Bio-Techne at Jefferies Conference: Strategic Insights and Innovations

On Thursday, 20 November 2025, Bio-Techne Corp (NASDAQ:TECH) presented at the Jefferies London Healthcare Conference 2025, offering a strategic overview of its fiscal first quarter. Despite reporting an overall growth decline of 1%, the company highlighted underlying strengths, including positive growth in core sectors and promising innovation initiatives. Challenges were noted, but the tone remained cautiously optimistic, focusing on future growth potential.

Key Takeaways

• Bio-Techne reported a 1% decline in overall growth, but underlying growth was positive at 1% when excluding specific fast-track customers.
• Large pharmaceutical revenue, making up 30% of the total, experienced double-digit growth.
• The company is prioritizing M&A to strengthen its portfolio, particularly in cell therapy and protein analysis.
• Bio-Techne is investing 8% of its revenues into R&D, leading to several new product launches.
• Temporary headwinds in the GMP protein business are expected to diminish by the end of Q4.

Financial Results

• Overall Growth: Reported at negative 1%, with positive 1% underlying growth excluding fast-track customer impacts.
• Large Pharma: Represents 30% of revenues with double-digit growth, while core consumables showed mid-single-digit increases.
• Cell Therapy: The business is at an $80 million run rate, with the GMP protein section contributing $60 million.
• Academic Market: Improved from negative high single digits to negative low single digits in the US.
• R&D Investment: 8% of revenues are reinvested into research and development.
• Leverage: Company maintains a low leverage at 0.6 times.

Operational Updates

• Cell and Gene Therapy: Acquisition of Wilson Wolf to enhance offerings; introduction of ProPax for GMP proteins to reduce errors.
• Protein Analysis: Launch of the ELA cartridge for ultra-sensitivity and the LEO instrument for increased capacity and precision.
• Spatial Biology: Introduction of Proximity Scope for protein interaction analysis, aiming to lead in the spatial biology market.
• Molecular Diagnostics: New tests launched for breast cancer markers and genetic testing.

Future Outlook

• Growth Drivers: Focus on innovation, strategic M&A, and market seeding with grant programs.
• Biotech Funding: Anticipated faster conversion to growth in instruments and consumables.
• Reshoring Trends: Expected to positively impact life science tool spending due to regional manufacturing shifts.
• Academic Funding: Positive trends in NIH funding, particularly in oncology and neurological diseases.
• GMP Protein Outlook: Expectation for headwinds to diminish by the end of Q4.

Q&A Highlights

• Pharma Strength: Double-digit growth in the US and Europe, driven by proteomic tools.
• Biotech Funding: Mid-stage companies are benefiting from recapitalization, leading to immediate spending.
• Share Gains: Driven by innovation in cell and gene therapy, protein analysis, and spatial biology.
• M&A Priorities: Focus on strengthening portfolios in cell therapy and protein analysis.
• AI in Protein Design: Leveraging AI for enhanced protein specificity and heat stability.

In conclusion, Bio-Techne remains focused on leveraging its strengths and strategic initiatives to navigate current challenges and capitalize on future opportunities. For a comprehensive understanding, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Jefferies London Healthcare Conference 2025:

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Great. We're going to kick it off. I'm Tucker Peterson from the Life Science team. We're pleased to have Bio-Techne with us today. Welcome. Maybe kick off with a little just quick look back on the fiscal first quarter, some gives and takes. You did talk about kind of core growth up 1%. Maybe setting aside the cell therapy kind of noise here, we'll unpack that in a minute. Just talk a little bit about what you saw in the quarter.

Unidentified speaker: Tucker, thanks for having us. Yeah, the overall growth for the quarter was negative 1%. A little bit a result that doesn't really reflect our underlying performance because you already mentioned we were 1% positive if you take two larger companies that received their fast-track designation and therefore did not order this year compared to last year. That really drove a negative 200 basis points on the top line. Underlying, if you think about the end markets as well as our four growth verticals, the end markets that did do a little bit better than we had expected was definitely large pharma, 30% of our revenues. We continue to be in the double digits performance there.

Last year, or last quarter, we were actually a little worried about the rhetoric with some of the tariffs and most favorite pricing that we were worried that they would tap the brakes, but they didn't. That was a positive for our quarter. Overall, we saw some stabilization in the academic and the biotech markets as well. From our four growth verticals in cell therapy, other than the dynamics we just mentioned, we had a very nice number of customers we added to the pipeline. We had stabilization in China. We saw some real nice results in our spatial biology business. That really was on the positive side for the quarter.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Maybe we could just unpack the pharma strength geographically, anything to kind of call out there? How has the kind of how have the discussions evolved on the back of some of the ongoing announcements?

Unidentified speaker: For large pharma?

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. As I said, large pharma continued to be in double digits, broad strength. We could see even our core consumables, which are usually growing with market, were back in mid-single digits. That indicates a healthy overall activity level across the board. As I mentioned, our four growth verticals very nicely aligned with the projects that are being pushed forward right now in large pharma, and specifically our proteomic analysis tools. All three of the platforms are taking share and are definitely benefiting from the investment dollars that flow back into the R&D activities for large pharma. That is certainly a tailwind for us.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Any geographic color? I mean, obviously, you've had kind of this out-licensing trend from China. How about pharma globally? Where are you seeing the strength?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, it is actually on both sides of the ocean in Europe and US, very healthy. We will see what the deglobalization and/or the investments in the US, particularly, will bring. That might shift this dynamic a little bit. For now, we saw healthy growth in the US as well as in Europe. Then on the biotech side, it was definitely a return to solid growth in China.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Biotech funding, obviously, picked up a lot in October. I think you made some comments about maybe faster conversion than a typical two to three quarters. What's kind of behind that?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, over the last year, the tougher times in biotech, you clearly could see that there was a rotation in the companies. Even though, let's say, in the prior years, when there are new companies getting funding, they might have to start with getting buildings, building clean rooms, and building out their facilities. Right now, we've seen over the last year, definitely several of the earlier stage companies having to close their doors. Some of the mid well-funded companies certainly being careful with their spend to make sure that they don't have to close their doors. Some very well-funded larger ones that made nice progress. With a recapitalization of the industry, we believe that the ones in the mid that have been kind of worried about spending, those are the ones that get funded.

Therefore, there will not be spend in buildings and clean rooms, but more immediately into accelerating programs and/or switching on new programs, which then definitely translates to instruments and consumable growth.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Got it. Obviously, a lot of talk on reshoring here that's maybe a little bit further out and a little more large pharma than biotech. Just talk a little bit about how you think you're positioned over the next couple of years as maybe more capacity comes back to the US.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, the reshoring will certainly be of influence. I mean, I call it deglobalization because it's not only coming to the US, but overall, you see that region for region manufacturing is becoming more common. Knowing that there will be more manufacturing coming to the US is obviously a good thing. We have good sales coverage. We have a good brand name in the US. We have been taking share in Europe and Asia. No reason to not also do that in the US. Overall, I look at it as the deglobalization. If you have one large manufacturing plant, then you obviously run it really, really efficiently. Your inefficiency sits in the fact that you will have to ship globally and through different borders and more paperwork. That is not revenue or spend that comes into the life science tools direction.

However, if you manufacture locally, now your shipping lines are shorter, but you have several manufacturing plants. That will have some inefficiencies in that you will have duplication of instrumentation, you will have more QA, QC, as well as validation runs. That inefficiency will sit more in the life science tool spend. Overall, I think it's a positive for the industry.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: You've mentioned share gains a couple of times. Maybe we could just jump to innovation and talk about some of the drivers behind that. I know you've got the new Proximity Scope and spatial, the automated cartridge for Simplex. Maybe talk on some of the recent developments. As we think a bit ahead to 2026, are there big new product launches?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I think we certainly always have made sure that we want to drive our growth basically based on innovation and staying ahead of our competition. In our four growth verticals, we have really made very nice progress if it comes to innovation. We should because 8% of our revenues get reinvested into R&D activities. If I go vertical by vertical, we have cell and gene therapy where you know all about the upcoming acquisition of Wilson Wolf. To make sure that we strengthen our offering, we certainly have looked at offering more and designing more AI-generated proteins that have ultra-specificity or are more heat-stable than others. They're patentable. They can command a price premium. We're very excited about that.

In the meantime, in that same business, we've launched a ProPax, which is basically a different packaging for your proteins that you then directly inject into, for example, a bioreactor like the GX. That form factor makes human error less likely. It also decreases the risk of contamination. That's a value proposition so high that even companies in later stage clinicals are now considering changing the usage of their GMP proteins based upon that form factor. We have one real nice case in point where a third company in a phase three clinical swapped to our GMP proteins because of the ProPax form factor. That's an innovation we're very proud of. If I look at the protein analysis, we have announced or will launch in our second half of the year the ELA cartridge for ultra-sensitivity.

That ELA was always very preferred for the small form factor, ease of use, speed, consistency. The sensitivity had a certain ceiling. That would make it less likely to be used in neurodiseases as well as in inflammation. With this new cartridge, which will enable it to be two to five times more sensitive, that is a market we can now go after with the other value propositions. That gives it a very interesting future. That is just the ELA. On the LEO side, the Western Blot side, we launched this instrument LEO, which has four times higher capacity than our previous generation, but also more precision and more detection abilities. Absolutely a throughput machine for larger pharma and lived up to all the expectations.

I might have mentioned in the past that the expectations and the rollout commercialization was done in a much more, how do you call it, stable end market situation. Now we have seen some more turmoil in our markets in the past couple of quarters. We still have been hitting for the last three quarters all our targets as they were set in better times. That is really a test to this instrument. The spatial, you mentioned Proximity Scope. It is a new launch that basically allows you to look at protein-protein interaction and very important lens for researchers. With the Comet instrument and our RNA detection as well as the protein detection and our antibodies and now protein-protein detection, we are really ahead of the pack if it comes to fully automated, full multi-omic capabilities in spatial.

I feel that we are really well set to continue to outcompete in the translational section of the spatial biology market. Last but not least, our molecular diagnostics. There we launched the exosome-based ESR1, ESR1, a breast cancer marker, resistance breast cancer marker. It will tell you when to change therapies. With that, doing that at the right time, you can double life expectancy of the patients. Very important innovation. Last but not least, we have an Oxford Nanopore-based genetic testing kit that made it to the market, which is also a combination of very hard-to-sequence genes. NGS is having a tough time with those genes. We have an elegant solution to really quickly read those difficult but important genetic diseases genes. That is just a small grab of all the substantial innovations we have brought to market.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Maybe we could segue into inorganic too. You did Lunaphore, I think, two and a half years ago. Just talk a little bit about, you've said M&A remains a priority. You obviously mentioned Wilson Wolf. Talk a little bit about current backdrop for M&A, how you're thinking about kind of valuations, other target areas. What are the gives and takes on whether Wilson Wolf gets done?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, overall, our highest priority for capital deployment is M&A. We had a year or two in which we did not see high-quality targets coming to market. Right now, that has improved. There are better high-quality targets that are available. Pricing expectations are elevated, but not absurd anymore. They are improving. We are 0.6 times leveraged. We definitely have appetite and capacity to be active in the market. We would love to do so. We will be, of course, disciplined in not doing anything we would regret. We are very good in evaluating targets from a technology point of view. Integration capabilities are very good. Good process and a good M&A team. Ready if we have the right opportunity. We like strengthening our portfolio in, for example, cell therapy. Organoids is a real dimension that is really taking off across Europe and the US.

There are some nifty things we could add to that portfolio. Then our protein analysis instrumentation, there's always some room for additional technologies in there too. Those will really be our focus. The core, other antibody types, protein types, there are some new entrants there too, new capabilities that we could add to our portfolio very nicely. Spatial, I think we're really well off right now. We have a very good offering. That is true for our molecular diagnostics business as well. If there's M&A activity, you should probably think core and the two that I just mentioned.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Does the optionality around Wilson Wolf kind of limit your ability to do bigger deals? Yeah, how do you think about that?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, to the contrary, actually. It's obviously latest. It would be December of 2027 that the asset becomes ours, unless there are milestones hit. Then it would be earlier. Nonetheless, we, of course, did our homework in what would be our capacity quarter to quarter and in between. Fortunately, with the leverage I just mentioned, as well as our debt capacity, we could easily do a deal or two typical for us in the size that is very typical for us in between. The interesting thing is that with the top line as well as the bottom line for Wilson Wolf is that you would think our capacity would go down for it temporarily, but it actually increases our capacity to do deals. It won't be to the detriment of our overall deal activity.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Maybe we can just touch on GMP proteins. You've had some headwinds tied to a small number of customers there. Just talk about the size of that GMP business today. What headwinds are kind of baked in for the year? How's the business growing outside of those few customers?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, so last year, we talked about the overall cell therapy business for us being $80 million run rate. The GMP protein section of that is $60 million. Q1, Q2 last year, we grew 60% and 90% in cell therapy. That was pretty much driven by large orders for obviously companies in clinical studies that have larger indications, so large populations for their clinical studies. Not by coincidence, those companies have received a fast-track designation. That means typically that, of course, the FDA will prioritize your review. You can submit your documents while you're progressing through your program rather than at the end of it. In the meantime, you typically get allowed to have a little bit higher risk by reducing the number of clinical studies or the number of clinical patients you do because there's such a health benefit at the end of it.

Therefore, very much aligned with the large indications, also aligned with the rhetoric in trying to make Americans healthy and big indications. This is really good news for these companies. For us, we will therefore have a little hiatus during a period where these companies will not order proteins because they have enough to finalize the clinical studies. That will give us headwinds. We had 200 basis points headwinds in Q1 and 400 basis points in Q2. The second half of our year, we will still have some tailwinds. They will be abating quarter by quarter. They will be fully out of our comparables after Q4.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: there any change in the competitive front with newer entrants coming into the market?

Unidentified speaker: In cell therapy? No. It's pretty much the same. There are two European players that were ahead of us in this market and we've competed with successfully. We have really carved out a stronger position in the RegenMed area where the more complex proteins are of importance. We have 49 years of experience in designing, but also manufacturing very complex proteins in very consistent ways. That's really where we carved out our strength. We are market leaders there. I see that especially with the new efforts in AI designs enabled further design of proteins that we can continue to have that advantage. That is also where the market is heading. We feel very comfortable with the competitive landscape.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Maybe can you dive into that a little bit, how AI is helping on the protein design front?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, of course, we have, after 49 years being in this space, vast databases on different characteristics of the proteins that we have designed and produced. We always were proud of being able to characterize them and make sure that there's lots of consistency and that we know how to make and design more complex proteins. With those databases, combine that with public databases, you can start looking at how do you design certain characteristics of proteins in there. We all know that stability and heat stability is a very important aspect. Specificity is always an important aspect. Utilizing AI, you can increase your specificity. You can also design in more heat-stable characteristics. Therefore, you get higher performance proteins that actually do not exist in nature. Therefore, they are patentable.

Having the database and the know-how, having the ability to design them, but also the know-how how to produce them really gives us a competitive advantage that we then can translate into better performance for the customers. Therefore, also being able to command a price premium.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Interesting. Maybe on pricing, you did notice or call out some promotion activity on the protein science side of the business in the recent quarter. Can you maybe just talk, was this to take share, protect share, and how broad across the portfolio was this?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, it was in the protein sciences where we did promotions. You can see them in different websites and LinkedIn. You can see our promotions. They're typically grants. A company would start a new program or an academic institution. They start a new program. We could assign a $10,000 grant or so in which they get to use our proteins. For us, with these proteins being super high margin, it's not very expensive. It's better than just lowering your prices across the board. That's not very specific. We believe that in constrained funding environments, fewer programs get started. The programs that do get started are usually of high quality because they obviously have something special to them. That could be the clinical indication or application or scalability. It can also just be that it's something that has a high NPV.

Therefore, we want to be part of those programs. As you know, the moment you start generating data utilizing certain ingredients like proteins or the G-Rex, the moment you start generating data utilizing those, the further you get into those clinicals, the stickier it becomes. The customer usually would not want to swap any ingredients anymore once they have clinical data. We feel that it is seeding the market more so than just dumping price. You can see that last quarter, we had 550 cell and gene therapy customers for our GMP proteins. It is now bumped up to 700. Much of that is through those grants. We hope to see these high-value programs right now so that when the funding gets better, these companies will continue utilizing our ingredients.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Is that mostly for biotech or academic or both?

Unidentified speaker: Yes, both. On both sides, we've done these grants. Again, there's a little review board in the company that looks at which of these programs really make a lot of sense and have certain promise. Then we collaborate with these customers to, even in tough times, start exciting programs.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Maybe just on that, just touch on the academic backdrop. I mean, grants have been flowing despite the shutdown, more consumables than instruments, obviously. Just talk a little bit about what you've seen in the current environment and how you're thinking about the calendar year ahead.

Unidentified speaker: The government shutdown, yes.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: More like the NIH outlook, right, on flat backdrop, presumably.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, as of February this calendar year, it was relatively messy in the U.S. academic. Fortunately, European academic was mid-single digits and stable and is doing well. I think that might even improve over time. The U.S. academic was relatively messy. We went from negative high single digits to negative low single digits. There is sequential improvement. We see that our core reagents, which usually indicate overall activity level, were more stable this quarter in academic. We saw August, September having finally some positive year-over-year numbers if it comes to the outlays of the grants. We definitely keep a real close eye on not only the number of grants, but the type of grants, right?

From grants very much focused on infectious diseases and immunization, you can see that there is definitely a swing towards oncology and neurological diseases, which is much more aligned with our portfolio, which is good. The proceeds are coming back into the market. The use of proceeds are coming our way. If you look within the grants, what technology usually money gets spent on, which used to be very NGS heavy, is now much more in proteins and proteomics-based. Also within the grants, the money is flowing a little bit more in our direction. We see very positive signs in the NIH markets, the academic markets. The close down of the government was very much noticeable in institutions like CDC and NIH. Those are definitely small endpoints for us on the overall company perspective.

That is less than 1% exposure. We have really not changed our forecast or our feelings about the balance of the year based upon that.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Does the push toward more multi-year grants make things better? I mean, you talked about better funded research and maybe better projects getting funded. If labs have visibility for a couple of years now, fewer grants, but maybe better visibility.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I would agree. I think that when you can plan out your grant and you know that there's a continuation of the program, it definitely helps you scheduling your purchases and when you get to certain needs and when you need new instrumentation. I think that's a benefit.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: We have just over a month left in the year. Any thoughts on kind of budget flush in the biopharma side in the year end?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, well, it's likely. It could definitely happen. We don't talk a lot about it because at the end of the day, only 10% of our revenue is related to instrumentation. 80% is consumables, 10% is service. The service and the consumables, so 90% of the company are not influenced by budget flush. Therefore, it's not a big theme for us.

Tucker Peterson, Analyst, Life Science team: Great. We'll leave it at that. Thanks.

Unidentified speaker: Thank you, Tucker.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.