Mathias Nilsen Reierth
Good morning, and a warm welcome to all joining us today for our presentation of Thor Medical's results for the second half and full year of 2025. My name is Mathias Nilsen Reierth, the head of corporate communications and corporate affairs here at Thor Medical.
It's a pleasure for me to be here today welcoming you for the very first time. I'm looking forward to interacting with you in the time ahead.
Just a couple of practicalities: this presentation contains forward-looking statements, and the complete disclaimer is available in the presentation material that was published earlier today. We have set aside some time for questions after the presentation, we will open the floor for questions in the room, and for those of you following us through webcast, please put in your questions now.
With me today, I have my colleagues, Jasper Kurth, CEO of Thor Medical, and also Brede Ellingsæter, Chief Financial and Operating Officer at Thor Medical. Brede will take you through the financials and also give you an update on the operational development in the company in the period.
First, Jasper will take us through our latest progressions in the quarter.
Jasper Kurth
Thank you, Mathias. Good morning, and a warm welcome from my side as well.
Today is about one thing: walking the talk. Great companies are not built on PowerPoint and promises.
Great companies are built on execution and progress. Today I'm very proud to report back that Alfa 1 is on track.
Not barely on track, but fully on track. The company is in the final stretch of completion.
The market is ready that we deliver the products from our company and that we sell the capacity that we bring online. Let's recap a bit what our mission is.
We are poised to become a leading supplier of alpha-emitting isotopes to enable groundbreaking new precision medicine therapies in oncology, and this is a paradigm shift in the industry. We believe that we can lead the market because we are early and we have superior technology that works, and we have built an order backlog of 850 million by now.
This is a growing number, and this is supported by Alfa 1, our first commercial plant. Now, just recapping a couple of highlights, and bear with me, because some of them feel like an eternity ago in this fast-paced environment that we're in.
Just in March of last year, merely a year ago, the board made the decision to build this factory, to build Alfa 1. What was a vision and an idea and maybe a concept is becoming something that is made of brick and mortar right now.
This picture is taken before Christmas where we lift four of these heavy tanks in, and this is really a pinch-myself moment just to realize that this is actually shaping up. Besides that, we have secured not only customer agreements, but also upstream agreements with our key suppliers of raw materials, because what we need is vast quantities of thorium, which is abundant in this planet.
We have signed a strategic agreement with a Western European supplier that actually helps to build this factory and actually to scale it up. The geopolitical risks are minimal because it's a Western European large company.
We also have shipped the first batch of highly purified lead-212 to a large pharma customer. While this is a normal transaction, it means the world to my team and me, because the revenues it generates, albeit small, is an indication that this technology works and that customers see the value of the product we produce here in Norway.
We have increased this order backlog that I mentioned, and this is something that my team is working on to continually increasing this order backlog and making more progress on customers that are on the clinical side. We now have received the facility of Alfa 1.
Before Christmas, we have been handed over what we call the ALAB. That's basic the shell in which all the equipment is going into.
Now the project team is busy moving in equipment, connecting, and actually setting everything up that we complete Alfa 1 on track as we are planning and as we're executing towards. This is, of course, in a situation where we are fully financed.
We have said this time and time again, we have raised capital, we have a loan of Innovation Norway, and we have a working capital instrument in place from DNB, and this gives us the position to be fully funded into break-even next year already. There's one point I'm incredibly proud of, and that is the team.
When you meet the team that works in Herøya, our operational team that we have now almost fully staffed, people that work on-site both in R&D and production, these are people that bring a lot of experience to the table, and they could have worked anywhere, but they decided to work with us. The same goes for our headquarter organization here in Skøyen in Oslo.
The team now with Mathias, you have just met, and also Therese running HR, these are high-class talent, and they decide to work with us. This is, for me, a very humbling experience, and it warms my heart to see that, actually.
This is really something that I was maybe a bit concerned of coming from Big Pharma to attract the right talent, but I can say the team is nothing short of fantastic, and I'm very, very happy and blessed every day to work with this fantastic team. Now let's dive a bit deeper into Alfa 1, and you can see the sheer magnitude of this huge tank that is hoisted by two massive heavy-lifting cranes inside of a building.
I was there that day, and I felt like a little schoolboy again standing in between this and seeing these operators moving this ton equipment in millimeter precision. This is something, I told you I was working in the pharma industry for most of my life, and the sheer magnitude of this is nothing that I've seen before.
We are talking about our Herøya facility, which is two hours south of Oslo, and we built this plant with a boiler-plate capacity of 21,000 patient doses on an annual basis to be online after three years, and we plan to start production already in Q3 this year. What we need for production is a complete plant, mechanical complete and commissioning.
That we can share today that mechanical complete is just a mere number of weeks ahead of us. We plan to have the mechanical complete done in April of 2026.
This means that this project, as I said on the onset, is fully on track, and we don't take this for granted. This is not a chance of luck.
This is the result of hard work and dedication and ingenuity of this project team I was referring to. Hiring people with experience and relevant expertise really pays off and makes sure that all these unforeseen circumstances of every project are managed and maneuvered against.
Very grateful for that situation. Let's talk about the market, because we built this huge plant.
21,000 patient doses, that sounds like a lot, and some of you and many of you are familiar with the clinical development pipeline with only a few hundred patients at tops. How does this fit together?
Let me try to explain this to you in the next couple of slides. We basically take market reports like any other company.
This is the report that also Novartis is using. You see many different figures when you look at different reports, but they basically have one in common, and that is this hockey-stick trajectory to grow this market, and to actually show that the therapeutics inside radiopharmaceuticals will have an inflection point where the very traditional business of diagnostics will be the smaller part of that market.
According to this report, this will happen somewhere around 2030 where we have a $15 billion market on the therapeutics, a market that is $3 billion last year, that was maybe $1 billion just a couple of years ago. We see this progress already happening.
For us in the executive team and in the board, it doesn't really matter if this market is $12 billion, $25 [billion?] , or $28 [billion?]
. It matters that the market is big enough and it's moving in the right direction.
We have, of course, a lot of activities in the clinic, this is an emerging market, clinical assets are worked on and Big Pharma companies are investing, and there's a lot of movement in this. I'd like to zoom into that movement.
This is a busy chart, but bear with me, I would like to walk you through because it's important. The first message that I would like to leave here is we have an established market already.
We have two RLTs that are on the market, both by Novartis, Pluvicto and Lutathera. These are drugs that work and that have established themselves as the standard of care for the respective indications, which is neuroendocrine tumor, specific gut tumor, and PSMA prostate cancer.
Pluvicto alone, $2 billion, $2 billion last year, growing 40% in the fourth quarter of last year. This product is a blockbuster, and Lutathera is also a blockbuster.
Novartis plans to have peak sales of $7 billion between two single products. They actually give hope to patients because they are safer than the standard of care, they're more efficacious than the standard of care, and that's why they're prescribed before chemotherapy in the case of Pluvicto.
This means that this market is not having a slowly evolution, it is a paradigm shift from traditional radiopharmaceuticals, which used to be niche products for very sick patients, to becoming standard of care. This is what is reflected here, and is what reflected on the last slide where we can see the market growth.
Now, beta-emitters are great, and they work, they're easily to produce, they have long half-life, and they just work, as we have seen with these two drugs and many other clinical assets. I think many agree that the future is alpha-emission.
Alpha-emission, two main advantages: short range, making it much more precise, you leave healthy tissue intact; and secondly, the kinetic energy transfer is much greater. The emission is a heavyweight particle that rips through both DNA strands.
One emission is enough to kill a cancer cell and rip the DNA apart. That's why the clinical activities are very much focused on the alpha-emitting space, and within that space, we see a confirmation that we are betting on the right horse, because lead-212, that is the isotope that our process evolves around, lead-212 is emerging as the leader from that pack.
This is for various reasons: what you want to have is an isotope that has a stable supply, and we make sure that our technology works in the way that we exploit the decay profile of the thorium decay chain and bring a precursor to our customers that they can actually use it to do the radiolabeling, and then produce a short-lived isotope because that's what you want to have clinically. You want to have a isotope injected with your targeting vector that seeks the cancer, destroys the cancer, and decays into something stable, and excrete it with the normal pathways.
With that, you allow a low toxicity, and you allow the immune system to respond, because otherwise you would also bombard the macrophages and T cells of the immune system with radiation. That's not what you want.
This is what lead-212 can give you with the short half-life and with a very clean alpha decay of just one single alpha-emission, which allows for easier chelators and a stronger binding to the targeting vector. A lot of advantages with lead-212.
That said, of course, there's great progress with actinium and the others. I just believe also the market will be big enough for supporting more than one single isotope.
Let's leave this clinical view a bit and talk about the market size today. We believe the market size for our market, thorium-based isotopes, this year will be between 40,000 and 50,000 patient doses.
We believe this based on educated information that we have and discussions that we have, for instance, with the Department of Energy, which is the sole supplier of these isotopes today, and they have doubled their capacity over the last four years. Every single year, they doubled their capacity to meet the market demand.
From our research standpoint, we believe this is not enough. The demand still outpaces that doubled amount of supply.
Case in point is this light-green bar. For the first time, we see a growth of Russian isotopes, which was not looked at by the Western Hemisphere companies because geopolitical risks and, of course, being exposed to a lot of negative publicity potentially.
Since they are exempted from the sanctions, they make inroads with traders in Western Europe or the US. Customers start buying Russian isotopes because they don't get enough from the DOE.
This is what we mean when we say the market is ready. We talk about 40,000 to 50,000 patient doses for the market this year, and we are building a factory which will have 21,000 patient doses in three years.
This is a bit the concept we're in. Talking about our customers and just looking at the first half year of 2025 where we have the solid basis, we're very happy to have attracted four new customers, and very different customers that is: so Telix, a multibillion-US-dollar company, very mature, huge product portfolio, very well-managed; we have Radiomedix, a pioneer in the field, the first clinical asset that was pushed through the clinic came from Radiomedix, they know exactly what we do; and I'm particularly proud of attracting two local Norwegian players, NucleThera and Oncoinvent.
This highlights what is very close to my heart, that we are building this ecosystem here in the greater Oslo area, and this is a chance for the Norwegian economy to really highlight the fact that we have the self-sufficient ecosystem with many companies working in that space, and these are two of them. Long term, when we have access to raw material also here in Norway, it could be a closed circle, this is, from my point of view, very, very beautiful.
Just to recap what I said in the onset, we are ready to scale once Alfa 1 is ready, and we are on track with Alfa 1. In the next part, we would like to highlight what makes our process so special and how we see the operational development.
For that, I would like to hand over to Brede. Thank you, Brede.
Brede Ellingsæter
Thank you very much, Jasper. Good morning, everybody.
It's great to see so many here, some new faces and some familiar faces. Today I will go through both the operational development in more details, but I will also give an update on the highlights of the financials for the period.
What I would like to do is to start by recapping what it is that we do and how we bring this isotopes to the market. We have developed a proprietary separation process which we call ALPHA CYCLE, for which we can produce high-purity lead-212 and its precursors from naturally occurring thorium.
If I can take your attention to the right side of the slide, to take you through the steps of the production process, we are starting with thorium-232, this is what is called natural thorium, you find it in the ground, and it decays into radium-228, which is our intermediate product. From tons of thorium-232, we are extracting radium-228.
From radium-228, which is our intermediate product, we can produce the final products that we are selling to our customers, being thorium-228, which is a generator product, the customers are using that for producing lead locally; but we can also produce radium-224, which is also both a generator product and a medical isotope; and we produce also lead-212 directly. Of course, that is in producing from Porsgrunn, that is a limitation in terms of how many customers we can serve with lead-212, but we have that capability.
We're doing this without the use of any irradiation, which is the traditional way of producing isotopes, or any high-energy-intensive processes. We are doing chemical separation, which, of course, benefit from a regulatory standpoint, but the real beauty of this process is that we leverage the half-life of the raw material, which has a half-life of 14 billion years.
It means that it continuously decay into radium that we can extract. The radium-228 itself has a half-life of six years, which means whatever we generate in the first period, most of it will still be there in the next period, and we will continue to increase our inventory of intermediate products, allowing us to continuously increase production of the finished goods products without any additional investments.
Just processing the same rate of raw materials will increase our output of products. Of course, over time, that means that once the market matures, we do not have to add any more raw materials, we will just have to reprocess what we have accumulated before, and that will create a position where the marginal cost of supply for Thor Medical will iterate towards zero, meaning, of course, also very attractive margins for the company.
We say that we have a self-scaling process based on this principle. Let me also then talk about what this means for our first commercial-scale plant, Alfa 1.
This site is set up to produce mainly thorium-228 and radium-224, the generator product that the customers are using to produce lead locally. By leveraging the self-scaling process, we will continue to increase production, reaching about 21,000 patient doses after three years of running the plant, and eventually about 60,000 patient doses in about 10 years' time.
The revenue potential for the 21,000 patient doses after three years is approximately 350 million NOK potential for the company in the current market pricing. The project is fully on track, as Jasper has talked about.
We have had no serious incidents in terms of HSE, that is, of course, most important, but we're also within budget and we are on time. The team is fully hired, and most of it is already staffed on-site, meaning that we can hit the ground running when we finalize the plant and ready for startup in Q3.
Let me also give a little bit more detail on the execution plan. We made the final investment decision in March of last year, and the first thing we did was to put orders for long-lead items, among other things, hot cells, which is large lead and steel constructions to contain most of the radioactive processes.
We also completed the final steps of engineering. At the same time, before summer last year, civil construction started.
The new laboratories that was being constructed in Herøya, was completed just before Christmas. That was a big milestone for us, we formally took over that site, which also allowed us to start installing equipment, also including these huge storage tanks that you just saw in the pictures.
We are now fully on track for a mechanical completion of the site in April of this year, and in parallel towards that date, at the end of this quarter, we will start partly commissioning the plant in a way that we are ready to fully ramp in Q3 for production start. With that, I would also like to go over to the financials and summarize key figures.
Most notably in the period, I would like to mention the continuation of generating initial revenues for the company. We are selling products from the pilot that is mainly based on lead-212 to our Big Pharma partner locally here.
This will also continue into the first half of this year until we are ready to scale Alfa 1. It's still symbolic, but it's meaningful because it keeps us relevant in the market.
Beyond having initial revenues, we are very mindful to keep a lean cost base and organization while we are building the large facility. EBITDA came in at negative 25.7 million for the period, and we had a loss before taxes of 30.5 million.
Net cash flow in the period was negative 43.8 million, and this reflects both the loss for the period, the investments that we did in the plant, which is also partly offset by changes in working capital. We closed the period with 180.6 million cash available.
That means that we are still very much fully funded. We have, beyond the cash of 180 million that I mentioned, we have a loan agreement in place with Innovation Norway of 90 million, of which first tranche was drawn now in first quarter.
We have a working capital facility with DNB, which is a structure of 10 plus 10, meaning that we have 10 available now and we will have 10 more available upon startup. With this capital, we are fully funded to take us through the ramp-up and to cash positive in 2027.
With that, I like to give the word back to Jasper to summarize.
Jasper Kurth
Thank you, Brede. You could also see, operationally and financially, we are well on track, and we don't take this for granted.
As I said, this is the result of hard work. I hope this is visible here.
Talking about Alfa 1, and Alfa 1 as important it is for us today, and we are firmly and laser-focused on completing Alfa 1. If you fast-forward five years, Alfa 1 will be a step on the road, a very important step, but a step, because in order to be a relevant player in this market, we need to scale our production as the market goes and also preempt when the market is going.
We conceptually need to think about increasing capacity, and we call this here Alfa 2 and Alfa Global, but you don't necessarily think about these as monolithical factories as we have with Alfa 1. These could be a combination of upstream purification, taking 1 ton of thorium into 0.4 milligrams, this, of course, helps a lot in logistics, and then maybe downstream purification closer to where the customers are.
This is an ongoing discussion, obviously, how we do it and when we do it, but rest assured, we are firmly grounded on our operational activities, and that is Alfa 1. Just to summarize the presentation, our single most important task in the leadership team, in the entire organization, is finalizing and ramping up Alfa 1 to commercial operations.
This is the big step, this is what this year needs, and we are on it and we are on track, as you could see. Secondly, we have this very unique position in the market.
Between the government entities and the market, it's only us that can actually bring these isotopes to partners and customers. This allows us to broaden and deepen the relationships that we have today and that we could also have in the future.
Looking at the value chain, this opens up a host of opportunities, and with the asset that we have, by being able to deliver today and in the future, we have discussions with players that are much larger than our company. This is a very important step to also position ourselves in this nascent market and find the best spot for this company to grow in.
Of course, we have written a couple of larger checks with our customers, the agreements that we have, the 850 million order backlog, this is always reciprocal. We don't do one-sided agreements; if the customer commits to paying and taking these amounts, we, of course, reserve the capacity and make sure that we produce.
These are checks that we make sure that they will not bounce, we will need to make sure to deliver against these and generate these products and with that the revenues that we have planning. All in all, we steer this company to future profitable growth in this market and beyond.
I hope everybody would agree with me that at Thor Medical, we walk the talk. Thank you very much.
With that, we hand over to the Q&A, Mathias, right?
Mathias Nilsen Reierth
Thank you, Jasper. First question: how does Sanofi's decision to deprioritize AlphaMedix impact the market and Thor Medical?
Oh,
Jasper Kurth
can we start with an easy one? Maybe I start.
What we have seen with Sanofi, and for those of you that couldn't catch it because it was a side note in the earnings call in late January, Sanofi deprioritizes an asset that they have licensed in from Orano Med and AlphaMedix. This is the asset for NET, for the neuroendocrine tumors.
While we don't know what it means exactly because there's no information out there, it is not uncommon that this happens, especially in this stage, Phase 2, Phase 3, sometimes even, that pharmaceutical companies undergo a portfolio streamlining and then decide to put a fixed amount of investments where the highest rates of short-term success is there. This is kind of what the process is.
We have to see this also in the light that Sanofi has undergone this strategic change a bit away from oncology, more towards immunology, they have this portfolio shift anyway, and they just have hired a new CEO. The new CEO, Belén, coming from Merck, the German Merck that is, she needs to also familiarize herself with the portfolio first, and then we can evaluate this step based on more information available better.
At the same time, I strongly feel that this is a confirmation of our strategy, not by putting our eggs in one basket by one asset or one company, but managing this portfolio of eight and growing customers, just to see how the developments actually work, because as someone that has been around the block a couple of times in the pharmaceutical industry, I know for a fact that these assets, some of them will not make it to the market, and this is how this industry works. Just looking at this market in particular and also seeing what we have discussed with the Novartis drugs, there are two main indications, and this is a very narrow clinical field.
Every new asset that comes to the market has to compete with the existing treatments and the standard of care, and then marginal improvements always don't cut it. This is basically the flip side of that blazing a trail and following the trail approach.
We have seen this, and Perspective Therapeutics, for instance, the closest competitor to Sanofi in that field, they have really appreciated in value after that. On that day where this was announced, or the next day, depends on time zones, the stock appreciated more than 100%, and they were smart enough to raise more capital, $175 million if I remember correctly, they have raised on the back of this in the matter of a couple of days.
The market believes in lead, but the story is still out which of these assets will make it to the market. We are well-positioned to manage this risk for our stakeholders and our investors by offering a participation in that market without assuming the same risk profile.
Mathias Nilsen Reierth
Thank you, Jasper. Next question is from Jon Magne Asmyr: which milestones does the management consider the most important for investors to monitor over the next 12 to 24 months?
Jasper Kurth
Maybe I start, and specifically for Alfa 1, Brede, you could comment. Of course, Alfa 1 as a milestone in itself, and there will be more granular milestones.
Of course, also looking forward how we start production and how we enter the market, and then, of course, financially, the revenues that we will report coming from this factory. Commercially, we have eight customers, but, of course, we continue working the market and understanding our opportunities to draw new partnerships.
That's clearly also something that investors should be on the lookout for.
Brede Ellingsæter
What I would add is we summarized the milestones for Alfa 1 quite well, but I'd say that every milestone that we reach, mechanical completion now in April, starting the plant in Q3, it's all de-risking everything that we are planning. Of course, then beyond that, creating meaningful revenues in the second half of the year will be another important milestone for the company.
Mathias Nilsen Reierth
Thank you. Next question is from Ivar Garness: how much more capex do you need to spend to complete the Alfa 1 project, and how does that compare to the FID plan?
Brede Ellingsæter
We are not guiding specifically on the capex expenditure budgeted, but we still have spending that remains in the project. Since we also made a decision to increase capacity in June last year compared to FID, the total capex is also slightly higher, but is still within the frames of capital that we have available and managing within the budget.
Mathias Nilsen Reierth
I think we will do one more from the online audience. Next question is from Thore Dannevold: how much was the monthly cash draw/use, and how will it develop?
Brede Ellingsæter
We have been running, let's say, a company burn where we have had about 25 million per half year to operate the company while we are building Alfa 1, meaning that still fairly lean, about 4 to 5 million per month. It will increase slightly now in the first half of the year as we are now having a fully staffed plant in Herøya.
Also, we have grown the executive team here in Oslo. We are still keeping a rather lean company.
Let's say the burn in the company will remain a little bit elevated, but not too much. Then, of course, when we start having raw materials coming in and processing and production, that'll be a different rate.
Mathias Nilsen Reierth
Thank you, Brede. Then I think we will open the floor for questions.
Yes. Microphone is on the way.
Yep, thank you for the presentation and for taking my questions. You said that you expect to reach profitable operations toward the end of 2027, I was wondering what level of sales, either in revenue terms or number of doses, is that based on?
Brede Ellingsæter
Again, we are not guiding specifically year on year on either revenues or doses. We have a ramp-up plan with Alfa 1 to reach 21,000 patient doses of lead equivalents after running the plant in three years.
If you draw a line between those two, the startup and the patient doses, you will be, if not spot on, you will have an indication of what kind of levels of patient doses that we intend to have capacity to produce. Based on what we experience in the market, both in terms of what we observe in terms of sales of these isotopes, but also the interest that we have, a sign of that is, of course, the order backlog that we have, but also the interest that we see beyond that, we believe that we will be able to sell that capacity.
I think that is the feedback on that.
Finally, when do you believe it is realistic to expect the first relevant drug approved?
Jasper Kurth
That's a very good question, especially after what we discussed about Sanofi. My money was on Sanofi before, but right now it's hard to tell.
I would say either late '20s or early '30s. Still a couple of years out, but just to reiterate, this company is, of course, grateful for every drug that makes it to the market, but we are not dependent on these drugs passing through in order to generate revenues that bring us to this cash-positive position.
We are not exactly dependent on that, but, of course, we are dependent on this market to unfold eventually. Thank you.
Mathias Nilsen Reierth
Thank you. More questions from the audience?
Yes.
Felix Heinrich
Hi, Felix Heinrich, I'm an investor in the company. I have a question regarding prices, because you say that demand is very strong, and normally when demand is bigger than supply, then prices go up.
Can you maybe comment on how prices have developed? Then also maybe regarding if you have any information about prices of Russian isotopes, because I assume that Big Pharma would prefer or will not rely on or roll out any program based on supply from Russia, maybe you can comment on that, and also how you think the Russian isotopes are produced.
Jasper Kurth
I think you hit it on the spot there, Felix. Also the dialogue that I have with our customers and future customers, and I bluntly ask them about Russian isotopes, they use it mainly for preclinical purposes and also to safeguard supply or managing supply bottlenecks.
I don't think that one of our customers would bank their clinical development on Russian isotope supply, because if this industry has been burned by one, it is the absence of isotope supply and is disrupted supply chain. We have seen this in BMS, and I have seen it personally in my time in Bayer when we couldn't deliver a certain dose to a patient, the doctor just is off the drug for a long time, at least.
This is clearly something that I wouldn't expect, but we, of course, take the Russian isotopes that are now moving into the market seriously. The price level is, from what I and we understand, lower than what is currently sold by the DOE, the Department of Energy, and, of course, also lower than the isotopes that we are producing, because we command a premium on top of the DOE price.
That said, while the DOE is increasing capacity, they also have increased the price substantially over the past couple of years, and they continue doing so. Right now the price trend is rather upwards, but this is really like looking in the crystal ball.
If you compare to actinium, they also started low, and the actinium prices per dose is now, per patient dose, is around $25,000 to $30,000 US, which is absolutely nuts if you catch my drift, because you cannot build a commercial plan on these isotope prices when you have therapy costs in Europe that maybe are €60,000 or €70,000. It is too early to tell how the prices will develop.
We have agreements with fixed prices, we would not benefit from a price going completely crazy, but at the same time, we are protecting our downside with these fixed-price agreements.
Mathias Nilsen Reierth
Any more questions from the audience? Then I think we will conclude this session.
Thank you all for coming, and thank you for your attention. Thank you.
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