Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are most high potential and intellectual property rich life science firms like Oncimmune (ONC). It's a classic ‘picks and shovels’ stock delivering best-in-class autoantibody profiling services at estimated 80%+ gross margins to blue chip clients including 7 of the top 15 biopharma giants.

The good news is that the vast majority of the heavy lifting - infrastructure, production capacity, master service agreements, and so on - has already been done. The next objective is to scale the business, fine tune the commercial proposition, become cashflow positive and ultimately deliver significant shareholder value.

To me this makes perfect sense, with the company today announcing a number of positive developments, namely to:

1.     Increase its total addressable markey by also targeting Contract Research Organisations (CROs) focused on drug discovery, pre-clinical and patient trials/testing.

2.     Leverage its unique skills and& medical science across new areas such as adverse event prognostics - predictive blood tests - in immuno-oncology therapeutics and companion diagnostics. It will also explore new indications in Central Nervous System disorders, possibly Alzheimer's, and diabetes or even GLP-1 drugs.

3.     Expand revenues beyond price-per-sample to more strategic partnership models such as royalties on future sales - similar to the deal it has with Freenome Holdings - and co-development projects with upfront project and milestone success fees with a pricing model based on the value being delivered by Oncimmune.

4.     Augment and grow its commercial team. Key hires have already been made in Europe and the US, with further expansion planned in the short and medium term.

5.     Reduce the size of the Board.

The important bit for investors is that none of this should involve a great deal of upfront capital.

CEO Martin Gouldstone commented: "In my first couple of months with the Company I have had the pleasure of meeting with a number of our current and potential customers, as well as some of our wider stakeholders, and have been very pleased to see our technological offering and customer service has been so well received. I believe that our new strategic approach, which encompasses CRO partnerships, the extension of our world class technology into new scientific areas and the use of new commercial models, will help us to drive growth in FY24 and beyond, following a tough FY23."

In terms of the numbers, there are presently no up-to-date broker forecasts or valuations available - which I believe is simply a reflection of the transformational nature of recent announcements.