Avacta Group Plc

To group PLC interim results investor presentation. Throughout this live presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your question and press send. Given the significant number of attendees at today's meeting, the company will not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so, These will be made available to you via your InvestorMeet company dashboard, and you will receive an email notifying when they are ready for your review. I'd also like to remind you that this presentation is being recorded. Before we begin, we would like to submit the following poll. If you'd be so kind as to give that your attention, we would be most grateful. And I'd now like to hand over to Tony Gardner, CFO, and Alistair Smith, CEO from Evactor. Good morning to you.

Thanks very much. Thanks very much indeed. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for attending. We're going to just switch our cameras off, actually, because that will make the presentation slightly larger on your screen. So please don't take that as rudeness, but it'll be easier for you to see. So there's a lot to get through today. So I'm just going to pile straight into the presentation. You've got Tony and myself on the call, as was just said. So, as I said in the announcement this morning, it has been a genuinely transformative period for the group, with both divisions moving the group substantially closer to the mission here of shaping the future of medicine with our two powerful therapeutic and diagnostic platforms. So as a brief introduction for those who aren't familiar with the company, Avactor has two divisions. The therapeutics division, which is now a clinical stage oncology drug company based in Cambridge and new offices in London, giving us a global outreach, a global headquarters for the therapeutics division in White City. An R&D centre in Cambridge of around 35 people. clinical development team that's been recently established by Neil Bell and Fiona McLaughlin and taken the AVA 6000 drug into the clinic. Obviously, we'll talk a lot more about that through the presentation. We have an in-house preclinical and clinical pipeline focused on oncology. and obviously developing drugs based on those two platforms that we mentioned, and we'll talk more about specifically the precision platform in this presentation because of AVA6000, and a number of global partnerships, which I can update you on, the key ones certainly in this presentation today. So the Diagnostics Division also has gone through an incredible growth period over the last 12 months or so to become an ISO 13485 accredited IVD product company with the first product launched, the AFIDX SARS-CoV-2 antigen lateral flow test, which obviously we'll cover in this presentation. Again, an R&D centre, and in fact, the group headquarters based in Weatherby in Yorkshire, a strong in-house product pipeline to feed in behind that first product that we just mentioned, and a number of global technology evaluations and partnerships. Okay, Tony, could I hand over to you to go through the results, please?

Thanks Alastair and good morning everyone. The interim results are for the six-month period to the 30th of June. The revenues reported of £2.3 million did not include any sales of the Affidx collateral flow test as that was launched post period end and that compares to the £1.8 million for the six months to June 2020. Our main costs are the research and development costs for the AfriDx natural flow test and the expanding therapeutics development pipeline, which obviously includes the commencement of the ABA 6000 phase one clinical trials, which included 6.7 million of costs there in the P&L compared to 4.2 million in the prior period. That means that our retained losses following an allowance of 1.2 million for R&D tax credits of 10.2 million compared to 7 million for the prior period. In terms of accounting policies together with accounting judgments and estimates, these results have all been prepared on a consistent basis with those from the audit results for December 2020. I move on to the cash flow and balance sheets. The net cash outflow for the six-month period was 10.9 million, which includes a 1.4 million increase in our working capital as we scale up the Affidix Electrical Flow Test manufacturing and the setup costs associated with that. Alongside that, there's circa 800,000 of capex as we have expanded the lab facilities in Weatherby and Cambridge. The comparative period showed a net cash inflow of just under 46 million. That's obviously as a result of the fundraising that was completed back in June 2020. Importantly cash and short-term deposits at the end of June were just a tad under 37 million compared to 48 million at the end of December 2020. The cash position continues to provide us with a base cash runway through into 2023 and obviously additional cash and profit generated from the AFI DX lateral flow tests will strengthen this position further. in terms of other balance sheet items uh ppe and lease assets is just under 5 million and intangible assets which is mainly the capitalized development costs of the asthma platform amount to 9 million which gives us a net asset position at the end of june of 53 million um on a hand back over to alistair to continue the presentation that's great thanks tally