Max Smock: Hi, thank you for taking our questions. Maybe one for me on the CDMO business. You mentioned a stronger sales funnel for this part of the company. And just wondering if there’s any more detail you can share around how the sales funnel has grown over the last couple of quarters here, and what you’re seeing in terms of the strength in the cell and gene therapy market more broadly? And then in terms of those potential opportunities that you’ve won so far, I guess, it would be helpful to hear really what has differentiated you or what you think differentiates you from some of your larger competitors in the space. Thank you.
Jim Foster: Sure. The market is strong and has remained strong. There’s a plethora of cell and gene therapy drugs that had then quote discovered and need to be developed either to success or failure. So we’re going to be very, very busy. We’ve, as I said earlier, retooled the sales organization. So we’ve got people with great expertise in both cell and gene therapy to understand both the science and the processes for manufacturing and the time frame. As I said earlier, the time frame is longer than we had anticipated. So we’re really pleased with the way we’ve been signing up clients, large and small, the openness to share their anticipated plans with us to wheel what the market size they think the drugs might have. As I said earlier, we have several clients that are on the verge of commercialization.
It doesn’t mean the drugs will get to market, but I’m just saying from a regulatory point of view are on the verge of having finished clinicals and will be filing and one that has moved into a commercial zone. So the sales funnel feels solid, consistent, persistent and pretty varied in terms of the scale of the companies. The market itself, the €“ it’s probably a number we should update, but we €“ when we quantified it last time, we said they were about 3,000 cell and gene therapy drugs in development, probably two-thirds of which were in the preclinical domain. And obviously, some meaningful portion of these we’ll get to work on. The differentiating factor for us and the reason we went into CDMO space having kind of fleet from a few years ago because it’s kind of a crowded space is that this is kind of an interesting niche.
We have a couple of other very good players in the space, which is fine. The market needs them, but what the differentiating feature is that we don’t just manufacture a drug. We have the Biologics Testing business, which is kind of how we ended up pivoting back into this space because clients were saying speed is of the essence. We give you our molecule and develop it for us. We can’t tolerate you sending us out to find some of the manufacturer negotiating prices, maybe someone we don’t know or trust. We’d like you to be able to do that for us. So if you think about it, we can do some of the discovery development. We can do all the toxicology work to say it’s safe, then we can test that molecule before it goes into the clinic €“ sorry, we can now manufacture the molecule, and then test it before it goes into the clinic and then test it as it goes into commercialization.
So I do think it holds true not just for cell and gene therapy but pretty much everything we do. We just have this €“ we have a broader portfolio than the competition. And even if they’re bigger companies and even if they’re bigger and have a larger reputation than us for being a CDMO, they don’t have the pull-through that we have, and they don’t have a comprehensive portfolio. We think that gives us a significant and distinct competitive advantage.
Max Smock: Thank you.
Jim Foster: Sure.
