Andrew McLellan, MD at BlueChiip (ASX:BCT) at the 4th Stocks Down Under Semiconductor Conference

BlueChiip (ASX:BCT): Andrew McLellan, MD, spoke at the Stocks Down Under Semiconductor Conference

Andrew McLellan, MD at BlueChiip (ASX:BCT) presented at the annual Stocks Down Under ASX Semiconductor Conference. Andrew spoke about BCT’s MEMS (Micro Electromechanical Systems) technology for tracking & tracing frozen samples in the medical industry.

Full transcription below.

 

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Transcription

 

Andrew: I’m gonna give you a bit of an overview this morning of what Bluechiip is all about, where we are right now, and what our foundations are, and why we’re a good organization to invest in. We’re at a slightly different point of the, from the last presenter in our progress. We’ve actually packaged product, and we’re actually selling it to end customers out there in the marketplace. And that’s something that’s taken us quite some time to get to that point, and we’re making some really, really good progress towards that, expanding our marketplace. I’m gonna give you that overview. I’m gonna run a bit of a video that gives you a little bit of a nice sight on what the environments are that we deal with, and what we actually do, and then talk about our progress over the last year, and go from there.

So, there’s a disclaimer. I won’t go into detail on that. You can read it. So, what is Bluechiip? What are our fundamentals? Look, we’re a world first highly differentiated technology. We have 33 granted patents. That’s across seven families, patent families, across different parts of the world, Australia, U.S., Europe, etc. We’ve got a huge market that we play into, that’s well over a billion dollars, and that’s direct revenue that can be generated by Bluechiip products. The target markets are in the IVF, assisted reproductive technologies, clinical trials, cell therapies, biobanking, vaccines. All of these markets require ultralow ID and temperature traceability. It’s absolutely critically important. There’s a lot of material that’s stored in -80, -196 degree liquid nitrogen tanks, and shipped around the world. So there’s well over 300 million units a year of biological samples, they might be eggs, they might be sperm, they might be cells, they might be blood, that are handled, collected, stored, shipped at -80 and -196 degrees C.

The current ID methods…and I’ll go into this in a fair bit of depth, you’d be shocked to actually see what the current ID methods are that get used in those harsh environments. They’re barcodes. Or they’re primarily handwriting, is still what’s primarily used in these markets. So, I’ve mentioned that we’ve had a fair bit of success over the last year, and I’ll go into this in a lot of detail. In December last year, we launched our own range of products that include our chips, but these are FDA-registered, CE marked for clearance in Europe, products that we can actually sell to end customers. So, they can take our core technology, our chip, and they can actually buy our products. And I’ll show you some of them today.

We’ve got a growing direct customer base, and I’ll talk about some of these guys. They’re based in North America. We’ve got a customer here locally. We’ve got a large pharma customer in Europe. And we had a major partnership as well, which we executed pretty much a couple of days before I presented at this conference last year, with Fujifilm, Irvine Scientific. That’s a multi-year development project, where we see that moving to a supply situation and a supply agreement moving forward. We’re reasonably well-positioned. Cash in bank’s at the moment $1.6 million. That was in our last 4C. We’ve got $1.1 million in receivables. That’s from R&D and from customers. We’ve got well over $3 million in inventory.

And I’ll touch on our chip side of things, because there’s always a question around, you know, access to chip and getting chips made and the like, especially over the last two to three years. We’ve got no debt, and we’ve got scaled production capacity. We can manufacture over 5 million chips a year, and I’ll go into that in detail. But before I do that, I’ll play a little bit of a video. It’s about four minutes, and it gives you a little bit of a visual on what we actually do, and our product and our market space.

Narrator: Bluechiip Limited is an Australian company with an advanced sample management technology that wirelessly tracks the identification and temperature of valuable samples, which are stored in harsh and aggressive environments like liquid nitrogen. These include IVF samples, like sperm and eggs, blood, plasma, cells, and emerging new molecular technologies and vaccines, many of which have to be stored and transported in ultra-low temperatures. Well over 300 million of such samples are stored or transported worldwide each year. Bluechiip’s technology is ideal for cryogenic environments, enabling each sample not only to be identified, but its temperature history recorded. For clients, Bluechiip’s technology drives productivity, redefines quality, and delivers confidence in every sample.

Andrew: Bluechiip technology replaces handwritten labels. It replaces barcodes that are used to identify very high-value samples that are stored in or shipped around in ultra-low temperatures, -80 or -196 degrees. These technologies can be enhanced dramatically by Bluechiip, improving the quality, improving the productivity, and at the end of the day, providing the user confidence in every single sample that Bluechiip is identifying.

Narrator: The Bluechiip technology centers on a miniature chip with 52 mechanical beams of different lengths, all responding at different frequencies. Each is turned on or off at the point of manufacture, to create a unique identification, with billions of combinations. Samples can be tracked individually or as large groups. Bluechiip’s technology is protected by 30 granted patents. In May 2021, Bluechiip’s BoxTracker product won the outstanding new product award from ISBER, the global biobanking and biorepository industry association. Bluechiip has further developed its technology, developing its own product, signing original equipment manufacturing agreements with large companies worldwide to embed the Bluechiip technology in their products.

Andrew: We have a number of agreements in place with major multinational organizations globally. One of which is Fujifilm, Irvine Scientific, for the IVF marketplace, where they’re utilizing Bluechiip’s technology, and we’re developing products with them under a license and development agreement. We also are selling our own products and consumables and Bluechiip-enabled technologies to multiple customers across the globe.

Narrator: A key part of Bluechiip’s strategy is going directly to market with Bluechiip-branded products, including readers, consumables, and software, especially in North America, which represents almost 40% of the global biobanking market. A direct-to-market strategy enables Bluechiip to customize and package its solutions for clients.

Andrew: Our recently released range of Bluechiip-enabled consumables, with our readers and our software, is extremely important for Bluechiip. Historically, we’ve worked with partners to actually take product to market, where they can include our Bluechiip technology. We now have the ability to sell our own products into the end marketplace, and we are doing that. It means we take control of our own destiny.

Narrator: While tracking biological samples is the company’s current business, other, broader applications are on the horizon.

Andrew: There’s significant applications for the Bluechiip technology. At the moment, we’re really focused on inventory management and the handling of samples in a facility. Outside of that, you’ve got the global transport of those samples within the cold chain, or otherwise known as cold chain logistics. That’s a very significant marketplace. That has parallels with the global cold chain food marketplace, where there are opportunities for Bluechiip.

Narrator: Crucially, Bluechiip’s technology works in the harshest of environments, like liquid nitrogen, or -196 degrees Celsius.

Andrew: Bluechiip is the only company in the world that can provide ID and temperature at the sample level every time a sample is read, or even when it’s being transported. That is completely unique, and it’s completely owned by Bluechiip.

The images there are not something that people typically see in the day-to-day life, but there’s a lot of facilities, even just in Sydney here, where a lot of biological samples are being stored in those ultra-low temperature conditions. And just seeing that sort of handling, where you’re seeing people lift those samples up out of towers and things like that, and you got the mist of liquid nitrogen evaporating, or you’ve got dry ice tanks, it’s a really harsh environment. It’s a really difficult process to actually identify. So, I will get into a lot of the detail on it, but handwriting is primarily what’s used at the moment.

Corporate Overview. Bluechiip listed, we’re founded in 2003, listed on the ASX in 2011. And since listing on the ASX, we’ve spent a lot of effort and a lot of time in actually, one, developing our core technology and scaling that to the point that we’ve got now 4 million chips on the shelf, and manufacturing those chips at scale. But we’ve also put those chips into the products that we’ve actually got in the market at the moment now, and got them registered and approved.

So, as I mentioned before, we’ve got a wide portfolio of patents, strong shareholder base and supporter base, and a very strong board, with experience of taking Australian technology global, and that’s in multiple cases, and in the life science marketplaces. And I can answer any questions on that in question time. But in terms of last year, it’s been really exciting for Bluechiip. I mean, we had two years where we were basically in lockdown, couldn’t get overseas, couldn’t do a whole bunch of activity, partnerships where people just shut the door. People weren’t actually attending facilities, actually doing some of the work of clinical trials. Everybody got very distracted.

We actually took that time to invest in our own products. And we launched those own products in December last year, and basically got ourselves certified for 9001 ISO certification, CFR21-11 software compliant for the life science marketplace. We got our products registered, but we also scaled our chip manufacturing. And it’s actually worth pointing out that, it’s brought up earlier by Marc, that, you know, supply has been challenging. We manufacture our chips in Europe, [inaudible 00:10:35], who the overall partner is that does that, but they’re a MEMS fabrication facility. And they didn’t miss a beat, right through. MEMS is a very specific area of the silicon manufacturing process, and the fab [inaudible 00:10:50]. But we didn’t miss a beat all the way through.

And one thing that’s interesting, we manufacture on eight-inch silicon wafers. On a single eight-inch silicon wafer, we get 14,000 of our chips, 14,000 of our devices. So we actually got the ability to scale very rapidly and very quickly. We won an international award, which was mentioned in the video. That’s with BoxTracker. The president of Eastbury is actually…works at Westmead Children’s Research Institute and Children’s Hospital. So, we won that award, and that’s a global award. That actually drove a lot of activity towards us. We accelerated our customer adoption. And one of the things that has actually, you know, it’s a simple thing, but in December last year, we were able to put out a catalog. What this catalog does is it allows people to pick up a product code and actually buy product off us. And it’s actually, it’s really cool. And being in this organization for some time, having that actually makes a big difference.

So, we then built a U.S. team. We had one guy on the ground in the U.S. In September, we brought another guy on, into the team. Both of these guys have worked in the life science marketplace for a long time, and worked with Australian organizations, taking product to market. In April this year also, we added two more people to that sales team in North America, and we’re really excited with the progress that’s being made. Also, as that’s been running along, and context of COVID is actually really interesting, because we came out of COVID towards the end of last year, early this year. We also executed our license and development agreement with Fujifilm. So, we’ve been working in partnership, in development activities, and generating revenue from that partnership as of today. And that’s moving towards releasing product into the market, into the IVF marketplace, where we’ve got global distribution with Fuji. And we’ll support them right the way through that process.

This is really exciting. In this time last year, we weren’t really able to do this. So, this slide here is pretty important for us as a business and for our technology. We’ve now got 12 labs across the globe, primarily focused in North America, but we’ve got a couple of customers here in Australia. We’ve got a very large pharma. We’ve got a top 10 pharma based in Europe that’s using our product. And we’ve been actually building that list, and it’s really strategically important for us to keep building out that customer base, and actually making it grow. Pretty excited that, you know, as of today, we’ve got 12 labs. So, we launched product, really, January, February, got that out there. We’ve had sales reps on board that have really been selling hard for only six months.

And we’re starting to get really, really cool feedback from our customer base. And this, it’s really interesting when you get that feedback, because, you know, I did a trade show only about a month ago, in San Diego, and one of the guys, which is the American Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, is the research facility up in, just north of Boston. They’ve got projects where they’re actually printing hearts, is one of the projects they’re doing. So, they’re doing work in cell therapies, where they’re actually taking people’s cells, modifying them, you know, printing things in a physical sense. And they might be going back into people. So, that’s the type of work they’re doing. What was cool is that these guys actually had a booth at this trade show, and they’re a customer, and we’re actually able to talk to customers and target customers, or potential customers, and point to people that are using our product right now. And they’re giving fantastic feedback. And that’s, it’s been very, very positive.

To give you an idea… Let’s see. I’ll get to it in a moment. So, what’s our vision? Our vision is to be the global leader in ID and sensing technology. We wanna be the gold standard for that biological sample storage, shipping, transport, right across the whole cold chain. Our mission is to help people that are advancing research and medicine, by providing confidence, confidence in every single sample. That’s confidence on the temperature side, it’s confidence on the ID, and it’s confidence on who’s done what, and tracking that whole process.

I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but our target is that life science market, cold chain, logistics, storage, and monitoring. And it’s a big market. It’s a huge market opportunity. It’s a market that’s changing pretty dramatically and pretty quickly. There’s increasing sample numbers, being, there’s, increasing dramatically. And the amount of samples that have been retrieved out of storage is changing. And as cell therapies and people starting looking at genetics and molecules, they’re pulling a lot more samples out of people’s materials, which is a drive on productivity.

There’s an increased demand for advanced therapies and sensitive samples. There’s criticality of sample history maps and reports. That’s increasing pretty significantly as well, as the use of these type of products that are stored in these temperature conditions increases. So, and cryogenics and cryo storage, I think everybody’s pretty well aware that there was a whole bunch of vaccines being shipped around in -80 degree conditions, which, actually, dramatically driving.

This image here, it was in the video. But to give you an idea of what the environments are, these are -80 degree freezers. And you can see in the images here, and I’ll just highlight, this guy here, that’s inside one of these -80 degree freezers. You can see all the frost. You can see, if I zoomed right in there, there’s handwriting on the boxes that’s actually doing the identification of what the samples are that are in store. That is state of the art. When it goes into liquid nitrogen, these are IVF samples that are actually in liquid nitrogen, -196. The environments are actually really quite severe.

Our primary market opportunity is across different segments. The details there, it’s over a billion dollars, and that’s directly from us selling our consumables, our readers, our software. That’s the total available market, and it’s growing significantly. So, getting back to our core technology, the video highlights some of that, but the way I best describe the core technology is that if it’s a one-millimeter cube of silicon, manufactured on an eight-inch wafer. If you look at it, if you’ve got a piano at home, and you count the number of white keys on your piano, you typically got 52 keys [inaudible 00:17:35]. If you play a chord, you get a certain tune. That’s the ID. If you took your piano and put it in liquid nitrogen, I wouldn’t suggest to do that, but if you did do that, it’d be way outta tune, right?

So, those 52 mechanical beams are all different lengths, embedded into a tiny piece of silicon. And as the frequency, as the temperature shifts, the frequency shifts also. And that’s how we get the temperature. Very, very simple approach, and it works. And it works in that ultra-low temperature condition. We then package that chip onto different antennas, for different application spaces, for different products that we might manufacture. What people do at the moment in these markets is they either use barcodes or handwriting, and what happens is you get frost, and you can’t read those, read the IDs. So, having a chip that you can wirelessly identify samples is a huge benefit. There’s a lot of interest in RFIDs, and RFIDs doing…you know, we all know that you can go to a decathlon and get your sports gear and put it in a box and it’ll tell you all the items that are in your box and what you’re buying. Those type of RFIDs, and they’re on your bank card and the like, those type of RFIDs don’t work below minus 40 degrees. So, they stop working for a number of reasons, and there’s no RFID that’s spec’d in that very low temperature condition.

But, you know, so, that’s one part of it. They don’t…RFIDs don’t identify the temperature. And also, RFIDs, when you’re selling bags of vials like this, that have biological samples going into them, they need to be sterilized. And the way items are sterilized is you put them past a radiation source. And if you take an RFID and put it past a radiation source, you scrub it. So, there’s a number of reasons that we outperform RFID technologies dramatically.

What do we sell? We sell those tubes, we sell readers, and we sell the software under a license to our end customer base. And our goal is to deliver confidence in every single sample. We are the only company, and we have the IP, and it’s registered, and approved and granted in North America, for having ID and temperature at the sample level, in a sample container.

Some of our customer benefits, we’re redefining quality. What we can do is we can actually read that ID and temperature in the liquid nitrogen condition. So, what people don’t have to do is take their samples out of the cold to actually do their ID and processing. They can do that in the cold. So, there’s no risk to the quality. We keep a quality record, and our software provides a quality record and a history, not just of ID, not just of temperature, but who has handled the samples, where they’ve been handled, the time stamping of all of that activity, so they can go back and historically look at that.

There’s a lot of clinical trial manufacturers, clinical trial companies out there that are desperately require that information. So, when you’ve got a big pharma that’s spending billions of dollars on a new drug or a new therapy, they need to have that traceability and control. We’re also driving productivity, and this is a really simple thing. And just to describe how the market works and where we’re actually getting that customer feedback and saying where our product differentiates from anything else, we’ve got a set of labels. These include a Bluechiip ID in them, that can be ID, the temperature, and the like. What we do is we put these on a tank, we put ’em on a tower, we put ’em on a box, and then we can go down to the level of a tube with our ID unit.

No matter what the sophistication of the facilities we’re dealing with, they might have a really sophisticated database that keeps a record. A lot of ’em are just using Excel and handwriting to keep a record of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of samples. No matter what they’re doing, no matter how they’re doing that, if they need to go and collect a sample, every single place prints out a sheet of paper, walks to the tank, moves around, trying to find where the right box is, and rubbing off frost, hand writes on their piece of paper what they’ve done, what they’ve moved, what they’ve changed in the facility, takes that back to a terminal, which is typically gonna be a different level in the building, and need to enter the data. The thing that we’re finding fantastic feedback on is on our handheld readers.

We call it guided storage and guided retrieval. We actually can generate the pick list. So, the user types in a pick list, automatically updates onto the screen here, and then we go down that hierarchy of storage and guide them to where the samples are. And that then means that their databases are automatically updated, and they’re not losing samples. Just one of the key benefits that we’re offering to the market.

Path to market, pretty simple. Getting out and selling our own products, through our own sales channels. We’re building a distribution network in Europe and in Asia, but we have direct feet on the street in North America. And also working with partners. There’s a lot of incumbent organizations in the industry that make consumables. One of those partnerships is Fujifilm. That actually helps us, one, in providing us brand equity, of being partnered. And when Fuji go to market with product that we’ve developed in partnership with them, it will be called “Bluechiip Enabled.” So, they’re gonna be selling a “Bluechiip Enabled.” It’s “Intel Inside,” is the marketing strategy there. So, two paths to market, and we’re making great progress on both of them.

So, I won’t go through all of this detail again, but at Bluechiip, it’s a really exciting time. It’s a really exciting time to be actually able to sell product ourselves after a long period of time investing in developing our core chip technology, which is manufactured in eight-inch silicon wafers. Thank you.

Marc: Thank you, Andrew. Before we go to questions from the online audience, just checking to see if there’s any questions in the room here.

Man 1: Hi. Yeah, it looks like a very interesting technology. So, just trying to understand the cost of the technology to the customer, compared to what they’re using now, if it’s barcodes. Will it generate some sort of cost blowout for them? How inelastic is the product, from a cost perspective? That’s the first question. Second question is, I’m assuming these chips need to be powered somewhat within the harsh environment. Is there a battery involved? How does it stay warm and do its semiconductor thing? And thirdly, who are the competitors in the RFID space? Yeah. Thank you.

Andrew: Okay, let me, to cover off on a few of those questions. In terms of price and cost to the end customer, we’re selling a solution. And what all of the vendors in the market…some vendors are selling tanks, software, but they’re not integrating them together. So, we’re selling a solution. If you wound back two, three years ago, we’re selling a tube for $3 to $4. They can buy a tube for a dollar, $1.50, $2, type. So there is an uplift on that. If you wind back two to three years ago, all of the customers we’re talking to, we’re talking about our tubes, which we didn’t have then. And we were positioning it that, okay, we’d always get that pushback on price. And the benefits are there, but there was the cost hurdle. Selling the solution, though, we’re actually shifted that pretty dramatically, in that the benefit…we’re selling the benefits, and as part of us going to direct to market ourselves, we’re able to do that. When we sell the benefits, you start looking at the package of products that the customer’s actually buying, and they’ll be looking at a software package to do their database and inventory management. They might be paying $50,000, $100,000 a year when they start looking at the different options available in the marketplace.

So, as we move into that, and as we’re going to the customers we’re bringing on board, we’re having no pushback at all on that price because we are capturing a whole lot of it, and they’re getting those benefits that they don’t otherwise have. In terms of, sorry, your second part to your question was battery? Yeah. Okay. So, we’re, it’s purely a physical device, the chip. What we do is with the reader, we have, we excite it with an RF signal. So, the excitation comes from an RF signal. That means we need to be within about 5 millimeters read range of each chip. But with the whole solution, that, they can get that whole mapping of the tank. And we do that, and do that over time.

Sorry. Then, RFIDs, competition. There is none. So, we don’t have anybody that…there are a couple of companies that say that RFIDs work in the cold temperatures. They do not. There is not an RFID on the planet that’s spec’d to work below -40 degrees, let alone actually work. So we don’t see any competition. We actually see…it can be a little bit double-edged, because people are aware that RFIDs don’t work in these low-temperature conditions, so we have to sell through that a little, to convince them that our product does work. And the way we do do that is we go to trade shows. At a trade show, we actually get dry ice, and we actually have it there, on, so somebody can see it literally working. If we go to a customer site and we do a demonstration, we typically ask them to get some liquid nitrogen, and we’ll literally put it in liquid nitrogen, box or tank, and show them that it works. And that then overcomes those challenges.

Marc: I don’t see if there’s any other questions here? If not, we’ll go. Oh, sorry.

Man 2: Can you indicate what your yields are from your silicon wafer, that you achieve?

Andrew: We test every single chip in liquid…

Man 2: No, no, but what yield the wafer.

Andrew: That’s confidential, what our internal yield is. But what I would say to that is it, one of the things that we’ve been doing…and, as you get a process up and running…we’re generating a process here. And one of the reasons that we’ve gone to having well over 4 million chips on the shelf is that as we’re doing the development of that process, your yields improve, right the way through, because you’re doing continuously, you look at what your process control charts, those sort of things, to actually tweak the conditions, and they’re continuously improving. We do a hundred percent test every single chip in liquid nitrogen, at our facility in Melbourne.

Woman: Yeah, I just wondered, can you recycle those chips or reprogram in any way?

Andrew: So, it’s fixed. It’s one of the benefits of the technology is that every single chip is unique, and it can’t be reprogrammed or…and it’s really important when you’re dealing with biological samples that, you know, if it’s an IVF, if it’s somebody’s egg, I mean, you don’t wanna be able to reprogram the information. So, that’s one side of it. Recycling, typically, once it’s had a biological in one of our consumables, they’re typically incinerated, just because, it is the process because of the biologics and the risk of contamination. It’s worthwhile pointing out that, you know, the customers that we’re in, and we’re really focused on what we call “land and expand.” So, we’re landing customers, we’re landing large pharma, where, you know, they might have one lab in one facility, but they’ve got thousand… They might have a hundred facilities across the world. And we’re actually looking to then expand into other labs within each of the business [crosstalk 00:29:29]

Marc: Before we go to the online questions, just a quick question for my part. Looking at the typical customer, how many devices would they use typically per year? And I know it’s a hard question because you got customers in all shapes and forms, but just to get a sense of what you’re shipping to them.

Andrew: Yeah. Great question, Marc. The setup cost for a customer is, you know, between $30,000 and $50,000. That’s for the software, the readers…we’ve got a box reader that reads up to a hundred samples at once. The pull-through, then, we’re looking at customers that, some customers, depending on the market, they might do thousands of samples a month. There’s some customers that we’re engaged with that do hundreds of thousands. And then there’s some of the really big guys have, you know, there’s one organization that’s got 15 million samples. So, that 15 million, though, would be multiple, across multiple labs. So, that pull-through that we would see and we’re looking at is, you know, that $30,000 to $50,000 up front. We’re seeing repeat orders on handheld readers as well from some customers. They actually get set up and then, you know, six months later they come back and buy a couple more readers. We sell our readers like this for about $5,000 U.S. And then, you know, if you go that $50,000, $100,000, $3 each, $3 to $4 per consumable, that gives you an idea about what each of the customers’ scale is.

Stuart: So, before, we got a question, so, a comment from me. When you talked about putting a piano in liquid nitrogen, I thought that was really cool. So, question about the competition. Obviously, you need to get, you know, the alternatives, like that slide you were showing with the crosses and the ticks, and you’re orders of magnitude better than them. So, how come you’re not further down the path, in terms of having, you know, swept the world before you? If I could put it like that.

Andrew: We only started selling product that the customer could buy in December last year. That’s primarily it. You know, we were looking at our pipeline chart. There’s 4 of the top 10 pharma companies in the world we’re talking to, and we’re in one of them. And they’re using our product. We’re really targeted at the high-value samples, where there’s less resistance. What we do find is that if an organization is mature, and they’ve got a lot of samples already in store, and we’ve got solutions for this in the back end, that they’ve got a… It’s inertia, that they’ve got inertia. We’re finding a lot of success in greenfield sites, where if they’re setting up now, they’re literally just taking our technology. And we’re, you know, last week we installed into a site. It’s just like that.

And cell therapy conference in San Diego, four weeks ago, I had about 30 meetings. It was a speed dating type conference, where you, sort of, half-an-hour meetings with different people and different companies, different targets. Fifteen of the groups were cell therapies, and there’s a lot of money going into cell therapy, research and development, clinical trials. We’d ask them the question, “Well, do you store samples?” “Yes.” “How do you track your samples?” “Oh, we’re, handwriting and Excel.” So, there’s a huge number of these organizations that are just handwriting and Excel. And so it’s just us getting out there, getting the runs on the board, building those key opinion leaders, building the early adopter sites, and actually having them drive it through. And when, pretty excited that when we get product into the market with Fuji, which is “Bluechiip Enabled,” that also builds that momentum of key users. And the life science marketplace is a follow-the-leader type market. Once you get the adoption of the leaders in the market, then the rest follow. That’s our strategy.

Stuart: So, next question is, there’s a lot of government organizations that need to store biological samples, like, say, CDC or Armed Forces Research Institute. How long till we see you showing up in those places?

Andrew: So, American Regenerative Manufacturing Institute is a government-supported organization up in Manchester. They’ve got a $70 million grant from the Department of Defense in North America. So, you could probably say that we’re already in some of those places. Not the ones that you specifically mentioned, but we’re making progress.

Marc: We’ve got time still for one more question.

Stuart: Well, because when the customers are talking to you about what they’re looking for to junk their old pencil-and-paper system, what is it they’re sharing with you as their biggest frustration?

Andrew: So, a lot of the customers haven’t had a solution in the past, so they still do the pencil and paper. There’s, so, depending on the market, they’ll be doing that handwriting. Their frustrations are that they might lose samples. However, they haven’t had a solution, so they don’t talk about it. And we’re going in there and actually communicating that we’re available. You can use us to improve their process. So that’s, and their frustration is just losing samples.

And to give you another sort of touchpoint, there’s terms like dual witnessing. So, when somebody’s going and getting samples out of storage for a patient, they’ll have two people that are looking and confirming the ID. We can eliminate one of those people, in a productivity gain, just with electronically tracking that. So, you know, that’s the sort of thing that they’re having trouble with.