StageZero Life Sciences Ltd.

Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call

11/15/2023

spk00: Greetings. Welcome to the Stage Zero Life Sciences Third Quarter Financials Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Rebecca Greco. You may begin.
spk01: Thank you, Holly. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the Stage Zero third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Joining me today is Stage Zero Chairman and CEO James Howard Tripp. Please note that management's discussion today will contain forward-looking statements about anticipated results and future prospects. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, and Stage Zero's results may differ materially from those discussed today. Investors should consult the company's ongoing quarterly filings and annual reports for additional information on risks and uncertainties relating to those forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned not to rely on these forward-looking statements. The company disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements except as required by law. On today's call, management may refer to non-GAAP-adjusted IPTA. This metric excludes certain items discussed in our press release under the heading Discussion of Non-GAAP Financial Measures and any other items that management believes should be excluded when reviewing continuing operations. The reconciliation of Stage Zero's non-GAAP measures to be comparable GAAP measures are available in the financial tables of our financial statements filed on CDAR. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to James Howard Tripp, Stage Zero's Chief Executive Officer. James, please go ahead.
spk05: Thank you, Rebecca, and good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us. Also just want to mention for those of you that are not sort of totally aware of it, we do a lot of weekly updates. They're found on the social media sites. We particularly do a series of very short video interviews. And so a very good way to stay current with what we're doing literally week after week is to make sure that you have these feeds and you can follow along. So we'll start with the problem and I know a number of you have seen this introduction, but we also have a very significant number of new investors and it behooves us to actually lay the problem out for everyone and then what our solution is. So I think, I think the key thing with a lot of this is that, you know, most cancers are found late. We know that if we look at the North American situation alone, It's nearly 2 million patients or 2 million people will be diagnosed with cancer this year alone. We know that COVID, the advent of that, the sort of downturn in testing, the inaccessibility of physicians and clinics significantly impacted cancer testing, cancer treatment, and we're paying for that now. We're seeing an absolute sort of tidal wave of cancer cases come through. We're also seeing cancer now appear in much, much younger people. So everyone's trying to sort this out. We're having some success by finding cancer early and treating it early in terms of getting better results. Some of the cancers, particularly in the older age population, are actually beginning to decline, but that's been counterbalanced by a surge in new cancer cases in much younger people. So we're all trying to sort it out. Key with all of this is obviously screening. If you move to what is our key market segment in this, It's where you have catastrophic healthcare claims. That really plays out in two ways. One, a major focus for us is self-funded employers. We will talk a lot about this as we move through it. But in addition to that, a very strong focus has to be the patient themselves. So the direct-to-consumer aspect. We'll talk a little bit about the sort of evolving area of patients taking more control of their health care because they're in high-deductible plans. They're actually choosing where to put their dollars. And so making sure that we can cater to this is key. If you look at the way we've structured our partnerships and the way we've structured our business model, it takes both of these into account. We can't do what we want to do without having built the organization the way it is. The overall cancer screening market is extremely large. The U.S. alone is something like 77 billion, so that's a very large number. I think even bigger than that, and that most people tend to forget about, is the national economic burden that goes with that is about twice that size. It's about 150 billion. So that's everything from time off. It's sick time. It's the additional cost incurred in this. It's having to hire new people, different people, train them. It's lost productivity. It's just all of that. So clearly, if we can have a marked impact on that, it has a very beneficial effect. And then coming back finally to the patient themselves, cancer is one of the primary reasons for personal bankruptcy, certainly in the U.S. Very expensive. People need to try and get the best possible treatment that they can. But the healthcare system doesn't always cater to allowing you to do that. And so it is, I believe at this point, the number one driver of personal bankruptcy. Moving to the importance of early detection. This slide normally or this data normally takes some people's breath away. If you look at the advantages of being able to find cancer early, you're typically in the high 90s in terms of what your five-year survival rate is. A couple of the cancers aren't there, but most of them are. When you move out to finding it in late stage, so if you only find cancer in stage three or four, it drops dramatically. We very typically talk about colorectal cancer. We're finding it early. You've got about a 90% chance of living five years was finding it late. You've only got about a 10 to 14% chance of living five years. It's critical. It's absolutely critical. I think the breast cancer one is there as well. Then we'll pick up on that a little later too. So you have to, you have to find it early if at all possible. So what is the solution? Um, The solution on our side is really a mix of these three programs plus two additional pieces, one being the physician groups that we have and the other being the telehealth system that we have. So Aristotle is an obvious. It's the only mRNA gene expression multi-cancer test that's actually in the marketplace. The advantages that we believe we have over other current technologies is one, the technology has been around for long enough that it's essentially proven. The other is that we are particularly good at finding early stage cancers. And I say that because most of the other technologies are not. And we find early stage cancer equally as well as we find late stage cancer. And that's a very significant advantage. If you have cancer, we can enroll you in the TREAT program. That's the care oncology group that we have. That's an oncologist-led adjunctive care program. It's adjunctive to standard of care. And our overall claim to fame starts with the metric study, as we built it out, where we showed a very significant increase in survival. And we're building that out. We'll talk about that more as we go on. We pulled that forward into the AVERT program. The AVERT program is going to feature very heavily over the next while. And AVERT is all of the learning of both Aristotle and treat in terms of can we find other factors. Aristotle will tell you whether you likely have cancer today, yes or no, discrete cancers. AVERT will tell you whether you're likely heading for with cancer tomorrow. It not only flags major chronic disease, but it flags the metabolic pathways that are at risk for getting cancer. We then have an overt protocol, which allows you to be able to remediate so that you can try and head off those risks of the past and actually lower your risk. We know that about 40% of cancers are preventable if you adopt the right strategies. He is, can you see it in advance? Can you get there? Also, a good thing with this, where Aristotle is a new introduction to the marketplace, to some extent, a virtuous plug and play. It, by and large, adds on to a lot of the work that is being done already. It runs it through a very unique algorithm that is ours. It ties back into the treatment protocol, which I talked about, which again is ours. But it's a very easy add-on and it fits extremely well with employers. It also fits extremely well with nutrition groups. The final two pieces, and we'll talk about these more as we go forward, is that you can't do most of this. You can't deal with employers. You can't deal directly with patients unless you can actually prescribe the tests. You can read the results and present the results back to them and then guide them as they move on forward. An absolutely critical piece. In addition to that, you need to have telehealth, and we were one of the telehealth space. It's actually proven to be very prescient, and it allows us to continue forward. You can't deal with employers. You cannot deal with direct-to-consumer without these two pieces, absolutely critical. It's why we built them. It's why we're partnering with the groups that we are. When we look at the overall size of the market, as we drive through it. This is a little bit of a recap of what I was talking about before. The overall market in the US is extremely large. We talked about the economic burden of cancer, extremely large. Everyone is interested in having an impact on that. Our initial beachhead, as we've talked about it, is to focus on the group of people, sorry, the group of employees that are working in self-funded employers. And we'll talk more about that in a moment. It's very clear to see that relatively little penetration on our side actually results in bigger rewards for us. So key with us, again, comes back to the partnerships. The secondary beachhead is sort of building off of the employer side, but it also begins to build out into the direct consumer aspect because it crosses over into all of that. But if you just look at a high-risk population, we all know that the first responders in North America are a high-risk population. They number nearly 4 million in terms of who they are. You look at the revenue that could be derived from just getting adequate screening rates within them. and it's obviously a very attractive area to move down. A brief discussion on revenue as we go. You will see that as we pivoted out, it's really interesting as you manage companies, you drive them through because we're essentially relaunching into the cancer space if you think of coming back out of COVID. It's making sure that the channel's right, making sure the organization's structured correctly, It's also getting the programs up. We've shown nice growth as we built into this as we've got both the testing as well as the treatment sides running. This third quarter was essentially flat. Yes, it shows a small amount down, but it's essentially flat as we run as you look at deferred revenue as well. And it sets us well for building through. The reason for putting this slide up is that I think a lot of people go, we need to have an immediate impact. You need to show that you're doubling, tripling, quadrupling in the quarter. We will show growth. I just wanted to remind people that Exact Sciences, which is a massive success out there from a sales and marketing and revenue perspective, took four years to get there. In fact, it's taken longer than that, but it took four years to get any decent measure of success. We'll go to the other group, which is Grail, which is a direct competitor of ours. You look at how Grail is building out. Grail has massive resources behind it, but even with Grail, it is taking time to actually get things established, get them into the marketplace, get them built out. So all we're doing is we're guiding to patients They're equally as important as looking at revenue growth is looking at all of the pieces that are being put in place to allow the revenue growth. Are they there? Are they moving in the direction? Yes, we believe they are. And as a result of that, we're looking forward to incremental growth as we move on out. We're still just on a note.
spk03: We're still on track with our break even goals. Just waiting for the next slide.
spk05: So key with this is the partnerships that we put together with the labs. And again, we talk to these in a reasonable amount of granularity. We have two lab partnerships. The one we've announced, the other one we will make public when everyone's comfortable with doing that. Doesn't mean to say we're not moving down the paths with them, and we'll explain that. So moms is key for us. Go back to what I was talking about on the avert side, for example, go to Aristotle, go to employers, go to direct to consumers as we drive down all of that range. And within all of this, you can talk about nutrition groups. You'll hear us talk more and more about nutrition groups as we move forward. We're making significant inroads into this space. And if you think about it, let's talk about them just for a moment, overt is a natural. Nutrition groups these days don't just sell supplements, for example. They provide all kinds of ancillary testing that runs on this, everything from gut microbiome to your sort of 23andMe type genetics through to major diseases. And within all of that, AVERT has got an amazing position. If you're already moving down part of that path, why don't you bolt on the full AVERT program as it runs through? And then if you flag positive, you can come to us and we can actually enroll you in the AVERT protocol in terms of looking at heading off a series of these things. We're not only going to affect major chronic disease, for example, it may be metabolic syndromes. But knowing that metabolic syndrome is often a precursor to diabetes, diabetes a precursor to cancer, we're heading off that 40% of cancers that believe we can have a marked effect on. So it fits very well. In addition to that, why don't you get screened for cancer? So your cancer today. So therefore Aristotle is that. So therefore you pull into it so you can pull it through in that way. You cannot move to any of these pieces unless you have the system that we've actually set up in place. You have to have the products. You have to have the distribution network in terms of where it is. You have to have the points at which it actually can get done. which means you've got to be in all 50 states and you've got to be readily available. In addition to that, you have to have a physician group that provides a script. There are relatively few states, and here we're talking quite specifically to the US, there are relatively few states where you as an individual patient can walk into a lab and say, I want to get tested for this. You have to work via a physician group. The physician group has to write the prescription. The report comes back. They then need to guide you afterwards. It becomes even more acute when you actually have cancer. You can't just send someone a report that says, guess what, you might have cancer. You've got to be able to provide the right care with it. We're unique in that. We're literally the only lab group that I know of that actually has it set up in this way to be able to do it. It's critical. It's critical for direct-to-consumer. It's critical, for example, for nutritional groups. It's critical for employers. You need to do all of that. It's actually critical for the insurance groups that we're speaking to as well. The final piece of all of this is telehealth. You need to be able to reach across all 50 states. It's not that easy to build out a 50-state comprehensive system. It takes time. It takes very careful consideration. There's a lot of regulation to go through. We've built it out. We can actually deal with patients in all 50 states as we drive through. As a result of that, it's key. And we can do it via telehealth. If you look at the care oncology site, we actually span globally. So the UK, for example, covers not just the UK and EU, but the UK actually also provides consulting into countries like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, with patients in all of those. In addition to that, the UK assists with Canada. We'll see Canadian patients as well. On the U.S. side, the U.S. obviously does all of the U.S., and as I say, we have 50 state coverage. In addition to that, the U.S. also does Canada. So we actually share Canada between the two groups as we drive through. And that is critical, particularly as you look at all of the support. So now we come back to my one medical source. And so my one medical source, we've known them for some time. We've been talking with them for some time, looking at a variety of ways of actually working together, and then have now put this together. They have over 1,000 of what are called medical access points, which generally are everything from small labs. For example, ArcPoint would be in it. Some of the ArcPoint groups would be in it. Some of any lab tests now would be in it. A lot of individual labs are all looking to, one, be able to provide access for us to draw, but two, looking to enhance their product lines. Second to that, they also have groups such as clinics. They also have pharmacies that get involved in this. They also have, for example, acute care units. All of these are very beneficial. They all have customer bases. They're all ideal for our product offerings. So we get to, they help us in a number of ways. We help them in a number of ways, but we get to be able to take it out immediately. It's a very neat system as they connect all of us. It drives through our physician group, as we've talked about. It drives through our telehealth system as well. The patients enroll with us. It drives down all of that place. And essentially what it does is it takes our single high complexity lab enrichment, And it makes us into a 50-state local lab group with all of that attendant customer base. And that is absolutely critical. Now what we do as we move forward is we begin to work with our patient base. We begin to work with their patient base. We take it out into the employers. All of these groups have employers that they work with. We have employers. We take it in. The intent here is they open the door, we walk in with them. We work with all of the clinics that we've got. The care oncology side, as we've talked about, is key. But here I want to touch a little bit on what we've been doing with the additional programs on the care oncology side. Visibility is key. Being seen is key. Having people know who you are and where to get you is key. And so we've been building out a whole series of programs, and it's very gratifying to see where it's going. In a relatively short period of time, something like, for example, the nutritional program that we added into the care oncology mix has not only taken us to an incremental number of patients, but it's taken to us an incremental number of organizations. So we're now talking with, and in some cases, working with a number of the cancer support groups the cancer support groups and taking our offerings to all of their patients, all of the patients, all of their members. And from there, we're moving out to invitations to speak at conferences. We're doing interviews. There's a mock step up in activities. We move it on out. So we will continue to do more of this as it builds and it builds and it builds. It's really key for us. The second lab group that we will announce in a short while, as we work with a little more tightly focused into groups like employers, in this case about two-thirds of their revenue comes from working with employers. It's very focused into that. Again, the same approach. They take us into their key employers. They open the door. We walk in with them. We present. We manage the process together with them afterwards. In this case, they will actually do the patient recruitment as it drives through because these are primarily their customers as they drive it through. But we will do all of the testing. We do all of the follow-up. Care oncology, again, critical. The physician base as we drive through it. In addition to that, too, is also all of the telehealth system. They're absolutely critical. And so the key focus there is self-funded employers first, nutritional groups second, direct-to-consumer third.
spk02: Just waiting for the slide.
spk05: We need to have relatively modest penetration of the self-funded employer market to do really well. Part of that is obviously because of our size and we can show a very clear sort of marked step up on this. Going back to the revenue piece, we know this is what everyone's looking for to show that actually we're getting traction. You don't get the traction without putting the pieces in place. You have to have the pieces in place to be in discussion with the people and it builds. So the key thing is to I think for us to state that we believe we have the pieces in place, we believe we're executing on all of that. Therefore, we're pretty comfortable with the revenue will flow. If you look at the size of the market, we're really targeting about 100 million employed people in the US as we drive. Doesn't mean to say we're ignoring Canada. We're doing some work in Canada. But Canada, for Canadian investors, is a slightly different system. On the Canadian side, there are a lot of regulations. We come up with the same sort of provincial rulings. A physician in Ontario cannot write scripts for a patient in Alberta. You've got to build it out across the various points. We've taken time to build all of the setup in Ontario, notably around the teaching centers in Toronto. I'll talk a little more about that in a while. So Canada not being forgotten, we're focused very heavily on the U.S. at this point. And then coming back through the Canadian side as we drive, that too is building. For example, on the Canadian side, we actually have an agreement with Life Labs to actually do the testing for us. And we will drop that into place in a short while. Wanted to talk just a little bit about this, because we're getting a lot of questions regarding this, and particularly, for example, something like full-body MRI. Remember that Aristotle is a, first of all, it's MRNA gene expression. The advantages, as we talked about, is that it's specific, it's multi-cancer, we do multiple cancers off of a single sample of blood. But it's specific to each cancer. It doesn't say you have cancer. Now, let's see if we can decide what the cancer might be and then set you off on the search for it. It's this particular cancer, yes or no. It is good at finding early stage cancer, equally as good as finding late stage, which we believe sets us apart in terms of where it is. And as we were talking about, it's a single blood draw. So it's relatively non-invasive and it's relatively easy to have done. It will continue to build out as we move forward as well as we add additional cancers. In addition to that, as we work more on being able to, for example, break out the reporting that says it's a stage one or two cancer, for example, versus a stage three or four. So that key as well. So that's what we offer. I think people are seeing a lot of information on full-body MRIs. So we actually did a series of things. We spoke with a number of very senior groups in the U.S., notably back into the various medical associations. On the Canadian side, too, we met with the heads of radiology at the senior... the most respected in the senior cancer groups in Toronto, and we have the following back. Essentially, guidance is don't do it. MRI is a magnificent tool, and MRI, if it's done specific to the organ, if it's done specific to what they believe the cancer is, is probably one of the best tools that we have. However, when you try and do a full-body MRI, What you do is you water everything down. And so two things. One, it is now no longer anywhere near as good at finding cancer in the individual organs because you're trying to scan the whole body and you're trying to do it relatively quickly. And you're not following the organ-specific protocols within all of this. So that is one. The second thing is MRI doesn't necessarily find very small tumors. And it reminds me of the work that we did several years back in the lung cancer field. And for those of you that might remember it, low-dose CT is what is typically used to scan for lung cancer. It generally doesn't find cancer nodules until they're about the size of a pea. But it is known for having a very high false positive rate, anywhere up to 96%. the test that we were evaluating and working on actually found cancer at a very, very early stage. And initially, the work that we did with it, we actually flagged a whole series of patients. We're doing a lot of work with the group out of Pittsburgh, the big medical center there. And what we did was we were flagging these patients with the test as potentially having lung cancer. They were running them through low-dose CT and, of course, seeing nothing on low-dose CT with a lot of the patients. Some were there. A large number were not. And so the question was, was our test right or wrong? What we did was we put in place a two-year follow-up program whereby the patients were actually further screened with low-dose CT every three months or every six months. And literally over the following two years, we actually saw the lung cancers appear as they got big enough to be able to be seen by low-dose CT. It was there, and in actual fact, at the end of the day, we were approximately 86% accurate. That's exactly what we're talking about with full-body MRI. You're not going to see the early-stage cancers. You need tests, for example, such as Aristotle to do that. You need tests such as... hopefully circulating tumor cells if that actually proves out completely, that yet is not good at finding early stage cancer. So at this point, it probably sets us apart in terms of one of the few groups that can do it. So generally, I will give you the sum up from the radiology groups on full body MRI. They said do not waste your money. It's as simple as that. Single cancer tests. Again, the other thing is we very often forget to look at how accurate or how inaccurate the current screening methods are. And for an example, I'll use FIT because it's pretty common in terms of where it is. There are two ways to look at the results on FIT. One is that it's either a pretty accurate test at finding colorectal cancer, but it depends on how you look at the data. The other is that it's not very accurate. The issue is more about the fact that stool tests don't appear to find right-sided lesions. It's the right-sided lesions in the colon that tend to be more dangerous. Women tend to have more right-sided lesions. And so you have all of those issues that run with it. The other aspect with it is it's a stool test, and only about 10% of the population will do a stool test. So we very often get going, well, you're not 99% accurate. Well, no, nothing is really 99% accurate, but you've got to balance it against everything else that actually is out there at the moment. And this is a particular focus as we look at what we're planning to do with the cancer centers in Toronto, with Aristotle, as we look at evaluating Aristotle as a primary screening method. It is because it is believed that it's a much better system than what is currently available. So I leave it there. I think the final piece on circulating tumor cells, very promising technology, not yet fully developed, having difficulty with finding early stage cancer, and still at this point seems to be giving an inordinately large number of false positives. So I think everyone's hoping it will actually play out very well as time goes forward. Um, but it is still a technology and process. A revenue model is not always that easy to understand. And so it's a matter of taking it through, but it is built off of the following Aristotle, priced out 949 us dollars. The metabolic panel, um, which we would do. So for example, let's say it's a vertice you would run through would be 795. Um, treat if you're coming into it is 2495, but it's essentially just under a six month program. Why? Why do we bring you in for that length of time? Because we believe that's the period of time we need in order to evaluate the effect that the program's having on you and your cancer, and to be able to make the adjustments that we need. It includes all of the follow-up pieces. From there, you move to quarterly follow-ups. Those are typically $7.95 a time, depending upon each of the programs you're working in. And then you get a crossover. Obviously, Aristotle can turn into treat. Avert can turn into treat. treat can continue forward and essentially become the maintenance program as it runs on quarterly. And key is to, again, why we built a lot of years is that if you're, if you're running a typical lab, it's one test, one and done patients done. You've now got to go and acquire a complete new patient each and every time. The difference with our model is that patients come and stay with us. And they stay with us typically for a year or more. We actually right now, an amazing statistic in a number of ways, we have glioblastoma patients that started in the early metric study with us that have been with us for many years. We are one patient that's now nine years on. That patient can be in remission, staying on the COC protocol as we go through it. But of course, the good thing for us is we continue to work with the patient. It's recurring revenue for us. So a large number of patients stay with us for a good period of time. They come for a test. They go to multiple other pieces. They drive it through. Therefore, everything that we do is inextricably linked. It is focused on stickiness, is I guess one of the words that's used. Come and work with us while you're getting benefit from us. Stay with us. And of course, that's good for you, the patient, but it's good for us, the company as well. So key is you look through all of this. As we keep adding supplemental program offerings, such as nutrition, such as mental health, and there'll be additional programs to come forward as you go on. all of these add to all of that it not only adds to revenue but even more importantly it draws new patients in it gets new eyeballs on us new eyeballs attracts um a bigger following a bigger following gets us into symposia it gets us into interviews and so on and so on so that is key really wanted um to finish off with some the two studies that we're doing um Metrics on the care oncology side, we're one of the very few groups in this space that actually has data that supports outcome in terms of what we do. And this is critical. If you're in cancer, if you're in medical science, you need to be data driven. And so a lot of what we have here is exactly that. Metrics two has been planned. It will take what we learned in metrics one. It is building on as a prospective study. It is glioblastoma because that's where we started, and it's typically a really horrible cancer. So any clear advantage that you can get in it, you see relatively quickly. So in that sense, it's a good model. But as I mentioned, we have a number of glioblastoma patients that have now been with us for many, many years. So hopefully that's testimony to what we can do together. It also pulls in UK centers. as well as North American centers. It's a prospective study, and it will move to us having the ability to add glioblastoma screening to Aristotle. So it will build out that aspect as well. And in actual fact, we're in the process of putting funding together to actually take this up at all right now. The second piece with this is the Aristotle Cancer Study. Key within this, if you look at it, take the Canadian situation we were talking about. We've got a variety of single tests. We typically only screen for four cancers right now. People want to focus on cancers that have good standard of care, where if you find them early, you can have a marked impact on outcome. And so those are the cancers that we have agreed to. And we are working with three of the centers in Toronto, dividing the cancers up amongst them, and we're in the process of developing the protocol right now. In the same aspect, too, we're in the process of ensuring that we have funding that can actually take this out as we drive it through, and we will go there. What is the end result of this? Obviously, third-party endorsement of Aristotle. But in addition to this, it's looking to see whether it can be a primary screen, for example, then going through to MRI for the definitive. But if it can do it better, think about what happens with cancer centers. Think about what happens with hospital groups. There are a large number of patients referred in with what is suspected cancer. You then have to begin to try and sort out what you think it is. If we could run them through Aristotle, and Aristotle actually discreetly does that, and then moves it immediately up to something like, let's say, organ-specific MRI. It's a much more definitive method. It's a much more practical method. It's a much more cost-effective method. So that is where we're going. In addition to that, it obviously allows us to continue to build out in traditional cancers as well. So that is the other piece that we're doing here. We need to look forward for that next little while. I think at this point, Rebecca, do we have questions?
spk01: Yes, James, we have quite a few on the webcast. The first one I will start with is talking about the major cancer centers, which you just referred to.
spk05: um maybe you want to just reiterate what uh the expected yield is from the studies so that's why i didn't quite get that last part what the expected yield i think just what are our expected ideas yeah yeah so i i actually i think i think i just covered that you know the the obvious piece with this is is aristotle about a primary screen for cancer I'll go back, I'll give another example with a large group out of the U.S. that we talked with just before the advent of COVID. And they have a group of employees that they have to screen. They were using a number of different methods, none of them very specific. And within all of that, if they got a positive, they were getting a large number of false positives. But it sent them off with each of those patients on what was often a six to nine month journey of looking for it and anything up to $50,000 in cost. What they were interested in is to say, okay, is Aristotle a better screen for these patients in terms of we run them through, you do multiple cancers, single gall blood, It's discreet, it's specific, it has good accuracy. Therefore, if we get a positive, can we move forward directly to just evaluating that cancer? So are we back talking with that group? Yes, but focusing onto the Toronto side, that's exactly what we're after. If it's suspected that you have cancer, Can we run you through Aristotle? Will that definitively tell us what cancer it is? As a result of that, does it shorten the entire diagnostic journey? Does it increase the accuracy? Does it decrease the cost? That's the expected outcome. Obviously, if we get all of the results we're after, it allows for adoption of Aristotle within these larger systems.
spk01: Thank you. Another question is in the beachhead slide, there was a reference of 15 employers. Is this an achievable forecasted figure? Is this the current funnel?
spk03: Good question.
spk05: So 15 is the initial beachhead that we're targeting. Do we believe it's achievable? Yes, we believe it's achievable. The revenue in that assumes that we have reasonably large size employers driving it through at sort of combined level of revenue. But I think, yes, we can confirm that that's the initial target in terms of where we're going. And yes, do we believe it's achievable?
spk03: Yes, we believe it's achievable.
spk01: We have another question. With regards to the new programs, clearly people are coming in to sign up for them. Are we seeing individuals moving from those one-off into any of our longer programs like Avert or Treat?
spk05: Yes. Yes, we are. That's actually one of the more gratifying pieces in all of this. Having built it, it's actually beginning to work nicely.
spk04: And I have another question.
spk01: Do we expect the revenues to continue to go up going forward?
spk02: Yes. It's what it's all about.
spk01: Okay. And the last question is, you referenced the partnerships bringing it out to their
spk05: client base does that mean you expect them to soft sell our program offerings yes great those are our questions maybe can even add to that not not even so much soft so might even say a hard sell it's um it's a program offering it's um we used to be able to do this for you we can now do this in addition So we expect all of that. A lot of our promotional material, as we have built it and will continue to build it, will be built with them. We've discussed, for example, the aspect of white labeling. We're well down the path on all of this in terms of how it would run. But it's not just a matter of, hey, we have these things. It's actually a joint marketing effort as we take the pieces through. And as I say, particularly as we approach employers, it's one thing if we have to go and find the employers ourselves. It's another if we work with a partner that already has employers where they know and they trust it and they walk us in saying, okay, we have a new approach for you. Let's look at it. They will also know which employers have the kind of problems that we're looking to address.
spk04: Those are the questions. Thank you, James.
spk05: You're very welcome. So I think with that, we'll wrap it up. And thank you very much for joining us. Again, just a reminder again, we typically are doing weekly updates. Please make sure that you find those. If you can't find them, please speak with us or make sure that we can give you the links so that you can follow along.
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