LBT Innovations (ASX:LBT) Presentation, FNN Investor Event, February 2022

Company Presentations

LBT Innovations Limited (ASX:LBT) CEO and Managing Director Brent Barnes presents on the market opportunity in clinical microbiology, the company's AI technology, new technology developments, commercial partnerships and acquisition of Clever Culture Systems.

 A bit of a varied outlook there before so I like Matt's feedback saying there's always one company that stands out and I think that's certainly our position. We see 2022 calendar year being a really important one and a positive inflection point for the company. We're a listed company, so the typical disclaimers apply as you'd be familiar with.

Look, I'm going to start, so we're a healthcare company. The space that we operates clinical microbiology, so I think within that specifically infectious diseases. So an infectious disease is something like a urinary tract infection, they're about 150 million UTIs that are diagnosed globally every year. And to put that in context, in an Australian perspective, it's about a billion dollar impact to the healthcare system locally. The other hot topic around infectious diseases is this concept of a super bug.

And these are diseases that are becoming more resistant to antibiotics. So in other words, they're becoming more and more untreatable or the antibiotics are becoming less effective in the treatment of these infectious diseases. So it's an area within the healthcare space that is growing and it's very much in desperate need of automation. Overlaying another element of that is the fact that we've got a skills shortage and at any one time, 10% of microbiologists, these are the people, the highly skilled resources that are in this infectious diseases space, well, their jobs are vacant. So we haven't got enough people coming through the university system to treat the growing incident rates of these infectious diseases.

And look, this is why we got into the space, and why we've pioneered, what is an absolutely global first, it's a technology that we call the Automated Plate Assessment System.

It's a single instrument so you can see a picture of what it looks like on the screen. And it has the ability to read multiple of these infectious diseases. So think of urine cultures think MRSA, which is golden stuff. These are examples of infectious diseases that our instruments are able to take a photo of and we've trained an algorithm to automatically make a primary clinical diagnosis. So there is no other company that does what we do, and we're a global first in that nature.

I think importantly for investors, all of the development, there's significant clinical trials and the regulatory clearances have already been completed. So it's very much a de-risked value proposition from a technology development perspective. We've got a product that's on the market. We've actually sold six instruments globally. And we've got to the point where we are disrupting enough, that we've been able to get the attention of some pretty heavy hitters, Beckman Coulter and Thermo Fisher, as partners that have put their brand and their organisation behind our technology and are now helping us get it into customer labs in the markets where we've launched.

And when you look at this global issue of infectious diseases, it translates into a large market opportunity, which as I said before, is really ripe to be disrupted. The way that we look at this because not every single laboratory will have one of our products with, so we've segmented the market based on volume. So we've identified medium and large labs, as our addressable market. And the type of lab I'm talking about is thinking of a hospital, and you've got a laboratory where you've got these various specimens that go into the laboratory. So that could be within a hospital setting, or it could be within a private lab setting such as your Sonic Healthcare is perhaps one Australian based healthcare companies so that's our customer. So we sell into these particular laboratories.

When you look at the revenue, the associated revenue opportunity, well, we sell the instrument for US$300,000 so that's a CapEx. We have got leasing bottles available as well, and then annual software license so that's your annuity or your install base revenue. The more of these instruments we have placed, the bigger the install base revenue over time. And so that's when you look at the useful life conservatively being five years and looking at what that translates to from a revenue perspective, that's how we get to a $450,000 revenue opportunity per installed instrument with a customer. And so when you put all of those numbers together and getting traction over future years, it gives a, I guess, a forecast in terms of broad numbers being a big opportunity to really disrupt and form a meaningful business, which is why we're in the space.

Focusing on the technology, nobody else does what we do. We are completely unique and we have pattern protection across our core technology. It is an AI based algorithm, and we got into this before AI was a buzzword and everyone was doing it. But I really like this picture on the left hand side, because it shows what a Petri dish looks like. And so the top half of that picture is what a microbiologist would look at. And then the bottom half of the image is how APAS translates that into something that allows us to train an algorithm, to differentiate between the different colonies that grow or different bacteria that grow on the plate. And you can see that by the different colours that are represented in that image. And importantly, we're able to make a primary clinical diagnosis, and we've gone through all of that validation, I can't say that enough, we've gone through extensive clinical trials to demonstrate that our core technology works.

And so we've then been able to bundle all that into an instrument. And we deliver efficiencies to the lab being that we can read these plates three times faster than a microbiologist and do it actually more reliably based on the clinical trials that we've been able to demonstrate. And look, it has been a long journey, which is why I said in my opening, why we believe 2022, this calendar year being a really important one for the company, we've spent 10 years developing the technology. It is very much the de-risked value or a de-risk platform for investors to consider those regulatory clearances are all in place, and we have commercial sales for our product.

We've got key opinion leaders in each of the various regions that we've launched product in that's really important. We need customers to be advocating for the technology on our behalf. So we have those key opinion leaders already in place. And I mentioned that before, we've got really giants of the industry, Beckman Coulter and Thermo Fisher, who are behind the product, behind the technology and looking to now get it in the hands of customers.

Thinking around that partnership, and there's a couple of data points here to give you an idea of the size of these two organisations, these both organisations are household names to all of our customers. So all of our customers know who Thermo Fisher are, and they know who Beckman Coulter are. We can't replicate the reach and importantly, the brand reputation that these organisations have. And look for different reasons, they actually have complimentary products. So you can, maybe the skeptic might say, "Well, great, you've got these big organisations, but how a going to focus on your product versus all the other things that they've got to sell?"

Well, the answer to that is that our product support it's a complementary product within their existing range of products. And so Thermo Fisher, they're the leaders in the media, the agar plate. And we obviously read the agar plate and our algorithms are tied to the agar plates that we support. And so there's a confluence of compatibility there between the plate and our instrument.

Beckman Coulter on the other hand, have a portfolio of instruments that do various things across the workflow, and APAS fits a perfect place right in the middle that automates the reading and you have the front end, which does the inoculation and streaking, and that's the auto plaque there. And then those positives for the ID and the AST. So complimentary products for both of those organisations.

And look, this is pretty hot off the press. At the very end of last year, we acquired a 100% of our joint venture company, Clever Culture Systems. This is the entity that is the commercial vehicle that we are bringing the instrument that you see on the screen to our customers. And so when you go into labs, they'll know Clever Culture Systems, they won't know LBT.

Really think of this as though we are buying back a 100% of our technology at very much the perfect time. I've had discussions with many shareholders and potential investors, who've become familiar with the joint venture and the way it works. And frankly, it's complex and not easy. And so now we've been able to de-risk and reduce those complexities and both joint venture partners recognise this, which is why the acquisition is largely in shares. And so it's really redeploying the asset from one organisation being Clever Culture Systems now directly into LBT.

And from a strategic perspective, we now own a 100% control, and we also own a 100% of the revenues. So a really important building block, strategic milestone for us to have achieved at the very end of last year, and is a really big deal for shareholders.

This slide geographically outlines where our addressable market is. And clearly the US market is our single largest lab globally. And we've identified a growing number of opportunities and a growing sales pipeline. We've done a lot of the heavy lifting, I said before with the appointment of key opinion leaders who are already advocating for our technology, the sales cycle is a long one, and we've introduced this advanced opportunities metric. And that's just to give some indication of the progress or the velocity of becoming an opportunity that's gone through the early evaluation of the instrument and coming to a point where they're very happy with it and we're progressing to that procurement side of the equation.

You can see that Thermo Fisher represent us as an exclusive distributor, the US market that's progressing extremely well. We appointed them only at the very end of September. And so they've been at play now for about five months making fantastic progress and look in Beckman Coulter, they're sales agent model for us. And we're really working to probably firm up or improve the nature of that agreement more similar to a full distribution style of an agreement there. So another building block milestone, perhaps that's on the pipeline.

I mentioned super bugs. These are these infectious diseases that are resistant to antibiotics. So look, this is a top 10 global health threat, it's a really big issue. And look, we are developing an analysis module that measures antibiotic resistance. And so you can see the image on the right, the little white circles are discs that are antibiotics and the lighter circles around those, demonstrates the resistance of the bacteria to the antibiotic. And so currently it's a very manual process to read those circles. And so through our AI application, we've been able to extend the core reading of plates into this antimicrobial resistance and we're beneficiaries of some funding opportunities, the B2B Funding grant so $750,000 supports the acceleration of that development that will look to have a first customer installation in the near term and likely launch that product next year. We've done some other work, which I won't go, we don't have time to go into around early culture plate reading, We've some data that's been published on that.

And looking at other applications outside of the clinical microbiology space, such as environmental monitoring. And so this is really increasing the market opportunity from where we see it today.

Looking at the corporate overview slide, we are primarily a retail shareholder base post the acquisition of the joint venture company. We've got $6.3 million in the bank, and our cash burns about $2.1 million per quarter, but that's removing any inflow of sales so taking a fairly conservative view around the cash burn versus our cash bank balance.

We've gone through over the last 12 months, a board refresh, so we've got a new chair, we've appointed another non-executive director. All of our directors have global experience. Two of them are based in the US, two of them are based here on Australia and all of them have experience in scale up as well as healthcare and technology experience. So very much within our domain and very much having a global outlook, which as you can see, is important because that's our biggest markets.

So wrapping everything up and looking at where we go to, you can see that over the last 10 years, we've really de-risked from a technology perspective, over the last 12 months we've firmed up channel partners, real giants behind our healthcare space. And we're at a point now where those building block milestones put us into a position to really make some traction on the commercialisation front.

Commercialisation meaning sales, we've sold six instruments over the last three years, we look to really create an inflection point starting in 2022 to start taking advantage of the opportunity. And now that we have a 100% of the joint venture company, our path to break even is improved from where it was before. So you can see how these transformative building blocks are starting to take shape and putting us in a fantastic position to really create an inflection point and a positive outlook for this company, both in 2022, but in future years to come. So I've come to my time I think, Matt hand it back over to you.


Ends

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