I can then also tell you that NCT have also given us insights and ideas that can improve the other way around. And this is why we want to cluster our focus around so that when we have an aha moment, that that applies all the way around. And let me be very concrete with that. So where cannabinoids gave us not just the first challenge of like, can we build this chain of enzymes that makes the mother cannabinoid, the core cannabinoid, but also the different rare versions of it. And when that was proven out, that was obviously a day of celebration. We can now make, replicate, if you will, molecules from nature that is highly valuable. But what it then, as a platform, gave us was also, but we can also do all kinds of things that nature could never do and that petrochemistry can never do. And that way, we are unlocking a new white space of medicinal chemistry from small molecules that have not been available to the world before. That's super, super valuable. So the cannabinoids are informing the NCT. We can make the core molecule NCT. That is the version that, yes, is a natural product, but we can also build new features on that. And that opens up composition of matter, patent opportunities and pharmaceutical opportunities. Let me just think here. Did we have other things in, like, I would just say overall, yes, we shorten the development cycles every time. We build tools one time and then we reuse them. And also from a supply chain point of view, we will end up in a future where there is just, like, volume discounts that starts kicking in because we are doing things. And that benefits everybody under the umbrella. Okay. So going back to NCT again, earlier guidance pointed to a launch around mid-27, while your October roadmap now targets the fourth quarter of next year. Direct to consumer. And you're talking about a direct to consumer launch initially to the nutraceuticals market, supported by larger scale production from Curia. So what's behind the change in timing? And of the key milestones between now and launch, including Curia's technology transfer, the commercial launch partnership that you're due to announce in this quarter, the first quarter next year PK study and the planned GRASTA work, which is the generally recommended a safe work in the second quarter of 2027. Which of these presents the greatest risk to your timeline? Yeah, let's start with the last part first. I wish there was just one that presented the greatest risk and we could just go and knock that one out. It is a combination of things that everything equal puts a risk profile on us from a timing perspective. The reason why it's so difficult to project this because we are pioneers, we are breaking into new territory. The unknown unknowns keeps popping up and we react to them. Sometimes it doesn't slow anything down. Sometimes we even learn from it so we can speed up. Other times it does result in delayed timelines. So when we give guidance and the reason why I'm conservative with the way I give guidance, where I have been saying like, hopefully if everything goes according to plan, but remember it seldom does, then it's already mid next year up to sometime next year is basically the timeframe where we have a high degree of certainty that we will get through the work that is in front of us. There is a combination of work that has to be done. We have talked about the tech transfer. We have talked about, or we'll be talking about how we go to market with NCT. And I'll unpack that here after just finishing off the last couple of things. Things like our PK study and the grass approval. That obviously is something that depends on how other people process our applications and other things. So that's also where you have kind of like an elastic band in your Gantt charts where we hope it's short. We prepare for it being long and we do whatever we can to shorten it. So to go into what is probably by many considered the most interesting question is that because we are a platform, and with time, I have clearly indicated, with time, this platform will have multiple partners, licensing deals, and even people that can come and outright buy a buyer solution if the sticker price is at the right price point. We will have a number of different partners. As a platform, utilizing this new power, control over the natural power of nature is going to unlock a lot of opportunities. But as a relatively young and pioneering company, we need to prove the first product to market. I've said before, I definitely talk to some people that are basically of the mindset of until they can buy it in their local CBS, it's not real. So they need to see it all the way through. And therefore, when we negotiate the partnerships with different people about NCT, and we look at the different options, speed to market is probably the parameter that I attribute the most value to, because we could work with some very large brands that is very slow at taking decisions and very slow at executing. And that's just not to our interest, despite our deep love and appreciation for NCT. It is just the first of many. And we can do this again and again, but we need to power it through. So because of that analysis, it often leaves us in holding up. What can we do ourselves if we just power forward? If we just heads down our team, help on bringing this to market as fast as possible? Is that the faster, better route? Or is it a partnership where we sell? Maybe we power up to that. We start selling. We start manufacturing it. And then people just buy NCT, because I can promise you NCT will sell if we offer it up to people, because there's a lot of people that is very interested in it. And then to a partnership model where we maybe find the right partner that maybe have some infrastructure that needs to be built, and we could plug in, and therefore that becomes the faster route. And then all of the other models. So the reason why I sometimes struggle with giving the really short answers to what we're going to do is because it has to depend on what the best case is for us and our investors. And that is explored by pressure testing it step by step. I can definitely say that we are in conversations with really interesting commercial partners that I could see ourselves co-built the NCT launch with even slightly different business models. But there's nothing that is going to hold us back. We're going to bring NCT forward even if we benefit from doing it ourselves. So that's the analysis that goes into all of this. Okay. So the October deck describes a DTC speedboat strategy, which you just mentioned gave us sort of the background to your thoughts on this. So the October deck describes a DTC speedboat strategy, in which NCTX owns the HN4 F4 alpha story before scaling through formulators and retail. That seems to put NCTX closer to the consumer than the more partner-led model you had discussed earlier in the year. So why start with... I think you partially addressed it, but maybe you could fill it in a bit more. Why start with direct-to-consumer and who bears the cost of acquiring customers? In other words, you pile on a little bit more expense doing it that way. And if NCTX is building and owning the brand, what specifically will the market launch partner you expect to announce this quarter contribute? And how do you see the model evolving as you expand into formulators and retail? Yeah, it builds on what we just talked about. Most extreme choice option is to... We do it ourselves and we just get to market so we can start. There is already a group of people that knows because of the... I think there's more than a thousand research articles on the drug receptor HNF4 alpha, as the master regulator of metabolism. So there is just like we know that demand is there. And therefore, parts of us goes like, you know what? If it's faster to get to market, maybe with smaller batches or exclusive communication to specific verticals, maybe we can do that equally good as everybody else. And therefore, we don't need to wait for anyone. And therefore, we can just run. There are partners. And this is basically what I think this question is getting at, is that there are direct-to-consumer companies that specializes in, for example, longevity supplements. They have an infrastructure already. They have customers already that have loyally been buying equal but different supplements to do other things about longevity and energy and these perspectives. Those people, as a partner, would give us a speedboat. And the reason why we say speedboat is that some of these companies are relatively small companies, but we could get there super fast. Then we are talking to the supertanker kind of partners as well. Some of these very large companies, they have to plan a year ahead, to budget a year ahead, to be able to launch on year three. And by then, all my hair has turned gray. And I'm sure our investors would have lost their hair by that time. So from that perspective, a speedboat approach is an opportunity to get product out in market faster, maybe smaller, but then building from there. And this is back to the unlock of we still have a fair bit of us proving to the world that there is really a new generation of chemistry that have just been unlocked by this combination of AI and cell-free. And until we have proven that it can be manufactured at scale, then I do understand there's a risk associated with that. And that's the value unlock opportunity to kill that risk. Right. I guess we'll be looking forward to some announcement later this quarter. And we could probably guess from what you've been saying that it would be the speedboat rather than the supertanker. My words. If you know a supertanker moving like a speedboat, then give me a call because that's obviously would be very nice. And speedboat can frankly also be extra signs that it's faster to get there by ourselves So we have those options ahead of us. So beyond the initial DTC launch, as you scale through formulator partnerships and retail distribution, first regionally and then nationally, how should investors think about the economics flowing back to Exozymes and its shareholders? Will the value come mainly through royalties, equity ownership in NCTX, ingredient supply margins or some combination of all of these? And how does the relative importance of those streams change as the business scales? Let me start by saying that you and I, we know each other well enough that I can see that. That is a question that comes from you, from the core of your heart, because you would like to sit down and model out exactly what we're going to do so you can put a pricing on us. And I apologize on the behalf of the world's entrepreneurs that we are not structured to a degree where we just write a business plan and deliver only according to business plan. So I'm making a little bit of fun here and saying what the reality we sit with is that we have to stress test these theses. We live in a world where everything we say is a thesis that we go out and hammer on. And we actually have the mindset that it's really good when we are wrong about our thesis and we find the right thing because it's a much faster path to market than living under that umbrella of like because the business plan says, then we have to do. And then people keep knocking their head into the invisible walls and other things that keep success from happening. So, yes, if you look at the different models we have talked about, we start with us as exozymes. If we take that forward ourselves, then you could argue that. And if we don't inform too much, then you would have to wait for revenue to be able to model us. And then maybe at some point we are willing to give revenue projections. And then at that point, you can start putting your risk analysis up against that. How good are they at delivering on what they project and so on? So that's kind of like the one end of what's possible. Then one step closer to partnerships without it being partnerships. It's just us producing NCT and selling it bulk out to people at a good price for us, but for people at a good enough price that they can bring it to market and make business of it. Then you have a little bit of the same structures going on, but it's slightly different. Where I think the model of exozymes will be long-term. So I'm not just talking about NCT specifically now, but long-term is a licensing model. We are uniquely capable of unlocking valuable molecules in biosolutions that can be patent protected. And the production format of it and the molecules that comes out of it can either be replica of something out of nature. So you have the grass path forward or if it's skincare or cosmetics or something like a fast to market. But also the engineering capabilities to make new to nature versions that are more potent or whatever you want it to be. So you can get composition of matter. That's fundamentally what we uniquely bring to the table. And therefore the business model has to depend on who sits on the other end as a partner. So we will probably be a little frustrating to model here the first couple of years because not only can you see us do NCT in a certain way. And when you finally, finally Michael showed us how he's going to make business on it together with the team. And we can start modeling then. Then the next thing comes up and then maybe fits one of the other journeys. And that means you can't just replicate the first thing and say, okay, now five of these. And what does that look like? So there is no doubt that as an early state company with a brand new technology that is really the physical manifestation of AI. It is that wild. We are, of course, not robotics and drones and cars that people typically think about. We are literally unlocking molecules otherwise inaccessible to humankind. And that's a big vision. So if you want to trade on us on a quarterly basis, then you're going to have to share the headache that I carry as the CEO to find the solutions on those things step by step and figuring it out over time. If you're a long-term investor, you can probably lean back a little bit more and say, this is super interesting. There will be different pathways to different things. And maybe sometime in the future, it will be better just to run the same model over and over and over again. So we don't have to negotiate with people. It's a take it or leave it situation. You said the long term, you see this as a platform licensing model. So royalties and licensing income that will come with it. Upfront payment. And likely also that we could supply the exocymes in certain cases. And it depends a little bit. If it's for the pharmaceutical side, then it's more about getting enough of the material that you can get to clinic and make sure you have a right backbone. That's where we can probably be more of the infrastructure. If it's more bulk manufacturing, that's probably where Curia and others will be a better setup. Okay. So NCT is, as we mentioned, is a naturally occurring molecule. So the molecule itself offers a limited scope for composition of matter pattern protection. Now, Brightseed has already commercialized an NCT NFT ingredient through Manitoba Harvest and has demonstrated production of NCT through precision fermentation. So where does XSIM's high purity single molecule NCT have the clearest competitive advantage? Is it manufacturing cost, consistency, formulation flexibility, or the ability to generate product specific evidence? And could a company like Brightseed or a larger ingredient supplier ultimately be a customer or a commercial partner rather than simply a competitor? Your question actually kind of gives the answer. You said where does XSIM's high purity and single molecule NCT have the clearest competitive advantage? It's because it's high purity. No one else can make it high purity the way we can. It is a single molecule, so you don't have other things mixed in that is, frankly, just because people can't isolate it out without also removing NCT. So you don't have the isolation cost. You don't have the inconsistencies. You don't have the big variation that when you work with cells. And then we can make it at quantities, price points, and purities that no one else can. And yes, we have offered Brightseed and other large ingredients players that they can be customers or commercial partners. So we don't need, as a platform, we don't need to kind of own all verticals. We're very aware that we are uniquely capable of making new ways of making molecules, and that we should spend our time and focus on that, despite we have to prove ourselves with NCT and go deep. So I might say what I just said and then still take it to market myself in the scenario where I can't get a partner to move fast enough. But we are absolutely open for partnerships and absolutely open for that other customers. Other companies could be our customers, either on us delivering the material to them where they already have the infrastructure to go to market, or if they want a natural product that is more potent, more bioavailable, more focused on a specific, I'm not talking about on the pharma side, more specifically suited for a certain indication, also so they can get to own the composition of matter patterns on it, then we're the right people to talk to. Okay. So Exozymes, let's talk about finances. Exozymes has raised about $20 million in non-deloative funding, roughly half of its total funding. Even so, taking NCT through manufacturing scale-up, regulatory work, and commercial launch will require additional capital. So what is the parent company's cash runway today, and how are you thinking about funding these milestones? Raising outside capital directly into NCTX, contributions from the launch partner or equity at the parent level. How do you weigh the dilution that comes with raising capital at the parent level against giving up ownership of NCTX? Fundamentally, we use math and our best ability to find out what is best, but that's obviously not exactly what you're asking about. Let me unpack it. So first of all, let's just together celebrate that we have managed to build a platform that people think should cost a billion dollars or more to build. And we've done that for $20 million investment capital and $20 million of non-dilutive funding. We have a platform that is doing things that people cannot believe, and they can especially not believe that it's not per project that it costs that kind of money. People are used to timelines of, give me five years and $50 million or $100 million, and I'll go and build you this biosolution for one molecule. And in five years, I will tell you if I think it will work, and then give me another three to five years to actually try to scale it up where a big percentage of those companies just disappeared as in diet because they couldn't scale it. So we have something that is a new generation of biomanufacturing, for sure, from a cost and speed perspective. And we want to be the company that basically you can come with an idea to us, and we can help you have your product ready for the market to sell in two years. I'm not saying we can do that right now with NCT, but it is a game changer how fast we can move in the development cycles, and it's a game changer how fast we can do the manufacturing, the cost, and the purity. And that is basically, think of me as producing competitive advantages for my partners so they can go out and win in the individual markets. So we have cash runway for this year, and we also have capital offers that could finance our future. We obviously, like all these other things, are going to do what is the best market terms. And we have, it's an honest matter that it is an interesting capital market we're looking at right now, but we're fortunate to have really good connections and ways of raising money in networks of people that are long-term interested investors and not short-term interested investors. So that gives me confidence that we are in a good position. How do we then do that balance of should we sell off or parts of NCT at the business unit NCT that we have said if it became a company of its own, we could sell, if it's a joint venture model, we could sell half of it, let's say that, to someone else. And then how would that dynamics between raising money at the mothership or in this new potential unit? Right now, we are fully focused on keeping all the value in exoscience. We have theorized, as you have also heard me do today, a number of different pathways to market. We will take whatever is the best for us and our shareholders. That's the only clear answer I can give. When that's said, it's like we are getting very concrete things to do the analysis on now. Like this is the offer that is on the table versus our alternative versus our alternative. So it is why I said with a smile, it comes down to math in the end. What is best for exoscience and our shareholders? Okay. So final question for this fireside chat. Looking ahead over the next 12 months, the story comes down to three things. Showing that NCT can be manufactured economically at commercial scale, building a successful route to market through NCTX, and proving that the platform works beyond NCT. Which of those matters most over the next year? And what are the specific dated milestones investors should hold you to so that by next October, they can judge whether you've delivered? Yes. I am smiling because I'm not going to give specific dates for the exact reason we talked about. It's an elastic band. But I'll give you the frames. The single most important thing right now is getting NCT to market, proving the platform and proving the potential of NCT. It is an amazing molecule. This drug receptor has been studied by literally everybody in the metabolomics spaces of like, what can we do to speed up metabolism? Because that's such a good value proposition. Here is a natural product that can do that, and it's just not been accessible in purity and quantities and cost points where it makes sense to mix into things. The few things that have gone to market have tiny amounts of NCT in it, and it's not a pure version, and it's still expensive. So getting to a point where we and all our partners can come with a value proposition so individuals can start benefiting from it, we really look forward to that. That's the single most important thing because it releases a lot of value with NCT, and it has this really nice secondary effect of proving the platform. After that, what is most important, it's probably showing ourselves and our investors that our... I'm now saying thesis, not because I doubt we can do it because I'm a company builder that does not see anything else than thesis until they have happened. And I stress test the thesis all the time. So the thesis of that this platform can produce new, very valuable natural product and natural product inspired molecules that has been inaccessible up until now, showing that that that's a consistent thing we can do. And you can argue we've already done it with the non-intoxicating cannabinoids and being able to take something that was inaccessible, not because it didn't exist. It does exist in the plant. You just have it mixed up with THC. And if you have THC in, it's not non-intoxicating anymore. And if it's intoxicating, you don't have a way of making that a product for neither nutraceutical nor pharmaceutical applications. So us showing we can unlock that is kind of the next thing. And you can argue we're so far in the process that we kind of have done that already, proving that those things can then be customized with our medicinal chemistry tool case that only we have access to. And bring those new kind of new to nature candidates close to the clinic is what we got the NIH grant to do. And that's going to be an unlock again of the platform. And then we have promised ourselves to basically screen. We had 100 plus ideas, screen the top ones of those. And then when we have proof of concept that we can produce those, the same thing we did with NCC two years ago, where we sat down and basically, maybe a little bit less actually, and said like, this is a really interesting molecule. But that's the big unlock. Deliver on NCT next year. And the proxy of that is showing the way we get to market, preferably with a really, really good partner that can take us even faster than we can run ourselves. But we always have the opportunity to run ourselves and make it happen fast and then proving the platform. But when we have done that, I think people will look back and hope that they, based on this conversation, took the best possible position. And that is an exciting 12 months we have in front of us. Yes, I think there's a lot of excitement to look forward. And we'll definitely be interested in following you the progress. And we'll obviously love to have you back for a fireside chat or podcast. And anyway, we'll wrap it up there. So thank you again, Michael. Michael Heltzen, thank you for joining us today and for sharing your perspective on Exozymes and the opportunity ahead. Clearly, Exozymes is heading towards an inflection point. And we're looking forward to following your progress, as I said, as we move NCT toward commercialization and demonstrate what the platform can do beyond that. So I'd like to thank everybody who's joined us in this fireside chat. And if you have any questions for Michael, please send them to me and I'll be sure to pass them on to Michael. For those who want to go deeper into the company, our initiation of coverage report on Exozymes is published on October 1st. It's available on the open access Water Tower Research website, www.watertowerresearch.com. And we'll be following the company's progress, as I said, against the milestones in our ongoing coverage. In the meantime, have a great day, everyone. Thank you.