To start, this has been a highly consequential year for CirqBio in many aspects. Most importantly, we've made major progress on our circVec platform.

We have now demonstrated that we can achieve up to 60-fold improved gene expression from AAVs using circVec in three different tissues in vivo: heart, eye, and now for the first time also in CNS. We're also continuously optimizing and enhancing our platform.

We're testing various novel genetic components inserted into our circVec backbone, and we've identified several new features that when combined together, we believe has the potential to improve on circVec further, achieving at least 200 times more benefit versus [m-vec?] , compared to the 60x we've shown today.

A novel Generation 5 is in the making. We have also progressed on our cell therapy project.

Now we've shown for the first time in vivo that we can deliver circVec DNA vectors using T-cell-tropic LNPs, and that we can do that at a substantially reduced dose compared to what we've done before, and get a continuous signal that vastly prolongs over either RNA-based in vivo CAR or DNA-based in vivo CAR using mRNA expression. Another important milestone and new data.

We're being recognized broadly in the industry. We had an oral presentation at the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy in Boston in May.

This is the largest and most prestigious gene therapy conference in the world in the year. We're also following that up with the presentation and two posters to be presented at the European equivalent, ESGCT, in Hamburg in October.

We're starting to get recognized in the industry. We're getting a larger volume of incoming requests for collaborations.

Lubor will summarize this, but we've now have 23 ongoing research collaborations, including one with a top five pharmaceutical companies. This may sound like a lot, but it's actually quite strategic.

They're split roughly evenly between the gene and the cell therapy projects, and they're also designed to address specific needs of each of those programs. With this success in circVec R&D as well as in business development, we've been able to garner positive market momentum.

That allowed us to raise approximately 620 million kronor, or $65 million, in three financing rounds during the first half of the year. This now provides us with a solid capital base that funds the company into 2030, and we can execute at full speed on all of our programs.

Part of the momentum for CirqBio is driven by general industry momentum for circular RNA. I summarized here on the right-hand side, you can see, I'd say, the three major circular RNA players in the US have all been acquired in the past nine months: Orbital by BMS, Orna by Lilly, and Sail by J&J, all for several billion dollar deals.

This just illustrates the potential the industry is seeing in this format. All of these companies were mainly acquired for their in vivo CAR programs.

In vivo CAR utilizing circular RNA, that's sort of where it's converging. We're working on circular RNA, and we have an in vivo CAR program, I think CirqBio is in a good position.

We're actually the only listed circular RNA biotech around. If you're a normal investor and can't access VC rounds in these American companies, CirqBio is the company you can potentially take a position in, and that maybe is part of the reason why there has been momentum for CirqBio.

With that, I hand you over to Thomas for an R&D update.

Thank you, Erik. There we go.

Thank you, everyone, for tuning in this morning for our half-year webcast report. I will try to guide you through our most recent R&D update.

There's a lot of data. This is just basically the tip of the iceberg that we'll be able to show today, otherwise this would be a very, very long webcast, but I think this is just a testament of a very active and a great R&D group that we have here at CirqBio, and we are expanding and and building on that, a lot of stuff in the making as well.

Just to remind you, in contrast to the companies that Erik was just explaining about with Orna, Orbital, and Sail, they are they have in common that they're focusing on the circular RNA itself. We are taking a different approach at CirqBio.

We're working on the DNA cassette that encodes the circular RNA that then in turn makes protein in the cell. We want we are engineering DNA elements, putting them together in a way so you get circular RNA expressed inside cells.

This is what we've been developing over the past couple of years, and we now have shown, and we will show, the the benefit of this approach. Basically, the secret sauce for us, and also for all the other circular RNA companies, is the stability of the circular RNA.

We are also leveraging that stability, but in contrast to the other companies, we keep supplying the circular RNA via the DNA template, you get an accumulation of signal over time as well as a durable signal profile. This I'll go come into why that that seems to be a benefit over conventional linear RNA-based expression profile that is inherently unstable and will not accumulate to the same extent.

We have these two different legs. One is in gene therapy, basically an approach where we put our cassette in an AAV.

That is a way that you can relatively easy go to your tissue of interest, we have a focus on heart, eye, and CNS. This may be expanded in the future, but this is our current focus area areas where we try to make an AAV that's so effective that you can put it in at a much lower dose while while still having a a clinical meaningful effect from the AAV.

That's basically the the main issue with AAVs these days is the high dose and the associated toxicity. This is what we believe circVec can actually overcome and and and solve, which will make AAV a much better and much safer therapeutic approach going forward.

We also have the other leg—I'll come back to that—with cell therapy, that is a CAR-T program where we do a non-viral based approach to get expression in T-cells durable and and and extended compared to normal approaches. The way we normally approach this is that we use a reporter gene.

We've presented a lot of data based on a firefly luciferase reporter. It is an amazing research tool because it allows us to monitor gene expression over time in a mouse in real time.

We can see the biodistribution, we can see the expression of the the protein, basically by measuring light being emitted from the animal. That is extremely handy, it's very informative, and it's easy to work with.

Here you see data that we presented in the past where we could basically in the heart see a 40x enhanced expression compared to [m-vec?] .

If you compare here the circVec 3.2, the top line, compared to the yellow one, [m-vec?] , you can see there's a clear difference in expression.

Of course, the question begs then, how does this then translate to a therapeutically relevant protein? Because, unfortunately, no patient will benefit from firefly expression.

We've been working on setting up circVec for different therapeutic payloads, one being LAMP2B, which is basically the mutated protein in Danon disease. Here that the the treatment strategy would basically, if you have Danon disease, you are missing functional LAMP2B expression, and and that is what current sort of the current gene therapy approach would be trying to solve by expressing the functional LAMP2B in LAMP2B in these patients, albeit with some toxicity that has been seen by Rocket Pharmaceuticals in in a clinical trial.

We thought that this this could potentially be a good fit for circVec. We can lower the dose and get high expression from our vector system.

Here you can basically see expression profile at day 57 comparing [m-vec?] and circVec.

It's a little more tedious to work on a therapeutic protein because here you have to basically take the tissue of interest, you have to extract the proteins and run it on a gel and then stain it with an antibody. This is what's been done here with a process termed Western blotting.

You can hopefully you can appreciate that that on the right-hand side, I'm trying to point to it here, you have much more staining on the gel, which basically says that we have a much, a substantially higher expression from our circVec vector system compared to [m-vec?] , exactly as we've seen for firefly expression to the left.

Basically, this this not only informs us that we can translate all the work we've done into firefly luciferase into a therapeutic protein, we also now have a vector system that we could potentially put in a in a mouse model and see the clinical benefit of of LAMP2B expression in a in a mouse lacking LAMP2B expression as such. We're also working on other avenues.

CNS is one of the very interesting avenues we've been exploring. We have a collaboration with a with a top five pharma company, and we're also doing some work in-house.

There's different ways you can address CNS expression by local delivery, one being, as shown here, intra-cisterna magna injection, where you basically inject your AAV in the in the in the neck area of the mice, and you monitor again using luciferase luminescence, you monitor expression and and biodistribution in a mouse. We can basically see by that approach, we get roughly one order of magnitude higher expression from circVec compared to [m-vec?]

, a 10x improvement with that route of administration. You can also access the CNS by basically drilling a small hole in the skull and injecting the the AAV directly into the brain, here referred to as intracerebroventricular injection, a difficult word to pronounce.

Here we see actually an even more pronounced fold change between circVec and [m-vec?] , in this case roughly a 30x improved expression, again measured with luminescence.

Finally, we've been doing intrathecal injection, where you inject into the spine in the lower back here, and and interestingly, we actually see a similar profile between circVec and [m-vec?] in the earlier time points, but the good thing about these reporter assays, we can monitor expression over time, and we can actually see that the [m-vec?]

has a temporal expression profile, it wears off over time, circVec is persistent, and it may actually increase slightly over the course of this experiment here. This is this is where we are with the CNS.

We are gearing up to do an experiment with together with with a big pharma—Lubor will come back to that in the in the BD part. We are very excited about this this CNS data, and of course, CNS is also the sort of the natural habitat where you see natural circular RNA is being mostly expressed in in humans, so we believe that may be a a huge potential for the circVec platform in CNS specifically.

Of course, being the CEO- CFO- not the CEO, the the CTO in in in CirqBio, we are working a lot, and and and this is something that's very close to my heart, the platform development. How can we perfect, how can we enhance, how can we make circVec even better, a better-performing platform?

There's basically, or essentially, two approaches that we we we focus on. One would be the biogenesis, basically how effective can we generate the circular RNA from our DNA template.

This is what we refer to as the biogenesis. We tested a few different things in vivo, this is actually data from from mouse, and we can see here that we compared to our circVec 3.2, which is probably our most characterized circVec design, we can achieve a 3x, sort of a a tripling of the luminescence, in this case, from that one, which also translates to a 90, around a 90x improvement over [m-vec?]

. As you can also see, it's not all the designs that that that improve, we have another design here which was actually slightly inferior to circVec, still still much better than [m-vec?]

, but this is at least a a design system that a design aspect that we believe is is much better in terms of producing the circular RNA inside the cell nucleus where this takes place. Then the circular RNA traffics to the cell cytoplasm, that's where translation goes on, I think this is a completely independent aspect, namely the the the protein production from the circular RNA itself.

Here there's different tricks as well you can do to try to optimize that, and we also worked on that. Again, this is data in vivo, and here we get an even better fold change, with our best-performing candidate a 5x improvement over [m-vec?]

—a 170x improvement over—oh, sorry, a 5x improvement over circVec, a 170x improvement over [m-vec?] in this case.

As mentioned, these are two different aspects. We believe these are independent, we of course the next step is is combining these two features, and we believe this would at least give us a 200x improvement over [m-vec?]

, likely a much larger fold change, but of course we need to do the experiment before we can say anything with certainty. Of course, also be mindful that this is, this is science, the data here is our current best estimates, but of course there's always a level of uncertainty with all the all the specific numerical data that we present.

This is what the data suggest right now, and and we will of course characterize and and and work forward to to elucidate these these different potential circVec 5.0 candidates in more detail. To summarize a little bit the the gene therapy track, we have a focus on heart, at least earlier we've seen 40x enhanced expression, which which trigger triggered us to pursue a heart program.

As you've just seen, this this is likely an underestimate, 5.0 will will will perform much better than that, we believe. We have better tissue specificity—we didn't show that today, but we've shown that previously—that we get much less expression in liver, much more on-target heart expression, which is an added benefit for the circVec platform.

We are now we've now shown LAMP2B proof-of-concept expression in the heart where we can actually express a therapeutically relevant gene. In the pipeline, of course, circVec 5, this will be test as tested in heart as soon as possible.

We are generating circVecs for other therapeutic proteins, other indications, and we're setting up a a mouse disease model that actually has a conditional knockout of a therapeutic protein, we can bring in circVec, show that at a very low dose we can hopefully show clinical or preclinical benefit in such a mouse model. In general, we are working on identifying the best path forward in cardiomyopathy.

It's a huge unmet need. There's a lot of patients here struggling with a with a genetic disease in in in the heart.

Something we are very keen on trying to solve and make AAV safe for that population of of of patients that basically have no other treatment option currently. Eye as well, still working hard on on on doing more work in the eye.

We are setting up a study very shortly where we're testing new capsids. Why?

We've been in dialogue with with partners and pharma companies, and they requested us to test more eye-specific capsids, this is ongoing now. We are hoping to actually start this experiment in the next couple of weeks, and and and then we will see how that goes, but that is going to be very exciting.

As part of that that experiment, we hope to also characterize a more cell-specific distribution within the eye: what what cell types in the eye are actually being targeted and what what cell types are expressing circVec to to the high extent that we've seen in the past using intravitreal injection. Here, actually therapeutic models in animals are more easy to establish, particularly models for wet AMD, we hope to be able to set up a wet AMD model in in the near-by future, as well as trialing circVec in a large animal model.

This seems to be more easily addressable with a local injection in eye, this is something that is that that we work hard on on on establishing shortly. As you've seen, CNS, exciting data, between 10 and 60x enhanced expression for circVec across these different routes of administration.

Again, we believe circVec 5 would be a would add to that fold change. Looking into also therapeutic genes that we could potentially express in the CNS, and of course we have we have the the big pharma collaboration that that that we're proceeding with.

Here, I think most of the future work would be part of a a partnership or an out-licensing deal, whereas in heart and eye, we believe that we can potentially bring bring a candidate to the clinic ourselves. That sort of concludes the gene therapy leg.

Cell therapy, where we try to do a non-viral approach, package our circVec cassette in lipid nanoparticles, systemic delivery, and then obtain durable expression in the spleen. Here, it's a little bit there's more more moving parts.

Of course, circVec, we are developing the expression system, as you can see on the left. It has increased expression, extended durability, enabling dose-sparing or reduced dosing.

This is what we develop. To to make a functional CAR-T, you also need delivery, as you can see to the to the right-hand side.

This is not our expertise, there we need to partner with companies that have developed ideally T-cell-targeted LNPs that allow effective delivery of our our cargo to T-cells. Then on top of that, there's these different DNA formats that we're currently testing that may actually allow for better gene expression.

They're called immune-quiet DNA, they may also be a little safer for for treatment and may allow to actually dose at different levels without impacting any any pathways in in the in the target organism. This is something we are—and that Lubor will come back to that—we are very active in in identifying and finding partners that could provide these two puzzles that, combined with our expression system, would be the ideal, we believe, CAR-T therapy approach.

You've seen in the past, and this is basically what triggered initially our our CAR-T interest, when we deliver circVec using LNPs in a mouse, we basically see for a normal [m-vec?] —so this is what you normally see with an LNP—you get expression in the liver, it wears off quite rapidly, after a couple of weeks, you don't see signal any longer.

This was mainly expected, and with this particular LNP that we use, it was supposed to target mostly the liver, a little bit liver, a little bit lung, and a little bit of spleen. For the for the mRNA, you only see that liver expression, and it it drops off, as you can see.

In contrast to circVec, and we've showed this in this before, we see the we we don't see the accumulation in the liver, but we see the accumulation in the spleen starting here from roughly three weeks into the experiment, which was extremely exciting, a very unique profile specific for a circular RNA-based expression vector. We're working on reducing the dose here because this is a fairly high dose.

If we went to, in this case, five-time reduction, we actually didn't see any signal back then in that experiment, there the mice were were blank, we had to dose at a fairly high dose to get the signal. Of course, working on a more targeted approach where we can lower the dose and get more specific expression to T-cells.

We've been partnering up with other companies that develop T-cell-tropic LNPs. In this case, it's an LNP that goes specifically or mostly to T-cells, although this is not with active target, this is passive targeting to T-cells.

You can actually see, when you look at the [m-vec?] here to the left, you see a short expression in the T-cell if you look at this high dose, but just bear in mind that this is a dose level that's 5 to 20 times lower compared to the one we showed on the previous slide.

At a much lower dose, you see expression in the spleen at a very short period of time with [m-vec?] , and then in contrast to circVec, as before, you need to wait three to four weeks, and then the signal appears in the spleen even at this very, very low dose, and it's very specific in the spleen.

Again, this is this is using a T-cell-tropic LNP. The status there is that now, confirming what we've seen in the past, a completely different LNP with this T-cell-tropic these T-cell-tropic properties, ongoing is to characterize what cell types in the spleen are actually emitting this signal.

This is still work in progress, and we are now screening multiple LNPs, other DNA formats, combining different things with our circVec cassette to see if we can make this this technology even more potent compared to what it is already. As you can see with the temporal profile of circVec, I think this we believe this is sort of a sweet spot in in CAR-T.

You have the permanent lentiviral to the right that will give you lifelong expression, but this is a a costly, costly affair, it's not without risk. Then you have what's very in hot these days, the very temporal, short-term RNA-based in vivo CAR approaches.

With circVec, we believe that we can do a non-integrating approach, but with a very long expression profile, as we just showed, months of expression, and it will be re-dosable in case that's needed. We think that actually opens up CAR-T for multiple indications, not only autoimmunity, but also in maybe more tricky to treat cancers without the risk of some of the secondary malignancies that you get from the lentiviral approach.

This is a very exciting avenue, and we are working hard and and expanding the team to really explore this in more detail in the in the near-by future. Hopefully, we'll have more data soon to show.

In summary, a lot of excitement with the platform. 5.0 is in the making.

We believe we can go maybe 200x or above compared to conventional AAV gene therapy, and of course you can it's just mind-boggling how that may affect AAV gene therapy in general, and and of course circVec in in particular, the the potential for that as a as a therapeutic modality. AAV specifically, we now have a therapeutic payload with LAMP2B, we're working on others as well, and setting up a mouse model that is for so we can evaluate actually the the preclinical effect of of expressing circVec at a very low dose in these animals, and hopefully seeing a seeing a correction of the of the phenotype.

We see in CNS a 10 to 60x expression enhancement over conventional AAV gene therapy, also opening up dose-sparing and potentially a much safer gene therapy for some of these neurological unmet needs out there. Finally, with the in vivo cell therapy, T-cell-tropic LNPs, confirming the long-term circVec expression in spleen, and we now do in vitro and in vivo characterization of of of the expression profile and the and the specific cell types that are that are involved in in this in this signal.

With that, I would like to conclude the R&D update, and I'll introduce Dr. Lubor Gaal for the business development update.

Thanks, Thomas. I have the pleasure to present the business development activities for this first half of the year, and I thank everyone for dialling in and showing interest in our presentation.

Business development has been a phenomenal year this year partly or only because Thomas has done and his R&D group has done tremendous success in R&D. Our business development activities fall into two major categories.

Here the first one, we are doing business development to strengthen, expand circVec technology, as Thomas was saying, we're always trying to improve the technology, make it better, make it applicable in different areas. As you can see, these are technological collaboration to access complementary technologies.

We also, of course, the partnership with other companies to test our circVec platform in preclinical models to generate more data, and just explore novel circVec application, especially in area which are non-core to us, so that we can really leverage the full potential of the circVec technology in areas that we don't pursue ourselves. You will see more of those technology collaborations, and they may lead to in- or out-licensing in the future.

On the other hand, of course, we also are focusing, especially in the future in '27, on forming more strategic platform partnerships. This is when we take our technology and we talk to gene therapy company and big pharma company about trying our technology to do collaborations, ideally strategic platform partnerships, but also just out-licensing gene by gene, or some kind of corporate co-development capabilities.

This is our future applications of circVec to generate better gene therapies. When these companies then license our technology, this will generate revenues for the company in terms of upfront, milestone, and royalties.

Look out for more in 2027. Let me show you a little bit what that means for gene therapy.

As Thomas already said, in order for circVec to become a gene therapy that we can be given to patients, it needs certain parts. For gene therapy, we have most of these parts in-house, but there are other companies who have claimed to have better parts that we are testing.

This is, for instance, the AAV capsid area, where, as Thomas said, we're testing targeted capsids to go to tissues and improve the expression of the protein in a specific tissue. Here you can see what are these therapies collaboration we have in gene therapy.

As we said, we have signed three collaboration, of which two are undisclosed, in the AAV capsid space. These are companies like Genedisets who said, "We have a capsid that goes specifically to muscle cells and that could be leveraged in the heart, or also they are specific in T-cells and go to T-cells."

This is very interesting to try because one of the important things in gene therapy is that you want to express the protein only in the place where it needs to be, but not in the entire body. These companies claim that where they're using their capsids, it will only go to the tissue that we want and it will not be entering cells in other areas of the body.

This is super exciting for us, and we are testing this, of course, if we can achieve very targeted, high-level expression in the tissue. Then we also partner for novel delivery or GOI, which stands for gene-of-interest partnerships.

There we have five collaborations. For instance, with Avenue Biosciences, one thing we want to do is produce proteins that have to be secreted in order to work in the entire body, and they have a technology to improve that.

Entheogen is a novel technology to just deliver DNA to cells. Then more importantly, like I said, on the other bucket, we're doing partnering co-development collaboration with companies.

Here we have, of course, our collaboration with the top five pharma, which is going really well. As you may remember, this collaboration or all collaboration have different parts, you start in different work packages.

We have successfully completed the first part of the collaboration, which we announced earlier, and we're now working in the second part of the collaboration, which will take some time because that's the most labor-intensive part of the collaboration. The preparation and the collaboration is going really, really well.

We will update when we can, but you have to respect that the activities with this company are confidential and we're not going to be able to disclose results from this anytime soon. Avigen is another exciting collaboration in the space.

This is a German gene therapy company focused on heart diseases. They have a proprietary gene that they want to deliver to the heart, and they also have a proprietary capsid.

We're in a technology feasibility collaboration with them, and we're very excited to work with them, and we plan to have more such collaboration going forward. Let me switch to cell therapy.

In cell therapy, our BD needs are a little bit different. As Thomas was saying, we need more components in order to make it work.

On the one hand, one component is similar: the delivery technology. In this case, it's not a virus, it is a non-viral technology, we call them LNP, but you can also explore other non-viral delivery technology formulations.

Then there's the DNA vector format that Thomas explained that we need in order to make this a better solution. You can see we've actually been very active in the DNA vector format.

We signed five collaboration of them really recently. This is a testament to the interesting technology that we have.

The reason why we have been so productive in the cell therapy space is that other companies consider our circVec technology incredibly exciting and interesting, and they want to try it with their own technologies. It's really fun to do business development for circVec because we really get a lot of really good receptions, we really have really good discussions, there's a lot of interest to try our technology, it's been quite exciting.

As Thomas was saying, we also do have collaborations in T-cell delivery systems. Here, as he said, there's two different delivery systems, we call them active and passive.

Passive is when it's more or less just the formulation where they claim that this formulation is taken up by T-cells. This is something like, for instance, Certus, we're testing with Certus here.

Then there's what we call active, where actually on the formulation you put a ligand, and that ligand binds to T-cells actively, and therefore should be taken up even stronger by T-cells. That's something we have tests with Acuitas, that's something that they provide.

Here, very exciting testing as well active as well as passive targeting, and seeing what works best when in collaboration with circVec. Then we're exploring other collaborations, other applications.

For instance, with United Immunity, they actually did not target T-cells, they actually wanted to target macrophages, and so we tested their technology with our circVec technology. Then we have this collaboration with UTMB, which stands for University of Texas Medical Branch, and they want to test antibody for viral or anti-infective therapies.

Again, it is in our interest to partner our technology with companies outside our core space in order to leverage our technology, and of course generate a licensing transaction for future revenue for circVec. With that, I want to wrap up the BD activities.

It's been super exciting to do BD with circVec in 2026, and of course we can expect to continue in 2027. We have done our first partnering deal with a major pharma company, and that's a good goal for '27 to do more of those, and also of course we want to enter into more collaboration with gene therapy companies.

On the cell therapy side, we're a little bit earlier stage, we're not as advanced, as not a mature stage as with gene therapies, the focus here will be more on technology collaborations, and we're looking forward to testing more non-viral delivery, either active or passive, and also other applications, of course, to expand the use of circVec. Again, it's been exciting so far, but I think I expect it to continue like this and go into '27 and be really a phenomenal year.

With that, I would like now to switch and then start the financial presentation. As Erik was saying, 2026 has been a transformational year in terms of finance.

We had several financing events, three financing events to raise 620 million kronor in the first half of 2026. This has been started by a rights issue, which was announced and approved by shareholders in late 2025, when financial situation was quite challenging, but through a lot of work and we were able to go out with a rights issue that was 90% secured and was a very successful event, it was oversubscribed.

Then following positive momentum in the first quarter of this year, we were able to do a private placement, which raised 250 million kronor. This was really a transformational event for the company because now the runway of the company was secured until 2030, and that provides incredible security for our R&D activities, and this was very, very important to achieve.

Then in June, we closed the warrants exercise, which was, of course, part of the rights issue, and through the positive momentum at the market, we were able to raise another 300 million kronor, and now to really develop our first clinical program. This has really a transformational event, and this will really put us in a totally different league in terms of biotech companies in Europe.

Let me now focus on the financial results of the first half of 2026. As you can see, the total operating expenses went up, and this is partially due to more in vivo studies in R&D, of course.

We need to invest more into R&D. It's exciting time.

We need to show different potential, different applications, also of course different collaborations. As Thomas was saying, we have so many different interesting avenues that we can pursue, and of course this is also why we raise the money, and we want to test them.

We're going to invest more into R&D as well, because this is also of course where the value is generated, and this is where the data is created that allows us to do the licensing deals that will bring future revenues to the company. This is a very important area, and we'll continue to invest there.

We also have higher payroll expenses. This is partly due to one-off items, and there were deferred incentive pay, which was paid in the first half of 2026.

Very importantly, there's also a non-cash effect on options because of the option that was awarded in 2026, this will had to be recognized with national insurance contribution, but did not affect the cash flow. In addition, what you can see, basically we do have a higher first half of the year, but because of the one-off items, this does not mean that for the full year we see a duplication of these expenses.

We expect the second half of the 2026 to have lower expenses, lower operating expenses than in the first half. What is good for us to now report is we had some currency gain and also some return on our cash investments.

We are, of course, investing in the cash that we don't need in very secure cash accounts or money market funds, and this is only a few weeks of performance that allow report positive, and of course expect this to go up by the end of the year. This will be a very positive development.

From the money that we raised, 620, we now have 533 left in the bank, this is partially due to a lot of expenses. Fundraising unfortunately isn't free.

There is, of course, expenses involved, and this is recognized here in the lower amount. With that, then I would like to conclude on the finance.

We had a phenomenal run in 2026, and this really had put us in a totally different situation as a company. Before or until April 2026, the limited funding that we had at CirqBio was probably one of the biggest risk factors for the company: would the company be able to secure enough funding to continue with the good research and the good science that Thomas and his team is doing in the lab?

Now this has been removed. I would say, with a runway until 2030, the financial risk has been made significantly reduced, and we can now focus really on R&D execution, on doing things well in the lab, on doing things in parallel that we used to do sequentially, and this of course helps us to generate a data package that really shows the true value of the technology, and will then enable or make business development transaction easier.

Because we raised money doesn't mean we're going to change what brought us here. We're going to continue to be prudent with our money, we're going to invest it where it really generates value.

As I said, this will be primarily in R&D. We'll do more studies, we'll do more advanced studies.

One of the things by advancing the program towards the clinic, unfortunately, studies cost more money. These are more complex studies, we have to use CROs, the expenses will go up, but this will be gradually, and we'll be very prudent, and of course be very careful to really leverage your money to the best value possible.

Do expect the team size to grow, and also of course the expenses to grow. What does that mean for 2026 and beyond?

Expect the budget, or the expenses for all 2026 to be about 50% higher versus 2025. Don't take 2025 as a reference point.

That was a time when CirqBio had very few resources, where we kept the team to minimum and small. I would think that we reset the base in 2026, and that sort of, it's not fair to compare '26 to 2025, but we're now in a much stronger position to really take advantage of a lot of things.

We are going to hire a larger team. A larger team means more facilities, we have a larger bench.

Now you can already see we are broadcasting from our new lab in Stockholm. Larger team means also, of course, higher productivity, that will be of course very important on our business development side.

See a gradual increase of expenses until we have our first clinical candidate selection, and that will of course change the company, but that will be in the future. With that, thanks very much for your attention, and I hand back over to Erik.

Let's summarize. It's been a strong year on R&D.

What I want you to remember is we have a circVec Generation 5 in the making. This looks like it should achieve 200 times or more better expression than conventional AAVs.

This is big. If you can get the dose down for AAV gene therapy by 200-fold, this can be a game-changer for the whole AAV field, and you may need to use circVec expression to have a relevant AAV in the future.

We're not there yet, but we're making important progress on the heart gene therapy. Importantly, we've shown that we can express a therapeutic gene.

Until now, we've mainly expressed reporter genes, luciferase, that we can use as an experimental validation, but now we've shown that the increased expression also applies to a disease-relevant gene, very important validation. We expanded now into CNS.

circVec AAVs also work in the CNS, same order of magnitude as we see in the heart and the eye, and we've shown it for three delivery routes. The fact that it worked for three different delivery routes suggests that this is consistent data.

This is, of course, where we also have the collaboration with a big pharma. These data are our own and independent, but obviously it suggests that circVec works well in this tissue.

These data led to substantial BD activities. I mentioned the pharma collaboration, this may lead to a licensing transaction next year, and we have numerous R&D collaborations ongoing.

I'd like to stress that don't expect us to update on each of these. These depend on the data we generate, the interest of the partner.

What we're aiming to do is not advance every single one. We're going to pick the best ones, the most promising ones, and where we have the best fit with the partner, and then progress those.

We'll update you when it makes sense and where it makes sense. Very importantly, we need to identify these other components to carve out a complete circVec in vivo CAR concept.

We need a safe and efficient vector—these are being screened—and we need a targeted delivery system to get a safe, low-dose therapeutic concept. These we're now screening, and as we progress, we will select our favorites and combine them together, and it will be important to secure access to these technologies for a future complete circular RNA-based circVec in vivo CAR construct.

We have the capital now to execute on these plans. We have 550 million in the bank.

This finances the company until 2030, and we're in a solid position to deliver on all these plans and expand as we go along. I'll leave you with the pipeline here.

These are our three programs in gene therapy: heart, eye, and CNS, as well as the in vivo CAR, and major upcoming milestones on the right-hand side that you can look forward to in the next month and into 2027. Now again, I'd like to stress that don't get too hung up in every single readout.

This is what we're currently doing, these are the plans we have, but experiments are unpredictable. You never know exactly what works and what doesn't work.

You may need to repeat certain things. We always report what is going on, what the actual plans are, but it may not be exactly what we end up reporting in the future because we follow the data.

The data at the moment looks strong, and we need to select what works the best and what partnerships work the best. What I can assure you is that there will be substantial amount of data coming out, and we expect to have our next update towards the second half of November, when we usually have R&D updates.

Remember, we do these updates every three months. In addition, we will be publishing data at European Society of Gene Therapy conference in the end of October, there will be both an oral presentation and posters presented there.

With that, we wrap up, and we can move to a Q&A section. Do you want to join me again, Thomas and Lubor?

You did not mention eye AAV today. Could you comment on what the status is there?

The current status is we continue to work on eye. We are still very excited about ophthalmology in general.

We are now setting up our larger study, so that has taking a while to get ready, where we test more relevant capsids, more eye-specific capsids in ophthalmology, actually by request from some of our partners that we discuss with. I think if that data in any way mimics or improves on what we've seen in the past, I think there'll be a lot of exciting partnerships going forward.

On top of that, this study is also powered in a way so we can do these single-cell type of analysis, we actually get a very granular readout on what cells are being targeted, what cells express circular RNA, and to what extent. That would be an extremely interesting data set that will come later this year, I expect.

The study is planned to commence later this month.

Just because we didn't update specifically on the eye gene therapy today does not mean we're not very very active.

Very active, and we're, as we speak, working on wet AMD payloads and other payloads that could potentially go into a transgenic mouse model also quite soon, but timelines are a little more unclear there.

We've received several questions around the safety of circVec, and generally it relates to that fact that we produce proteins for a very long time and at very high levels with circVec. Does that lead to any safety concerns or toxicity problems, and is there an off-switch in circVec?

Of course that's a great question. I think, at least for gene therapy, I guess you want lifelong expression because this is expressing a protein that you're not able to express yourself, so that would be needed.

Whether you can overexpress and get a toxicity readout is something that we will of course carefully evaluate. Of course, with the circVec cassette, now we have circVec 5.0, but in case that basically overshoots the therapeutically relevant gene expression, we can just settle back with the circVec 3.2 and then use that one.

That gives us some flexibility to actually adjust the gene expression profile to the indication of interest here. An off-switch, something that we've also been considering, it's not something that's built-in for the time being, but it's something that's definitely on the table.

There's some different avenues you could explore there: there's riboswitches and microRNA target sites and so forth. This is something that's possible, but it's not currently in the circVec cassette, but it's definitely a future potential, but that would be more maybe in a CAR-T therapy setting that could be applicable.

We've received also several CAR-T questions. An important one again for you, Thomas, is: has CirqBio confirmed that the durable circVec signal following LNP delivery in vivo originates specifically from T-cells?

Short answer here would be no. This is top on our to-do list, this is ongoing work.

There's been some logistic challenging with how you get the spleen sample, you have to get that analysis done, but we get an in-house machine later this month that will actually allow us to do that work. We can say that we see it in the spleen, it is still confirmed in the spleen with the T-cell-tropic LNPs, and we've also done in vitro study in T-cells, also showing a circVec benefit.

I think those data combined suggest that we believe we have T-cell expression, but of course we need to get that data point, and this is definitely something that we're working hard to achieve.

Can you comment on who delivered the LNPs used? This we're not doing yet.

We're screening multiple LNPs here, and we will select one to move forward with, and we're not going to disclose here which specifically we used in this case we showed today. Have any of the delivery collaborations, again on the LNP, produced data that made them fall away or be more prioritized?

I think this probably also then relates to some of these alternative applications. Do you want to comment on that, Lubor?

I think it's too early to talk about that. I think we are still testing these different technologies, ongoing studies, and we'll make that assessment at a later point in time.

Right now, I would say no, but of course people should say we will definitely compare technologies, we don't expect to go forward with all of them. It is to select the best for that purpose.

We will look at the data and then identify only one of them to go forward and then do more testing.

Following up on that, we get questions on this vector types. What is the difference between the vector types, and do you have a preferred format?

I think there's a few different things you can consider when you look at vector types. One would be the manufacturing of the vector type, whether it's done synthetically or in a bacteria or in a bacteriophage.

The other thing would be whether it's double-stranded or single-stranded, and the size of the vectors. There's a few different aspects that we are considering.

I think right now, it is well established that if you bring in a double-stranded DNA, which is sort of the typical vector format, it may elicit some DNA sensing, part of our immune system, and that may trigger some unwanted effects. You have to be careful with your dose level if you go in with a double-stranded DNA.

We believe with the single-stranded DNA that we're currently testing, and that's why it's being termed immune-quiet, will not have that adverse effect, and we plan that this would be much more effective in terms of the non-viral gene expression. I think here in particular, we believe circVec could be an added benefit to that technology.

That combination is a very interesting combination going forward. Very excited how that will read out.

We can add that this area of DNA vector technology, and maybe in particular single-stranded DNA, is a very hot field at the moment. We're seeing numerous companies launching with big financing and high-profile investors.

It's a bit like circular RNA was 3 years ago, we follow this closely, and we believe the fit with circVec is great. This will be important to make the most potent and safe circVec in vivo CAR product possible.

I would like to stress that the interest is mutual. It's not just we're not the only think that there is a really good combination of technology, but also those circular DNA companies think that.

It was, to be honest, from a business point of view, it was very easy and quick to sign these collaborations because they are equally interested because they understand the potential of the circVec technology. Both parties believe that the combination should make a lot of sense and should be very interesting.

I think that wraps up the technical questions. I can deal with a last one here, which is asking if we can comment on our expansion plans and how many employees we are now.

We are not planning to go overboard. We are an organization of tight resource and cost control.

We plan to continue with that, but we grow as it makes sense to be able to increase our capacity and get more capacity in-house, like Thomas pointed out before, being able to do these immune cell characterizations ourselves. We're recruiting people and internalizing equipment that allows us to do these things.

We're growing the lab. We've expanded roughly 50% the lab footprint since our fundraising, and we are now 16 employees.

Costs will go up, but they're not going to explode. We expect something like a 50% increase as compared to our previous cost base.

Looking ahead 2027, I think we aim to expand the team to 20 to 25 people, and that's probably where we're going to stay for a while. That concludes the webcast.

I think we dealt with most of the questions, but we got quite a high volume of incoming requests today, feel free to contact us afterwards also, and we are happy to follow up on email or on the phone if you have specific areas of interest or questions. Thank you all for tuning in, and wish you a nice day.

Thank you.

Thanks.