CelLBxHealth Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Massive Restructuring and Pivot to Commercial Partnerships

Moderator, Investor Meet Company: To the CelLBxHealth plc investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin, I’d like to submit the following poll. Then I’d hand you over to Peter Collins, CEO. Good morning, sir.

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Peter Collins, CEO at CelLBxHealth. I’m joined this morning by our Executive Chairman, Jan Groen, and our Head of Finance, Sinéad Armstrong. Let’s get moving. Key highlights about CelLBxHealth and the exciting opportunity in front of us and the reason I guess everyone’s gathered here. We have a key platform for better understanding of cancer biology, identifying patients who would benefit from important therapies and to enable drug companies to develop more therapies to address a huge number of unmet clinical needs in the oncology space. Well-established with a leading platform, with high recovery and viability rates. We understand very well now that in a blood test, ctDNA falls short in many areas, and only via circulating tumor cells can you address the full picture in a multi-omic analysis of what’s coming or what’s the characteristics of the tumor.

Well-established on three commercial pillars of instruments, consumables, a pharma and CRO servicing business, plus laboratory-developed tests. We’ve got a significant install base across academia and globally. We’ve put in place some anchor pharma and clinical partnerships since our reset at the end of 2025, beginning of 2026. A recent announcement you’ll have seen with the master services agreement with AstraZeneca. Initiated two clinical studies with AdventHealth, who acquired a Parsortix platform for their work, which we’re very excited about. You’ll hear more in presentation. We’ve also put things in place for our partnership with the NHS, which would enable a significant number, 10% or 15% of the non-small cell lung cancer patient population, to potentially get access to drugs, very effective therapies that they can’t currently get.

We’ve right-sized the cost base of the business, with over GBP 6.6 million annualized cash operating cost savings versus last year. This would’ve started in action in 2025. Refocused our commercial approach leadership across the team. An accelerated path to positive EBITDA at the end of 2028. Company is moving forward nicely against the new strategy, which we pulled together and was the basis of the fundraise in November, consolidated onto one site, excellent facilities over 6,000 sq ft of lab space. ISO 13485 certified, SOC 2 for pharma. A new focused team. We’ve reduced the headcount by approximately 60%, went from circa 100, or gone from circa 110 employees at the end of 2025, down to 35. Platform has both good validation in multiple cancer types and a significant patent portfolio.

We’ve addressed some key areas in terms of standard care workflows with already in the first part of this year, for increased recovery rates and viability of cells for further analysis. Platform was already well-validated in terms of significant publications, over 120 publications. Active sites over the past 10, 15 years has processed over 250 samples. In the cost optimization areas described earlier, and reduced our cost this year to GBP 6.7 million, and cash in the bank at the end of Q1 was GBP 4.3 million. Moving forward now with a well-characterized pipeline, on the commercial delivery side with very well put together and well understanding U.S. leadership on the commercial side, which is primarily where we expect most of our revenues to come going forward, and expected a 50% increase on revenues from 2025.

The opportunity in front of us is significant and we’re able to play a significant role in developing the next generation of precision cancer diagnostics, with partners. The market opportunity is currently valued at GBP half a billion, projected to reach GBP 1 billion plus by 2031 with a CAGR of 10.4%. There is an absolute need for circulating tumor cells, both in patient management and in drug development. As of now, I’ve this year been to the American Association for Cancer Research and the American Society of Clinical Oncology, which are the two biggest oncology meetings held annually for a global audience. From the podium, CTCs have been referenced, data shown, and questions responded to by the major key opinion leaders of CTCs, becoming into standard of care clinical utility as we speak now. Exciting time for the company. CTCs are both complementary and unique beyond circulating tumor DNA.

We’ve got a new business model, which has shifted away from science to commercialization and only pursuing opportunities which provide revenue in the near and medium term, and that’s driven by a partnering approach, both with lab services providers and the diagnostics and tools companies that provide the equipment and workflows to generate data from those environments. We’re able to address multiple partners across the ecosystem of drug development and then through to the clinical tests that physicians use to manage their patients. Exciting time. We have a well-qualified sales pipeline that we’ve been able to build on and, after a reset, then moving forward, we’re excited about how we can build the pipeline moving forward. New management team with strong experience in the commercial and the clinical space and, as I say, very focused on delivering revenues and profitability as rapidly as possible.

Our restructure has been focused solely around our ability to deliver on these specific revenue-generating projects. Essentially, we’re now able to be part of addressing some of the blind spots that exist in the current cancer testing paradigm. All patients get a tissue biopsy at diagnosis, but that’s not a process you can ever repeat on a regular basis, and the tissue itself from the original biopsy is restricted in that cancers evolve over time, the material degrades over time, and often lesions are inaccessible. There’s a real need to be able to address that. CTCs can add there. ctDNA isn’t always present in the blood. There are well-understood low-shedding tumors, many types, and there is also some restrictions in terms of dynamic range and sensitivity whereby false negatives can often be generated.

You also have the scenario whereby circulating tumor cells and the CTCs, what’s known as CTC clusters, a lot of work initiated by one of our major collaborators, Professor Nicola Aceto at the ETH in Switzerland, and many others have followed up on his work. CTC clusters are known to have high metastatic potential, and Professor Nicola Aceto and others are now working assiduously on developing so-called cluster busters. Similarly, there’s a whole wave of cancer tests based on ctDNA, but originally developed from a signature that comes from tissue. If that tissue’s not available, you can’t develop the signature. There’s a significant number of patients who currently can’t get access to the testing available, and CTCs play a perfect accompaniment and add additional information.

The platform itself, everything revolves around a simple blood draw, 10 mL blood sample, and then we take that blood, pull it through the instrument you can see at the top of the image in the middle, and then we very gently pump the blood through a microfluidic device or a cassette, as we refer to it, and there we’re able to separate cells on the basis of their size, shape, and their deformability. We can then capture those intact cells and clusters and then recover them from the cassette for a whole range of downstream analysis, which you can see in the blue box on the right. What we can do there is so much more than just looking at circulating tumor DNA, which is basically coming from dead and dying cells.

We’re in a very strong position to provide the materials required for all this downstream work. Recently, there was an independent expert consensus. Many of the people who are on this paper are very much involved in a lot of current clinical drug trials with pharma and all supported the consensus of integration of CTCs into standard care workflows within five years, and that CTCs provide so much more information than we can currently get with the limits of ctDNA. Many, 40% in that panel, identified the Parsortix as the most promising next-generation technology for clinical applications, and this is because of our unique and very gentle approach to recovering cells and keeping them in the best possible condition for downstream analysis.

We’re definitely in the right place at the right time, with real need to use CTCs, say, in understanding tumors better, in monitoring patients and in drug development. CTCs are able to do what ctDNA cannot when there’s no tissue available, as described. When you have a low-shedding cancer, we can see circulating tumor cell clusters, which you can’t with ctDNA. We’re then able to do a whole series of functional and drug-resistance biology, which you can’t do with fragments of DNA. We’re able then to look at the characteristics of individual cancer cells that we know are live and would have recently come from the tumor itself. That ability to look at single-cell omics is very powerful and, again, we can then do repeat sampling on a multi-dimensional basis.

Basically, we are able to transform inaccessible tumors into actionable biology, and thus we extend precision medicine beyond the current paradigms of tissue and ctDNA. The market is estimated to be a GBP 1 billion opportunity by 2031. We were able to see that move now from circa GBP 400 million-GBP 500 million at this time, moving forward to potentially up to GBP 1.15 billion in total addressable market in 2031, with a very good CAGR at 10.4%. We are able to participate there with our instruments and cassettes, other reagents we provide, and with our pharma and laboratory services, which not only we run in-house, but also with many other partners in the ecosystem. The platform is well-validated. We have 61 sites with 102 instruments working at the moment. Say 250,000 samples that have been processed over the last 10 years or so, and 120 plus peer-reviewed publications across multiple tumor types.

The platform itself has all the required regulatory and quality characteristics to work successfully with our pharma and CRO partners. We have a good patent portfolio to support that. Bottom right-hand corner is a number of partners we have or have previously worked with. AstraZeneca and Ematix are live partners as we speak, others that we previously worked with. We have excellent work going on in a number of sites around the world with multiple pharma support or work in those labs. The application across the cancer care continuum is a very attractive space for us to operate in because there are so many options where we can provide help here in the pharmaceutical world.

Many companies now have a pipeline that includes the antibody-drug conjugates, the radioligand therapies, and other cell therapies, which all require an understanding of proteins or so-called epitopes on the cell surface of the cells that you ideally wish to direct the drugs to. You cannot see that with circulating tumor DNA, and it is very difficult to do from the original tissue block. The optimal way to do this is to be able to identify cells that have come from the tumor, and that is most easily done with circulating tumor cells in the blood. It is an exciting time for the company as we move forward now with our partners across the continuum, and we can address both the fastest-growing area of cancer testing at the moment, which is the MRD space, where companies like Natera now are running hundreds of thousands of tests on patients every year.

I think they have a market cap of about GBP 35 billion currently based on the fact that ultimately, ctDNA-guided therapy is super important across all patient groups. The fundamental challenge with MRD is it is not going to tell you enough about what therapy to switch the patient to. If you combine CTCs with that, you are going to get that information to say, "Okay, this is the direction of travel of the tumor, and these are the therapies we should go on." That is very much broad-based, that we have specific applications in a very large cancer group like non-small cell lung cancer. We can also address issues for rare cancers, where often tissue and ctDNA is unavailable.

In a very specific area of circulating tumor cell cluster biology, which is pan-tumor and associated with metastasis, there are a number of groups who are working on developing these so-called cluster busters. We’ve anchored a number of partnerships to de-risk our revenue plans for 2026 and 2027. AstraZeneca is the first of what we hope will be a significant number of biopharma agreements. That enables us not only to do testing in-house, but also to be able to work with our partners in the CRO world to have an amplification effect on the number of projects that we can be involved in. We don’t have to do them all, drive them all, but the Parsortix and the cassettes are at the core of those.

Similarly, the partnership we’ve just announced with AdventHealth, who are one of the largest private healthcare providers in the U.S., circa GBP 20 billion operation and the better part of 50 hospitals. They’ve started these two clinical studies in cancer patients, which is essentially an approach to being able to monitor cancer patients remotely using a blood test. It’s been demonstrated that patients who embark on moderate exercise have better relapse rates and also overall survival characteristics. Paper recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine, part of a program, which I think is well accepted in every healthcare system, of wanting to use a blood test to be able to monitor their patients remotely and only bring them into hospital when you absolutely need to.

We’ve with our active programs with academic centers and CROs are moving forward, which again, pulls pharma in one side and then delivers the laboratory-developed tests and clinical utility on the other. We think the NHS Royal Marsden project we’ve moved forward enabling an additional 10% or 15% of lung cancer patients to get access to available and very effective therapies, would have a knock-on effect globally. A bit more about that specific program and how it doubles up. It’s the largest, most prevalent cancer globally, certainly here in the U.K. as well. ctDNA has certain limitations there, something of the order 10%, 15%, the test is uninformative. At that point, these patients can’t be biopsied.

The ability to reflex, where there’s no information to using CTCs to identify actionable alterations that would see patients eligible and getting access to those drugs is super important. This is a well-recognized, well-understood phenomena. This project we’ve started with the NHS, will work towards increasing the number of patients. It will support the NHS’s KPIs, which requires a treatment plan within 21 days of a diagnosis. Obviously, you’ve got no information about a patient here. 10%-15% of non-small cell lung cancer patients is roughly 6,000 patients in the U.K. That’s a lot of patients who you don’t really have an effective treatment pathway for, and it’ll help generate the real-world evidence to enable national commissioning further down the track. Obviously, any assay will have to be validated in-house in the laboratory at the Royal Marsden that currently offers the Marsden 360 test.

We’ve reset the company, funded it to move forward on a new trajectory and growth path. We had GBP 4.3 million in the bank as at the end of 31st of March. We’ve made a tremendous amount of cuts and cost savings, as rational as possible, over GBP 6.6 million annualized cost savings this year. We expect our running costs, operating costs in 2026 to be circa GBP 5.5 million. The revenue guidance that we recently provided is a 50% increase on the revenues we had last year, we are funded through into 2027. We’re confident about the revenue trajectory that we can build on with the current key anchor accounts and partnerships we’ve been putting in place and work with other partners that’s currently ongoing. From a capital and funding perspective, we have a number of options open to us.

Obviously, we’ll be delivering operating cash from the current business. We have commercial milestones that are obviously tied into deliverables, which will clearly become part of the operating cash that we pull in. There is also a number of strategic collaborations with customers or industry partners, that we believe are open to us that will provide non-dilutive funding. Equally, with the very strong revenue board that we’ve put in place and excellent relationship with existing shareholders, we’ve got a good dialogue going forward to enable to leverage the equity capital markets, as and when is required. Some key catalysts moving forward to the end of 2027. AstraZeneca was pivotal for us, as was AdventHealth, addresses pharma and clinical utility, enables us to work more closely with the academic and CRO community.

We can see that expanding out by the end of first half of 2027. The NHS lung program data we expect to have read out by the end of the year, then we move it to the next stage of supporting that regulatory development with the Marsden. By the end of 2027, given other work that we’ve done in terms of improving both the pre-analytic side of securing the maximum number of circulating tumor cells in the best possible condition, is going to see an amplification effect with a number of partners that we’re currently working with, establishing workflows for a number of key downstream analyses. As part of the reset, we now have a new management team and a board, which is absolutely built for the next stage.

Our chairman, Dr Jan Groen, is formerly the CEO of MDxHealth, which is a company he transitioned from Belgium, from about 15 years ago now. Took that and reestablished it on the NASDAQ in the U.S. That is a $100 million-plus business going forward and has worked in multiple other organizations across the European-U.S. divide, with a significant amount of success. Similarly, I’ve been working in the precision medicine area now for the past 20 or so years and moved with key areas of what was initially the CDx revolution, the companion diagnostic revolution, through into liquid biopsy and now MRD, leading to three strategic buyouts. Our board, very experienced and knowledgeable board, sector experienced non-execs in both the private and the public marketplaces, direct experience in biotech.

We’ve got experience in the AIM and NASDAQ across the board, and clearly with Jan myself, a really good understanding of operational and commercial requirements to build a successful business. Our Head of R&D, Lavanya Sivapalan, we’re very fortunate, comes out of the Vogelstein Johns Hopkins group. Vogelstein was at one time the most cited scientist on the planet. He was part of founding companies like Exact Sciences, which I’m sure many of you will be aware, just got acquired for a mere GBP 23 billion by Abbott. There are a number of, I mean, Bert and his group, one of the most successful academic departments on the globe for a significant number of businesses, and Lavanya was lucky to work both in the translational oncology group and also in a number of the companies that were spun out from that. Very fortunate there.

We have a new commercial lead in Christina Dorris. Spent the past 15 years specifically in cancer diagnostics, and led teams and built businesses in liquid biopsy with Guardant Health, and most recently Epic and Menarini in the CTC space. Similarly, heading finance is Sinéad Armstrong, who’s been with the company many, many years and has significant experience with AIM-listed companies, capital allocation, and obviously all the cost discipline required to manage this business. Last but not least, Michelle Munson, who’s our Chief of Staff and HR Director with a good background in pharma and biotech prior to. We’ve got a very good team on an operational day-to-day basis and a board of non-execs who, and the board itself, obviously with Jan myself on as well, we have a really good fundamental understanding of the business. Excited about what we can deliver as a team.

Move to the financial results and on to Sinéad. Thank you.

Sinéad Armstrong, Head of Finance, CelLBxHealth plc: Hello, everyone. Financial highlights for the year ended 31st of December 2025. We had revenues of GBP 1.4 million. Rather challenging market conditions and slower commercial conversion than we had anticipated, down from 2024 of GBP 2.9 million. Our product and services revenues of GBP 1.1 million were close to the previous year. Our pharma services revenues were where we struggled because of slower commercial conversion. Gross profit margins were held at 62%. We had an operating loss of GBP 19.2 million. This is represented by operating costs of GBP 21 million. Of this, cash costs were GBP 14.5 million, which includes restructuring costs of GBP 1.2 million. Non-cash costs were GBP 6.5 million, and there were GBP 3.8 million of one-off impairments in that number. The loss after tax was GBP 19.5 million. That compares with GBP 14.2 million the previous year. In December, we had a successful fundraise. We raised gross proceeds of GBP 8.4 million.

Net proceeds of GBP 7.4 million. At the end of the year, we had GBP 7.3 million in cash. After Q1, we had GBP 4.3 million in cash, accounting for a run rate of GBP 1 million a month for the first three months as we got through the restructuring period. Since the end of Q1, the run rate is down to less than GBP 0.5 per month, and we expect that to decrease steadily for the rest of the year, coming out more of an average of GBP 0.6 million for the year. In terms of financial recess, based on the pre-restructuring costs in terms of annual cash burn, we’re looking at GBP 14.5 million in 2024, a decrease to GBP 13.1 million in 2025, and down again to GBP 5.5 million in 2026, and expected to decrease further in 2027.

Gross margins, we’re trying to retain at least 65% in 2026, which good margins from products, and sometimes brought down slightly by the pharma services. EBITDA, we had GBP 13 million of EBITDA this current year, and that we’re hoping be reduced down to GBP 3.9 million loss in 2026, and hopefully positive from 2028. Headcount, which is a driver of more than 50% of our costs historically. We had 130 headcount averaged in 2024. In 2025, that was reduced to 108, and currently we’re looking at an average headcount for 2026 of 35, which may be reduced down to as low as 32 by the end of 2026. Overall, operational restructuring has been completed. It resulted in quite significant cost savings, as you can see. More than 60% reduction in headcount.

We’re consolidated into one single operating location in Guildford now, having surrendered one lease at a fairly good rate. We have spent quite a significant time renegotiating supplier and service contracts, reducing costs right throughout the business, and we’re continuing to do so as we move through the year. The focus is very heavily on revenue-generating activities and projects, and any additions to headcount will be directly as a result of revenue-generating activities.

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Thanks, Sinéad. From an operational perspective, some significant highlights here, and I would really like to emphasize what a fantastic job the new team has done, ably supported by the board. We had to move from two sites to one site. We had a laboratory on both sites. Huge amount of work to transition, and then also get that previous building back into good shape to hand back to the landlords. The team did a fantastic job, and in the process, during the last six months, has made some significant improvements in our ability to both recover and provide viable cells for downstream analysis. The research team, or the R&D team, went from the better part of 60 people to circa 12, the team’s done a fantastic job there.

We’ve reassessed the pipeline, ensured, again, that all the projects that we operate on are driven purely by commercial reasons, return on investment in the short, medium term, and putting all the right partners in place. I think the team should be really congratulated on what we’ve got to there. The corporate rebrand to CelLBxHealth was completed to ensure that we could be revised and aligned with that strategic direction. Obviously, it was an opportunity for me to come in as CEO, strengthen the board with three non-executive directors. Obviously, we’re well set now with some good strategic collaborations with QIAGEN, Myriad, Illumina, and Roche Diagnostics. That broadly covers some major diagnostic companies, labs, and also tools providers that provide equipment and systems that are prevalent across the entire lab environment.

We’re really well embedded with the right partners across the ecosystem that supports both patient management and drug development and cancer research. During that period, AstraZeneca has been signed, and we begin moving forward with work there. AdventHealth was important for us with those studies, and as just described, the health service is a super opportunity because if it works out as we anticipate, there will be global implications for that. Maybe as a good example, as I recall it, is that in the breast cancer space, there’s a recent paper that came out from one of the leading groups as a combination of the University of Athens, but also Weill Cornell and Professor Massimo Cristofanelli, who’s a very well-known figure in the cancer world.

A paper there showed where they were comparing mutations in a gene called ESR1, which is very closely associated with patients who have so-called HR, hormone receptor, positive breast cancer. These were advanced patients, and they were looking at methylation of that gene and mutations in the ESR1 gene in ctDNA and also in the circulating tumor cells. The ESR1 mutations are significant for getting patients on a next generation drug. Currently approved is a drug called elacestrant from Menarini, but there are a number of other in development, including AstraZeneca’s camizestrant. Anyway, the CTCs showed a prevalence of ESR1 mutations over 65% of the time, versus in the ctDNA, they were only picking up these mutations just over 25% of the time.

Real food for thought there, and I think one of the reasons why Professor François-Clément Bidard at ASCO, when asked the questions, "What is the role of CTCs? Is there any role? Are we going to be using them?" It was a resounding yes. Frankly, if I had or knew of someone with advanced breast cancer and they’d had a negative result on ctDNA, I think I’d be asking for my circulating tumor cells to be looked at, if at all possible. Outlook for the next 18 months, obviously based around our product sales and lab services, and then the tests that we both develop in-house and with partners. We will remain really good and prudent stewards of cash and look for all the efficiencies we can. We’ve already done a fantastic job in reducing the cash burn in the short term.

Expect to reduce that further to GBP 5.5 million to 2026. In the process efficiencies, we’ll see increased margin and a 50% increase on revenues in 2026 versus 2025, and we remain on target for EBITDA breakeven in late 2028. All in all, hope you agree, it’s a very exciting investment thesis and a place to be for the company. It’s very focused. We have a leading platform, a credible path towards scale. We are well differentiated, not only from addressing the CTC platform, but obviously, as complementary and unique to doing things that ctDNA or tissue cannot. We’re already validated at a good scale in terms of publication samples, et cetera, so the credibility to work with the platform already exists.

We’ve already done more work to ensure that the performance we get is at an improved level to ensure both in-house and with our partners we get the best possible experience. The anchor wins are in place. There are more to follow and some other announcements that we will put together over the next couple of quarters. Well-funded through. Again, a big thanks to everyone who contributed to investment and enabling us to be able to restructure back in November. Cost savings have been actioned. We’ve done what we said we’re going to do. The new commercial leadership, I think, is really coming into play now, and we are funded through first half of 2027. Thank you very much for your time, and happy to address any questions.

Moderator, Investor Meet Company: That’s great. Thank you for updating investors today. Could I please remind investors to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. For your reference, a recording of today’s presentation will be available on the Investor Meet Company platform shortly after the meeting has ended. Guys, as you can see, we’re receiving a number of questions during today’s presentation. If I could just hand over to Paul McManus of Walbrook to host the Q&A and to read out the questions to the team, and then give responses where appropriate to do so, and I’ll pick up from you at the end.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: Thank you very much. We’ve got quite a few questions, some pre-submitted and then some that have come through. We’ll try to get through those before the hour is up. One question that was pre-submitted, but also has cropped up in the presentation is about the Solaris collaboration, asking for really an update on the opportunity or the status. The question that we had pre-submitted, would you resume this collaboration? Can you just explain what status the collaboration is?

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Yeah. The current status of the collaboration is that it is in stasis. At this point in time, we don’t have the bandwidth to drive that program forward. That was originally part of the previous strategy, which was around building all these tests ourselves. At this stage, we don’t have the bandwidth to be able to do that. For the time being, we know the strategy we’ve embarked upon, and we intend to continue down that route. I think there was one other question that kind of looked at, again, studies from the past. Like I say, when we’re in a position with partners to address those, we can come back to them. For the time being, we can’t.

We don’t have the resources to be distracted away from the critical things we see now in terms of driving the business forward, in a partnership approach.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: Talking of driving the business forward, somebody asks, "How many big pharma are you in talks with now?

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Currently, we have good conversations going with about half top 10 pharma. Like I say, having worked both sides of the fence here many times before, you need to be careful about how many big pharma you wanna work with. You’d love to work with all of them, we barely count as something on a pinhead compared to too many of them. With the people we wanna work with, I think, and who want to work with us, are ahead of the curve. I think we’re very comfortable about the partnerships we currently have, and I’m sure it will see a multiplication effect once they see data coming out and more projects in place.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: Along those lines, are you still co-marketing Parsortix with Illumina? Can you give us an update on that?

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Yeah. I’m not sure we were ever co-marketing with Illumina. Obviously, I’m gonna have to plead the Fifth and say this absolutely predates my time. We do have good collaborations running with Illumina because they understand the importance of being able to look at circulating tumor cells and do single-cell genomics, and they need a workflow. Everything in terms of doing any downstream analysis is only as good as the pre-analytics, yeah? It’s an ill-used, bad word. It’s rubbish in, rubbish out. We work very closely to ensure that we have the right downstream or upstream protocols to get the cells in the right place, and then there are multiple applications, either DNA or RNA, that we’re working with them on. Once we have more to share, we’ll do so, but we’re definitely working with a great partner there.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: Thank you. A question on competitive positioning. The independent expert consensus published in 2025 concluded that 90% of experts expect CTC analysis to become part of routine clinical practice within five years, yet only 40% identified Parsortix as the most promising next generation platform. From a shareholder’s perspective, what does management believe is still required for CelLBx to strengthen its competitive position and emerge as a leading commercial beneficiary of CTC adoption? What specific milestones, partnerships, clinical evidence, or other commercial achievements should investors watch out for, which would demonstrate that your product is gaining a durable competitive advantage rather than simply participating in the growth of the sector?

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Okay. Great question. How long have we got? The thing is, you’re describing about developing an entire market there, which, let’s be realistic, we have money through to the 12 months from now, and we’re doing this in a step-by-step basis. Fundamentally, any of these relationships that build the market are always data-driven and with the right partners. As I say, we can only work with a certain number of partners, and move through on a step-by-step basis. Generating high quality data, with partners is the only way we’re going to be able to do this. I think we’ve already got a good number of partners that we’re working with, whether it be AstraZeneca or AdventHealth.

There are other CROs involved and the providers of both equipment and kits that drive that business, where again, we will have individual programs that we’re working on where we make sure we deliver high quality data. That’s the way we’ll be able to work to move this forward. Clinical evidence and utility is a very demanding bar to work to achieve. There are relatively few tests that have ever demonstrated true clinical utility. Most of those are in oncology, and the generation of the clinical utility data has basically all been supported on the back of those clinical trials.

That is our intent, but it will take more than a couple of years to be involved in a phase III clinical trial that has all the clinical data that says, "This is prime time." In the meantime, relationships like the Marsden successfully showing that you can reflex a small but important number of patients, to a test that enables to identify alterations to get on drug, is the way we’ll move this forward. Step wise, one at a time, and work with the right partners. I think we’re confident and happy that if people want the best quality cells and the best possible recovery cells to work with, then the Parsortix does what it says on the tin.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: In terms of Big Pharma, how they think about CTCs, there’s a question from a shareholder about whether, has the thinking changed over the two or three years, compared to two or three years ago? Has the thinking about CTCs changed in terms of industry engagement?

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Yeah. No, absolutely. I spent five years heading diagnostics at GSK and biomarkers and diagnostics for their immunotherapy group, having previously done a lot of work in the companion diagnostic space. There’s a real understanding that ctDNA has basically hit the buffers in terms of more innovation and the information we can get from it. ctDNA is of little or no value in settings where you need to know something about the expression of all the proteins, epitopes that exist on the cell surface in order to effectively deliver the drugs. We’re talking antibody-drug conjugates, where the antibody’s going to bind to the epitope, the radioligand therapies. Again, this is an antibody with a radioactive payload, again, looking for the right epitopes. Similarly, any cell-based therapy is looking for receptor epitopes to go to. You can’t get that with ctDNA. You can’t get it from tissue.

That’s been demonstrated well now. Circulating tumor cells, live cells, from a simple blood sample is the best way to be able to do that. There’s a huge amount of interest and drive. If I think back, for example, to AstraZeneca, delighted to be working with them again. I’ve worked with them now over 20 years, three drug approvals, that I’ve been very fortunately part of. These are also osimertinib and tremelimumab. They’ve had a liquid biopsy group running for many years now. Up until recently, it’s primarily been a ctDNA working group. Well, now it’s addressing circulating tumor cells and other components like extracellular vesicles in the blood, and it’s really being taken very seriously. As you know, with ENHERTU, they are the leading group in the ADC space along with their partner, DSI. Very excited about that.

There’s no question Pharma does tend to move a little bit in a herd mentality. You can see once other programs are known about moving forward, then we’ll see that momentum moving forward. Definitely Pharma takes it much more seriously than.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: Following on from that, for the momentum to move forward, is there key evidence that still needs to be generated before it becomes a meaningful commercial opportunity?

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Of course. At the end of the day, we’ve got to run the studies and demonstrate that the circulating tumor cells deliver this unique information that you can effectively only get from CTCs on a consistent basis. I think that’s where So much of that is about the pre-analytics prior to make sure you give yourself the best possible chances of having access to the circulating tumor cells. Clearly, there are a lot more circulating tumor cells in the blood of a patient with advanced disease than there are with someone who’s at stage 1. As ever, this is always nuanced, stage 1 through stage 4, and then the disease will have an impact. Picking on the right tumor types at the right time, again, is the smart way to do this.

That’s one of our criteria is we’re being very specific about who we work with. We’re not available to work with anybody on any project, knowing that it may be low-hanging fruit in terms of some revenue, there’s a high likelihood that the data may not be good enough. I think we’re a smart enough and experienced enough group to make some good decisions about the projects we want to be involved in as well.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: A shareholder’s asked about recent recruitment of scientists. Have you made hires to support active customer programs, or is this ahead of anticipated future demand? I’m not sure.

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Yeah. Given that there’s only 12 of them, I’m absolutely certain it’s all about supporting active programs. At the point we see those opportunities growing significantly, clearly, we’ll be back to raising the appropriate funds required to deliver more at a greater scale. Very much the here and now.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: The question about the blood samples. In the past, the company has mentioned about having the 7,000 blood samples. Are you able to comment about the long-term commercial value of this data set as well?

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: I think there is hopefully potential in those biobank samples. Currently, those studies were all based around developing our own test, which, as I recall again, Sinéad, correct me if I’m wrong, we did have a CLIA lab facility in the U.S. where we intended to drive these types of tests. You’re only going to get paid for the cancer types that you look at if you’ve got a MolDx coverage decision for an LDT in the U.S. Essentially, we’re not in a position to do that now. We still have that lab facility in the U.S. We’ve actually sublet part of it to a very good CRO and development partner who we’re working with.

In the short, medium term, we’re not resourced to go and take that kind of a program all the way through the MolDx process, because you’d have to run all the samples, get the data. You’ve then got to submit it, get it published. Only upon a publication can you go to the MolDx group, to Palmetto to get an approval. It’s a very expensive process. Once you’ve got through that’s probably going to take you at least a couple of years, maybe 3 years. You’ve then got to have a commercial sales force to market it. That’s too big a lift for us at this stage. We’ll address it with a partner at the right time.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: We’ve got several questions on cash, if we could wrap them all up together. Obviously, you talked on slide 16 in your capital and fundraising options that you have available. Sinéad, on slide 20, you explained about the current cash burn and the reduction there. Can you just clarify or sum up again to answer those questions that have come through? What is the cash position? What are the steps that you’re taking to get to being self-supporting? I think you’ve talked about it already, a push for sales, increasing revenues as well as cuts, what options are available to you if there is a need for cash?

Sinéad Armstrong, Head of Finance, CelLBxHealth plc: Yes, absolutely. As I said, I think there’s some questions around the spend in the first quarter and how we can see the funds going through to Q2 2027. The cash position, we did spend GBP 3 million in the first quarter. We completely restructured the company at that point. More than GBP 1.2 million of that GBP 3 million was in restructuring costs. The cost base is now completely under control. We’re still managing to make savings as we right-size ourselves. The head count is dropping. We had committed to less than 44, and we’re now down at an average of 35. Cash is always a concern for us, and it relies heavily on the revenue coming in. We had a slow start to the year in terms of revenue income coming in because the Q4 2025 was much poorer. It’s usually our strong month.

November, December, August, very strong for us. We were going through the transition at the end of the year, a lot of our customers got a little bit nervous. We saw that through Q1. The income in Q1 was poor, but we’re now seeing that ramp up really fast. The impact in that GBP 3 million in the first three months was on top of the restructuring. It was enhanced, essentially, or made worse by the fact that the revenues weren’t coming in. That now seems to be much more under control as well. We are starting to see a lot more traction, the customers are now sort of settled down a little bit. We do have some other income streams as well.

Yeah. I think people are worried about in terms of the R&D tax credits, which will be about GBP 0.8 million, which we should receive at the beginning of, well, sometime in Q3. I think in terms of funding, yes, we are clear that the funds at the moment take us out to Q3, or sorry, Q2 2027, at which point we will need another source of funding, whether that be, as Peter said, by equity funding or working with existing shareholders, or collaborations. I think is a question for Peter.

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Yeah. Obviously any of that engagement is all based on continuing value inflection points with partners based on the data that we’re generating in selective studies that we’re running at the moment. Seeing that revenue curve rise along with the potential, as you mentioned, there’s always an element of how do you anticipate the hockey stick here and I think in terms of the growth we’re going to see in CTCs. It may well be, given the absolute need to have CTCs available for so much work, I think at some point there will be a significant inflection in terms of the demand for use and work that we can do. Then we need to be prepared as a company with the board and with our investors to be able to capitalize upon that.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: Similar question related to that, are there particular technical, clinical, or commercial hurdles that you think you have to get over to see that revenue rising? Are there certain things that you think you need to deliver? What’s the challenge?

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: I think the challenge, frankly, is always the veracity of the science that you do, and it’s dealing with the fact that you are going to be dealing with a large amount of biological variables. You have to make sure you’ve accounted for those as well as possible going forward, which again, means pick your battles and make sure that you do the science as diligently or with as much veracity as possible. All the data is there that says once you’ve got access to the cells, the data, you can do it with it, you just need to do it well, and that means focus, discipline, much like we’re managing the cash position. Only on the basis of the data, you have to earn the right to go forward and expand what you do.

You have to do that off a solid base with one eye on the future. At some point, if you look recently, at the couple of acquisitions that are recently made by both Abbott and Roche. Abbott moving into giving themselves much more resources in the oncology space. If you look at what Roche have just done with the acquisition of both Saga and PathAI, they’re trying to build a full ecosystem of tools and markets they can address. They own Ventana on the tissue side. Saga, which I was the CEO of for four years, took it to where it had MolDx coverage decision. They can leverage both their sequencing platform, and their knowledge of digital PCR. Guess what? You can use that all on circulating tumor cells as well as anything else.

They just need enough evidence to be persuaded that this is part of the continuum that they need to support in a lab. They’re already preparing for the future, for example, with mass spec. They’re the only company, I believe, with a program that would see mass spec, which no one ever thought would get into a clinical lab. That program is in place, and ultimately proteomics, not genomics, is, I think, going to tell us what to do here. Those moves are already afoot, and I have no doubt that circulating tumor cells and looking at the proteomic side with known numbers, very small numbers of cells, it’s just a matter of when, not if those problems get corrected.

Our job is to, in a very disciplined fashion, stay in that game, performing well, growing in a well-understood fashion until we and other partners can take advantage of what will inevitably be a significant acceleration.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: We’re getting close to the end-

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Sorry, yeah.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: of the hour. I’ll quickly put in two questions that we’ve got left. There are some other questions on the platform here that we just haven’t been able to get to, and probably require detailed answers. That’s fine. We can give written responses for those.

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Yes.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: Just quickly, the last two. One was, obviously you’ve explained about the revenues being GBP 1.4 million, due to slower commercial conversion. That had an impact on what you were hoping to do last year. Looking forward, do you feel comfortable about the forecasts? You’ve obviously said about your 50% uplift.

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Yeah.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: how comfortable do you feel looking forward? What gives you that comfort?

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Yeah. No, I think the current revenue trajectory is very achievable. We’re already seeing data that we’ve, say, generating with partners. I’m thinking of a company we’ve been working with called BioSkryb, who are working in this space. They have their own lab and they have a kit-based solution. They are the leaders in whole genome amplification on a single-cell basis. Similarly, a transcriptome, and they can do a methylome too, if required. We’ve done some terrific work with them and we’ll be working more closely with them. Distributable kit model, combination of kits With a platform linked to an Illumina or an Ultima sequencer or a QIAGEN digital PCR instrument. All those options become open for us as we move forward.

The data we’ve generated to date suggests it’s going to be a really valuable tool, again, in this antibody-drug conjugate world, radioligand therapies, and cellular therapies, which are really what are now at the front end of driving pretty much every oncology pipeline. That’s really where we expect to see much of the growth as we move forward.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: The last question, I’m sure you get it asked all the time. An investor has used a specific big pharma’s name to ask whether they would buy you, we won’t mention specifics. Ultimately, is that what success is for this business in the long term? That a likely option is a buyback? That’s not what you’re looking at at the moment, the success in the short term.

Speaker 0: We are focusing on building the business where we are with the certain concepts. By definition, pharma companies as such, they don’t buy diagnostics.

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: They don’t buy diagnostics.

Speaker 0: They never. They never.

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Yeah.

Speaker 0: They did a few in the past, but it was a disaster.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: I think the focus at the moment, as you say, is getting the business, increasing revenue.

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Yeah

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: Utilizing the commercial aspect of the technology.

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Yeah. As I say, the team has done an incredible job with the reset. Obviously, don’t underestimate the PTSD that goes with reducing a company from 110 and all the relationships, the colleagues, one building to two. In a six-month window, we have made tremendous strides, reset the pipeline, got the right partners in place. We’re confident that we’ve got the business under control, reset, and with the right partners moving forward. We’ll move forward to execute against the plan, and yeah, excited about the future. Yeah.

Paul McManus, Q&A Host, Walbrook: Thanks, Peter.

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Thank you.

Moderator, Investor Meet Company: Thank you for answering those questions from investors today. Before we ask investors to share their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Peter, could I please just ask you for some closing comments?

Peter Collins, CEO, CelLBxHealth plc: Thank you. Pleasure to meet with everyone today. As I say, I can’t emphasize, thank you for the opportunity to take the company forward. At the end of last year, there was a question whether the company would continue to exist. Without your support, it would be non-viable. As I say, I think I’m very comfortable that we have an excellent team now, an excellent management team, a great board to work with. We’ve already demonstrated that we can execute on important plans to a good timeline. Partners are all lined up in place. I think we have a good understanding of the, in many cases, it’s understanding the limitations of your own products and technology, picking the right battles to win here because there are so many possible options. I think we’re well set going forward.

As I say, I think it’s been tremendous working with Jan, very happy for his support here today because it’s unusual, I think, for a company of this size in any market to have so much salt and pepper around the table to address key questions around how you run and operationalize this business and also turn them into successful commercial organizations. I think thank you again, and looking forward to an exciting future.

Moderator, Investor Meet Company: Thank you once again. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you’ll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback, which will help the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team of CelLBxHealth PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today’s presentation. Good afternoon to you all.