ANTEOTECH LTD (ADO) - AnteoTech’s Two-Track Chemistry

Six times lower capture antibody usage and faster activation sounds like a marketing claim until you unpack what it does to cost, workflow, and test performance. We sit down with Merrill Gray, Managing Director and CEO of AnteoTech Limited (ASX: ADO), to explain how AnteoTech’s chemical and materials science platform improves molecule-to-surface bonding and why that matters in modern immunoassays and precision diagnostics.

We walk through AnteoTech’s move into CLIA diagnostics, including the successful completion of an initial stage in a collaborative CLIA development program with a large global life sciences company and the next stage already agreed. Merrill breaks down the practical value of superior antibody orientation on magnetic beads, and why reproducibility and sensitivity are the difference between a promising chemistry and a deployable in vitro diagnostics solution. We also discuss the upcoming ADLM 2026 launch of a ready-to-use CLIA kit that bundles magnetic beads, AnteoBind™ NXT , and optimised activation protocols, plus what “moving up the value chain” looks like when your customers range from vaccine R&D teams to pathology and research labs.

Then we pivot to advanced battery technology, where the same platform shows up as performance additives and materials choices that target real manufacturing constraints. You’ll hear how Anteo C progressed from 100 mL lab work to a 20-litre sample shipped for manufacturing scale trials in South Korea, why primer coatings on copper foil and aluminium foil matter for electrode performance, and how separator integrity links to safety and thermal runaway risk. We close on what to watch over the next six months, including regional go-to-market choices and progress on Ultranode™  high-silicon anode work aimed at high-power battery packs. If you find value here, subscribe, share the episode, and leave a review so more investors and builders can discover it.

Transcript

Andrew Musgrave

Welcome again to ASX Briefs, and today we're joined by Merrill Gray, the Managing Director and CEO of AnteoTech Limited, a company applying its advanced chemical and materials science platform across two growth verticals, life sciences diagnostics and advanced battery technology. Merrill, great to have you with me today and welcome to the ASX Briefs Podcast.

Merrill Gray

Thank you for having me.

Andrew Musgrave

Now, Merrill, for our listeners that may be unfamiliar with AnteoTech, can you provide a brief overview of the company?

Merrill Gray

So, AnteoTech at its core is a chemical and materials company. We have a chemical platform that has been developed over several years that has been deployed in two verticals. So, we have two business units, one in life sciences and one in advanced battery technology. So, what's so special about this is that it's to do with transition metal salt and coordination chemistry for anyone who's on the more on the technical side. Now, it's to do with the bonds between from molecule to molecule that our chemical platform allows, and I'll get to some of the applications we're talking about here, or between that from a molecule to surface perspective. So, you know, what's so important about that, Andrew, is we in life sciences we're in immunoassays, and immunoassays, modern precision medicine equipment requires biomolecules and disease markers to be analyzed through what can be very high-volume diagnostic equipment. So, for example, chemiluminescence or clear, as it's talked about, uses what they call magnetic particles. And our chemical can coat those magnetic particles so that biomolecules can attach to those particles in a fashion that it allows better bonding with other molecules more and allows more sensitivity and reproducibility of those tests. So, it's really for us about how proteins like antibodies attach to those surfaces. It's really, Andrew, it's a bit like pick me, pick me. They're sitting on the surface, and they allow other reactions to happen where they're very sensitive and you need less material, which can be very expensive, or if it's blood or saliva or anything else, you can take less of that material and do more tests. So that's one way that our chemical is delivering into the life science on the life sciences space. And then on the battery side, the same platform is being used within batteries. And in fact, we've had some really, which we'll talk about, some really significant progress on new products, which is really showcasing how we not only understand chemistry and materials, but we understand our way around a battery. So, we have launched during this financial year three new products. The most recent in 2026 are to do with copper and aluminium foils, which are a critical part of the battery in terms of electrodes and identical cathode electrodes, as well as our chemical can be used on separators to maintain the integrity of separators, and that's pretty critical for batteries because that's a predominant area of failure that leads to thermal runaway and fires. So, you know, it's quite, I've been at the company for a year now, just over a year now, and as MD CEO, and to understand that this platform has been around for some time and how to, what my job is, is to commercialize it in these two verticals. But I would say we can talk about that maybe later. We have had demand for how it can be used in other applications, which is also quite exciting for the company.

Andrew Musgrave

Okay, and you've just announced successful completion of the initial stage of your collaborative CLIA development program with a large global life sciences company on schedule and with the next stage already agreed. Can you unpack what this milestone means for the company's commercialization strategy?

Merrill Gray

Yeah, yeah. This is to do with the overall, because we are in in vitro diagnostics, and you know, immunoassay diagnostics. And that's really important because if you look at in vitro diagnostics, that's proteins, antibodies, polymers, all those sorts of things, that's completely different to say pharmaceutical applications. They're used to seeing a piece of equipment with multiple tests being run, they'd go to a pathology lab, they're used to the fact that you've got a lot of tests being run and you need to be able to run those quickly and reproducibly and sensitively. So, the thing is that we have been for some time in what they call two platforms, which are in that immunoassay suite. One is called lateral flow, which everyone again is used to because lateral flow is what RAT tests are. So, in COVID, you've got basically various chemicals and you're looking for that line to be positive or not to be negative. And our chemicals go into that test, and they allow it less material to be used and for it to be more sensitive and reproducible. It's actually to do with the particles and how that the liquid runs up. So, we've been in lateral flow and Luminex. Luminex is a really is a piece of equipment that actually allows multi biomolecule testing at the same time on very small samples. It's a very expensive test. And our biggest customer is the Serum Institute of India, who are massive, they are very large manufacturers of things like measles or meningitis vaccines. And so, they use in an in-house test that they've developed our chemical in Luminex equipment to do their QAQC. So, what the CLIA work is about us moving into other immunoassay tests or platforms, if you like. And that's really significant for us because about expanding the total addressable market that we we're in. The CLIA market is around about US 13 billion per annum in revenues for the participants there, and as opposed to the 15 or so that we're all of the markets we're already in. So, there you go, it's almost a doubling of the market that we could access.

Andrew Musgrave

And AnteoBind™ NXT has been shown to deliver up to six times lower capture antibody usage and up to six times faster activation versus conventional chemistries. Why does that combination of performance and cost matter so much to the CLIA diagnostic manufacturers?

Merrill Gray

Yeah, those are our key selling points. So, Andrew, that comes back to what I said about how our chemical allows for what we say superior antibody orientation. So, what that means is that you use less antibodies, and they can be quite expensive in these tests. They can be as much as 35% of the total costs of the tests. So, using less of them is a very significant cost for the users of these tests. And it's it talked about lower cost, higher sensitivity, and it's also about workflow too. So, the benefits of our tests are that you can use you have less waste, you can prepare the tests quicker. So, the people who are doing the tests also want to be very efficient. So, yeah, the we put out a white paper in late March, which was about test work we'd done on magnetic particles, and then we've done this work with a very large global life sciences company who we haven't named, and we've used their particles and developed protocols, optimised protocols that improve the performance of their particles in the CLIA diagnostics, so going through CLIA machinery or equipment. So, the next steps are there's internal work being done for us to then be able to regroup on how we how we take everything forward. And that will just take a little bit of time. 

Andrew Musgrave

And AnteoTech is launching its new CLIA kit offering at ADLM 2026 in Anaheim in late July. Can you explain what's in the kit and why combining magnetic beads, AnteoBind™ NXT, and optimized activation protocols in one ready-to-use product is an important strategic step?

Merrill Gray

Yeah, great. So that just comes back to what I just said is that by showing how we can improve the performance of particles, we've now been able to pull everything into a kit and to make it easy for people to say, thanks very much. I already use those particles, I'll take that kit with your activating chemical, which is AnteoBind™ NXT, and I'll take that away. And you've even done me the service of giving me the protocol of how to put everything together. So, the real kicker for that is that we are planning to look at supplying these kits into a pilot market. Now, whether that's South Korea or Japan or India and in maybe even the Middle East, part of the Middle East, by the value for that is that we're able to now bundle our chemical in with particles and show the value that it can deliver by activating those particles in a way that we weren't able to do. And there's some possibility that we might be able to even white label those particles. That would be exciting, and it would be an AnteoTech kit, right? So, we've been looking at ways of moving up the value chain, apart from just being a small chemical additive that activates particles to secure a larger part of that, right, with the end customer. And it really is really important to understand that end customer is that an in-house vaccine development R&D group who will then ultimately test and lead to large-scale vaccines, which is the likes of Serum Institute, or is it a university who's doing work or a research institute who's doing work for on contract for a range of parties? We basically deal with all of these parties, and it does vary in terms of how this all works in terms of end customer requirements, particularly we're ISO 9001, and it really does vary what people demand downstream.

Andrew Musgrave

And now on the battery side, you've launched Anteo OC, a new primer coating additive, and just shipped a 20-litre sample to a South Korean manufacturer for manufacturing scale trials. Can you walk us through the journey from the initial 100 mil lab testing to this point?

Merrill Gray

Yeah, our battery business is divided into two. One is performance additives, and the other is our Ultranode™, which is our high silicon anode. It's a design or formulation, right? We'll come back to that. But on the performance additive side, which is what this is, it's normal that someone will want to take a sample of that, try it in their specific application, get the test results, and say, yeah, that's making an improvement or not. And so that's why you start at the lab scale with 100 mil, and then you'll move to something maybe like five litres in this case, because this this product is actually used on collector foils. So, whether they be copper or aluminium, they work with what's called a primer coating, which is what you put on there that makes the active material, whether it's a cathode active material or an anode active material, adhere better. And it also brings strength and a range of other aspects to the way that active material can perform. So, it's improving the overall battery performance in the end. So it's very normal for people to take small, larger, and then 20 litres is quite significant because you're starting, we only we're only an additive as a performance additive, we're a small part of primer coatings which go on to these really just think of it, large runs of copper foil or aluminium foil, which are essentially the anode or the cathode and large scale, very large scale battery manufacture. So, it's a big deal for us that we got to 20 litres. And of course, what we want from there is for someone to say, hey, we really love your product, and we want this many litres. And I I can say to you about the size of the market. We put some information out in our in our recent announcement that you know the combined current collective foil market globally is in the order of US 20 billion per annum in terms of everything that goes into that. Now, of course, primer coatings and they're different, it differs between whether it's copper foil or aluminium foil, and  the primer coatings for those, for example, for anode primers, which is the copper foil, you're really talking for the amount of material that we would add into those primer coatings and the amount of primer coatings that are used, because it's not across the entire sector, but they use around about between 15 and 25 percent of copper foil will use primer coatings. What we would add into that, you know, it's a big number, Andrew. If we were able to get into that market, it could represent around 500,000 litres, right? So, but for me, what I need is the first contract, which is a sizable contract after this manufacturing run works. So, yeah, it's not it's not a sort of it's an all or nothing for us in some of those performance additives. Someone loves it, they want it in their product, and then I want it at a reasonable scale.

 
 
 
 Andrew Musgrave

Okay, and Anteo C is the second new advanced battery technology product introduced this year alongside Anteo S™for separated technologies, which is already at pilot scale testing in Southeast Asia and the USA. So, how do those newer products complement your existing Ultranode™and Anteo X™ offerings?

Merrill Gray

So, to go first of all over to the second part of your question. So Ultranode™is a high silicon anode formulation. And when I say high silicon, it actually uses silicon, micronized silicon. Now that's it's not a high-tech material, but the design and formulation of Ultranode™is so by using relatively lower cost at scale silicon, which you can make from silicon dioxide, so from SiO2, from silica sand. That's just call it silica sand, you heat it up, you can basically produce silicon, pure silicon, and then micronize it, which is what we what one of the raw ingredients for our us. And then it's all the other additives. It's understanding the binders, the crosslinkers, and that's when I started, when I started talking to you, I said what we do is we do chemicals and materials. So, this is our sweet spot of understanding how that to pull that all together into our into a product which is Ultranode™, which is can be up to 95% silicon. What you're trying to do there is you're trying to get into the battery the benefits of the much higher specific energy that you get from silicon. So, it's about 10 times that of graphite, right? But silicon has is known and does swell in the charging and discharging process. So, you need to have products like ours. So, you have to have binders and crosslinkers, which is what our Anteo X™ product is, to keep that anode intact and so that the power is, can be used in the battery over the longer term. So that's Ultranode™, and that's actually our first product, well, additive, performance additive, was Anteo X™. And that's where these other ones have been derived from. It's again what I said earlier is we know our way around a battery, we know how the chemicals and the materials interact, and we have this unique chemical platform that is around molecule to molecule and molecule to surface bonding and interactions, and we're harnessing that in different parts of the battery. Yeah, it's a really great thing.

Andrew Musgrave

You've also highlighted early momentum in South Korea, including engagement through distributor Kangshin Industrial, plus a positive response from a larger prospective customer in India. How are you thinking about prioritizing these regional opportunities, including the longer-term potential in China?

Merrill Gray

Yeah, this is this is a key question. For example, in separators, almost 70% of all, and we work in ceramic-coated separators, which is not in all batteries, but it is a very significant market. 70% of those separators are manufactured in China. So, you've got to ask the question, should we be there? And so, we have at a board level, of course, really worked on how we could do that commercially and protect obviously our know-how and our intellectual property. And that's I guess something that remains to be seen. But we the South Korean entry that we have made through Kangshin, who are a specialist chemical company, they're a chemical importer, that for German and Japanese chemicals will, of course, that we fit right in there, has been really great. And I've said that before. It's been wonderful. They are very well connected, and they have helped us immensely in that market, and of course, it's all about both of our companies being successful. South Korea has been a good move, but it needs to materialize for us in terms of sales contracts now. So, we've got a lot of samples out being tested by all the people that people would expect us to have them out with, and bringing those to sales contracts meaningfully is what we're focused on right now. So, yeah, a good distributor who's very well connected and who is enthusiastic about your product is obviously a good thing to have.

Andrew Musgrave

And finally, between the next stage of the CLIA collaboration, the ADLM kit launch, and progress on Anteo C evaluation and additional customer opportunities, what should investors be keeping an eye out for over the coming months?

Merrill Gray

Yep. Well, next six months is pretty critical for us because we've been working really hard on a couple of things that you've covered there and some that you haven't, which is one in particular is to do with Ultranode™. You know, we need Ultranode™ to be in a battery pack. We need to be working towards very high-powered battery packs in terms of how we're matched up with cathodes, how you work with the separator and keep the separator intact. And we've really focused on the military drone market in the US. And I go to the US next week and I'm in front of people who are testing our Ultranode™ for potential relationships. I've been very public about the fact that we are chasing two joint development agreements for next generation batteries with well-known battery manufacturers. They're our target market. We want to work alongside them and design really high-powered batteries that are very highly regarded. So, the military drone market is has been a target for some time. I've been very public about that, and I'm going to be in front of various parties when I'm over there. And I will be at the ADLM, which we talked about earlier, the ADLM conference, which is where we'll be having kits. And it's again about strategic partners that we're on magnetic particle manufacturers who will who can see the value of what we can do with our chemical and might want to get more heavily involved with us. So those are things that we're and the go-to market, those are the things that I'm really focused on, the go-to market with that kit in the right place at the right time with the right partners. And that's going to take a bit of work, whether it's Japan or South Korea or India. We've got, we are actually part of the export growth program, Austrade’s export growth program, and they of course have very specific role, a very specific offering and role to make connections with it for us with the right parties, and we're working on that. So, it's going to be a very busy six months, and it really needs to deliver, and I'm very clear on that, and so is the team. So, yeah, we're really looking forward to it and looking forward to delivering for our shareholders.

Andrew Musgrave

Okay, Merrill, with the CLIA program advancing to its next stage. A new kit launch at ADLM and Anteo C now in manufacturing scale trials in South Korea. It's a busy period across both sides of the business. So, it's been great to chat today. Thanks for your time and thanks for joining me on the ASX Briefs podcast.

Merrill Gray

Thank you, Andrew. Great.

Andrew Musgrave

That concludes this episode of ASX Briefs. Don't forget to subscribe, and we look forward to catching you on our next episode.