UK Biotech Day 2026 post-event reflections: key industry takeaways

Advanced tools and scientific breakthroughs are making the word 'undruggable' obsolete, while human-centered deal-making and innovative business models are set to dominate the coming years in the pharmaceutical industry.

UK Biotech Day 2026 takes place at a time of real structural pressure across the life sciences sector.

On one side, the industry is facing a major wave of patent expiries, with more than US$200 billion in branded pharmaceutical revenue at risk of generic erosion over the next decade. On the other, biotech financing remains highly uneven: later-stage, de-risked clinical assets are still able to attract sizeable Series B and C rounds, while many early-stage and pre-clinical companies are struggling to raise Series A capital without facing excessive dilution or constrained valuations.

The conference chairman, Dimitri Dimitriou (Managing Director at DyoDelta Biosciences Ltd.), opened UK Biotech Day by framing the UK not just as a strong European market, but as one of the world’s most credible hubs for biotech innovation and dealmaking. In his opening remarks, Dimitriou pointed to the depth of the UK’s life sciences base and the way it consistently converts academic excellence into investable companies, clinical programs and partnering activity. He also struck a pragmatic note on the UK’s role in global value creation, emphasizing that successful exits and acquisitions should be viewed as a sign of ecosystem strength and an engine for recycling talent and capital into the next wave of innovation.

Dimitriou anchored his remarks on current sector data. He referenced BIA figures showing £3.5bn in total UK biotech equity financing in 2024 (including £2.06bn in venture capital across 111 VC deals) and the UK capturing 37% of total European biotech VC that year which reinforced its position as Europe’s leading biotech hub. He added that the most recent snapshot continues that trajectory, with £552m in total equity financing and £516m in VC in Q1 2026 across 24 transactions, representing 58% of the European total for the quarter.

Big pharma is not ignoring your science. It is dealing with its own revenue crisis.

Big pharma is hunting for external innovation as internal pipelines simply are not replacing the massive revenue blocks currently heading over the patent cliff.

An example is provided by MSD’s Richard Taylor (Executive Director Business Development, European Innovation Hub Transaction). When a single asset of Keytruda’s blockbuster magnitude faces looming loss-of-exclusivity, the entire BD strategy shifts overnight. The priority pivots aggressively toward late-stage deals that can plug near-term revenue gaps, leaving brilliant early-stage science to fight for scraps of attention. This leaves mid-stage biotechs caught in a tough valley: they are past the high-risk early science but have not yet hit the clinical inflection points that trigger standard pharma valuation models. If you are a biotech ready to pitch, understanding where each prospective partner sits on this timeline is foundational pre-meeting intelligence.

Two paths into biotech’s pipeline. One killed its labs. The other kept them. Both think they are right.

The opening panel highlighted a fascinating strategic divide between Ipsen and Lundbeck. Ipsen’s Matt Beard (Senior Director External Innovation) made it clear that his company has gone all-in on external innovation. Shuttering early-stage internal discovery half a decade ago was a radical choice, but it allowed Ipsen to lean wholly on the biotech and academic ecosystems for early science. Today, their sweet spot is onboarding assets at the IND-enabling stage or mid-development, letting Ipsen focus its capital on what it does best: clinical execution, regulatory heavy lifting, and commercialization. Far from a cheap cost-cutting play, this asset-light model is a deliberate bet on where Ipsen drives value.

Lundbeck’s Gregor Macdonald (Vice President, Head of BD & Licensing, Search and Evaluation) offered a starkly different playbook. Lundbeck is hedging its bets with a hybrid approach, blending internal R&D with external dealmaking across three core franchises: psychiatry, neuro-specialty, and rare neurological diseases. For Lundbeck, keeping a foot in the internal discovery lab is not a legacy habit, but rather a partner-retention strategy. They argue that maintaining in-house scientific expertise is exactly what makes them a smarter, more credible collaborator when sitting across the table from biotechs, particularly in the highly nuanced rare disease space.

The end of traditional licensing? How risk-sharing models are reshaping pharma partnerships

The traditional upfront-and-milestone structure is still the workhorse of pharma BD, but it is increasingly sharing the stage with more creative, risk-sharing models like option-based deals. Instead of buying into a program outright, pharma is aggressively paying for optionality, buying a seat at the table early on, with the right to step in only after a specific milestone is cleared. This gives pharma early access without a heavy, immediate capital overhang, while allowing the biotech to keep the operational reins and future upside. It is a structure that fits platform biotechs perfectly, where the true enterprise value lies in the underlying discovery engine rather than any single asset.

One of the most complex variants is the platform partnership, where the deal object is a capability, not a molecule. Servier’s January 2026 collaboration with Insilico Medicine illustrates this: Servier is not buying a polished asset; they are paying for a key to Insilico’s AI discovery engine, securing the rights to whatever oncology candidates the tech eventually spits out. Valuing a deal like this requires a total mindset shift. Traditional, program-specific NPV models completely break down here; instead, you must build a framework valued entirely on platform optionality.

An academic group and an experienced biotech company might present different risk profiles, but pharma companies usually welcome both.

Kurt Pike (Senior Director, External Innovation at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine of Johnson & Johnson) shared a line that gets repeated often within J&J: 'we believe a good idea can come from anyone', highlighting the company’s source-agnostic approach to innovation.

Panel members also commented on the importance of building trust between both parties and that providing the right data can, sometimes, speed up the process.

An interesting point was brought up during the panel discussion moderated by Claudia Blattner (VP of Business Development and Partnering at Immatics). What could help is for Big Pharma to provide clearer, more granular feedback on what they need to see, and for biotech companies to be more receptive to that input

To further align incentives between parties, Marco Cerato (EVP and Global Head Innovative Businesses at Glenmark Pharmaceutical) described an asset that becomes the core focus of the collaboration itself. It is no longer a transactional arrangement where one party simply utilizes the other; rather, both partners jointly manage what feels like a third-party venture together. When both sides are completely aligned on the success of the asset, the program, or the platform, it provides an elegant way of bypassing the adversarial dynamics that historically plagued traditional pharma-biotech relationships.

This approach, often called 'Brand Inc.', involves funding a virtual company around the in-licensed asset, where stakeholders from both partnering companies are equally represented and equally relevant. There is no more adversarial preconception, nor 'you' and 'us', but rather 'we'.

There is no perfect stage to make a deal. There never was.

The consensus, delivered with consistent nuance by panelists from Ipsen, AstraZeneca, MSD, Roche, Otsuka, Lundbeck, GSK is that no universal sweet spot exists: the optimal acquisition stage is a dynamic function of the acquirer’s portfolio composition, patent cliff timeline, risk appetite by modality, and the competitive intensity of the indication.

Ipsen’s Matt Beard laid out a portfolio strategy that is a great reality check, mostly because he is honest about internal limits. His blueprint is straightforward: close one to two late-stage deals a year to patch near-term revenue gaps and seed the long-term pipeline with five to eight early-stage transactions. This is not a scientifically perfect ratio but rather a strategy dictated entirely by resource constraints. Beard’s underlying point is critical: expanding a pipeline beyond your team’s actual bandwidth to champion those programs is a massive liability.

Philipp Schreppel, (Senior Director of Business Development at Ethris), raised something that does not get enough attention in deal analysis: sometimes data readiness is simply beside the point. When several large pharma companies simultaneously decide that a nascent modality is approaching validation, competitive pressure alone can drive deal execution and compress the diligence timeline that would normally gate it.

The cluster of major in vivo CAR-T deals from the prior year is the clearest recent illustration. Multi-billion dollar valuations, minimal mature clinical data, transactions closing within weeks of each other. What drove that was not scientific consensus but rather the fear of being locked out.

For platform biotechs, this creates a double-edged window. The conditions are ideal on the surface; pharma attention is high, diligence bars are lower, and term sheets move fast. But partners entering deals out of competitive anxiety rather than scientific conviction tend to build in milestone structures that become punishing once sector enthusiasm levels off. The biotech that secured a headline valuation can find itself holding a contract engineered for a hype environment that no longer exists.

The ones that come out ahead are typically those that gave pharma something specific to hold onto, like a differentiated target profile, a reliable manufacturing story, or interpretable clinical data. In this crowded space, narrative precision is a defensive asset.

Partnerships between biotech companies and big pharma are essential fuel to biotech innovations. The wave of interest in in vivo CAR-T Philip described is certainly not the first instance of Big Pharma refusing to wait until everything is ‘figured out’ before committing significant capital.

Lilly signed with Genentech before recombinant insulin had been proven manufacturable at scale, and before regulatory pathways for biotech-derived biologics existed. The deal effectively created the blueprint for modern biotech-pharma collaboration.

Genentech in 1978 was not an obvious partner for the world’s dominant insulin company. The firm was barely two years old, venture-backed, with no approved products. What it had was a result: on August 24th of that year, working with researchers at the City of Hope Medical Center, its team became the first in the world to synthesize human insulin using recombinant DNA. Eli Lilly signed an agreement the following day.

Lilly had dominated insulin since the 1920s, but its entire supply chain ran on pancreatic extracts from pigs and cows; a method that was reaching its natural ceiling as diabetic populations grew. The company did not need convincing that recombinant insulin was the future. It needed to own access to it before anyone else did.

What made it work was not the structure itself but the fit underneath it. Genentech had the breakthrough and needed the infrastructure. Lilly had the infrastructure and needed the breakthrough. Neither could build what the other already had.

Genentech remains an independent unit within Roche, though it relies heavily on Roche’s global functions. Experts originally expected this independence to last five years at most, but it has now lasted over 17.

The soft stuff isn’t soft: why culture is now a deal diligence item

Even the most promising biotech asset will need to be combined with the right strategy and culture.

Millie Pari (Director, Corporate Strategy at Astellas) introduced the dimension that strategic alignment analyses sometimes underweight: corporate strategy is not static, and a biotech that builds its business plan around being a priority for its large pharma partner is building on shifting sand. The specific example she offered (i.e. an acquired asset becoming an 'operational outlier' under a revised portfolio strategy several years post-acquisition) is not an anomaly. It is a predictable consequence of the fact that pharma strategy cycles, board composition changes, and competitive pressures evolve on timescales that frequently fall within the life of a major collaboration.

Millie Pari (Astellas): 'Over the past decade, I’ve seen both approaches – fully integrating acquired companies and deliberately keeping them at arm’s length, preserving their identity and operational autonomy through key milestones.
What I’ve learned is this: often when a biotech retained their autonomy there was a feeling of isolation and consequently their people left within two to three years. Ultimately, they wanted to be part of something bigger. That was the whole point of signing the deal. So, Pharma might think they are doing them a favor, keeping them at length, but might inadvertently be making them feel isolated and sidelined.
So the instinct to preserve independence at all costs is not always the right call. Integration done thoughtfully is often what these teams came for.'

Romuald Laine (Head of Evaluation and Partnering at Servier) recapped the panel discussion: 'Great science alone doesn’t make a great deal. You need the right strategy too. But even then, if you overlook culture, it will come back to bite you.'

The China out-licensing signal and the reconfiguration of global innovation sourcing

There was no way a biotech conference was going to dodge the China out-licensing wave.

Albert Pat Fetaya (Partner, Princeton Global Biopharma Advisor), who open the first B&DL session on Day 1, delivered one of most striking quantitative data point of Day 1: average upfront payments for China out-licensing deals increased from $52 million in 2022 to $172 million in 2025. This is a directional indicator of a fundamental reconfiguration in how global pharma perceives Chinese biotech innovation quality and, by extension, a reconfiguration of where the global capital efficiency frontier sits in early drug discovery.

Sangeun Lee (Search & Evaluation Director at GSK), whose team led the Aiolos Bio acquisition (a long-acting, half-life-extended thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) asset for respiratory indications), described the strategic logic with precision: Chinese partner organizations can generate Phase 1 clinical data at an exceptional pace and cost basis. The value proposition is not cheap science; it is time-compressed clinical risk resolution at competitive pharmacological quality. When the TSLP mechanism was already clinically and commercially validated by the existing therapy in the market, acquiring a half-life-extended variant with Chinese Phase 1 data in hand is a strategically and financially attractive opportunity after risk adjustment.

Muhammad Mustaqim (Director, Transactions, Business Development at AstraZeneca) contextualized this within a broader strategic framing: AZ’s deep China operational presence – one of the largest multinational footprints in the country – creates institutional knowledge about ecosystem quality that organizations with arm’s-length exposure cannot replicate. China now represents over 20% of global pharmaceutical revenue. That market weight, combined with an increasingly sophisticated clinical regulatory environment and a biotech workforce that excels in process-intensive innovation (CAR-T manufacturing, automated discovery workflows, complex biologics process development), creates a platform-level advantage that late entrants to the market will find structurally difficult to overcome.

For AZ, China is a big green flag, and they interact extensively with their Chinese Corporate Fund for intelligence and insights on the local ecosystem.

The reverse engineering that shapes the evolving innovation pipeline

A $172 million upfront payment from GSK for a Chinese asset does more than close a transaction. VC scouts are already mapping adjacent biology, looking for the next program that fits the same profile. The capital follows the proof point.

What is less obvious is that the information flow does not stop there. When pharma BD teams disclose deal terms, they are revealing something they probably did not intend to: how they are currently pricing entire target classes. Experienced biotech investors read those disclosures carefully. They use them to anchor Series B and C valuations and to work out where their portfolio sits relative to what pharma is willing to pay.

The deal announcement is the public part. The reverse-engineering is what happens after.

InflaRx’ Igor Orshanskiy offered a real-time case study in investor-driven strategic pivoting that illustrated the systemic character of these dynamics: a company generating strong Phase 2a immunodermatology data, instead pivoted more toward a rare disease positioning following intense investor interest and competitive intelligence on an Amgen product targeting the same mechanism, and immediately secured $150 million in institutional financing from investors who were specifically backing the renal disease re-positioning thesis. The scientific mechanism did not change. The narrative reconfiguration around unmet medical need, regulatory exclusivity, and premium pricing potential was sufficient to unlock a greater capital tier.

Beyond the low-hanging fruit: the R&D platforms redrawing the map of what can be treated

For decades, drug discovery played it relatively safe, crowding around a narrow subset of proteins that could easily be drugged with standard small molecules or antibodies. That low-hanging fruit is gone. Today, the industry is breaking into territory once dismissed as completely 'undruggable,' going after complex proteins and pathways that used to be total non-starters. But for certain therapeutic areas, finding the target is only half the battle; the real gamechanger is delivery. Massive leaps in delivery tech are finally allowing us to ship complex modalities: like RNA, gene therapies. We are not just adjusting our strategies; we are completely redrawing the map of what can be treated.

These themes took center stage during the R&D panel sessions at this year’s UK Biotech Day. Here are some of the companies and their technologies.

Stick Therapeutics – molecular glues for any drug target!

Most cancer and disease research into 'molecular glues' (drugs that force unwanted proteins to be destroyed) has focused on a small subset of biological pathways, many involving a protein called Cereblon. Despite their desirable clinical properties, difficulties in mechanism prediction and structure activity relationships, mean most molecular glues have been discovered by chance.

Stick Therapeutics takes a different route – systematic identification of molecular glues beyond Cereblon via high-throughput pooled screening of mutated E3 ligases. The human body has around 600 proteins (E3 ligases) that can tag other proteins for destruction. Only about a dozen have ever been targeted by drugs. Stick has built a biology-led, AI-enable high throughput pipeline to find small molecules that recruit these unexplored ligases to degrade disease-causing proteins. More ligases mean more targets, more indications, and less competition. The challenge: many of these unexplored ligases do not have obvious places for a drug to bind, and finding workable drug candidates from this approach is classically hard. Stick created their GlueSEEKER pipeline to address exactly that.

Stick’s pipeline is disease area and target agnostic. Stick’s execution risk focuses on the correct indication and modality, with an internal company focus on oncology. Partner collaborations offer a way to explore new disease areas and, since innovation requires accepting risk and failure, sharing that burden through partnerships makes it easier. For pharma companies that have exhausted the Cereblon approach or have a target where molecular glues would offer a best-in-class opportunity, Stick offers a genuinely new angle. Stick is a textbook platform partnership candidate. The BD panels were clear that the best deals for a platform company are not necessarily the biggest but the most focused. Stick’s co-founder acknowledged the risk of being pulled in twelve directions by twelve different pharma companies and the impact on internal strategic priorities.

brainQr Therapeutics – stopping Alzheimer’s before it starts

Alzheimer’s drugs targeting amyloid plaques have shown only modest benefit and come with significant cost and complexity. Attention is shifting to tau, a protein inside neurons that misfolds and spreads through the brain, driving the actual neurodegeneration. The challenge: tau doesn’t have a fixed 3D shape, so conventional drug design (which needs a defined pocket to target) doesn’t work on it. brainQr has built an AI platform that predicts the full range of shapes tau can take, rather than a single structure. This was validated against rigorous experimental data. They use this to find small molecules that keep tau in its healthy, stable shape, preventing the cascade that leads to neurodegeneration. Their lead drug is oral, which matters enormously. The commercial model they are targeting is similar to statins for heart disease: a daily preventive pill started years before symptoms appear, in people identified as high-risk through blood tests. If it works, the market is enormous and there is virtually no competition today. This is a classic example of a hot-sector deal in the making. The BD panels discussed how competitive bidding dynamics can accelerate when pharma companies collectively believe a modality is approaching clinical validation. brainQr’s oral small molecule strategy is commercially sophisticated – it sidesteps the logistics and access barriers of antibody-based therapies, making it viable at population scale.

Avacta Therapeutics – drug delivery that targets the tumor, not the heart

Powerful cancer drugs are often limited not by whether they kill cancer cells, but by how much damage they do to healthy tissue on the way. Doxorubicin, for example, is highly effective but causes irreversible heart damage, forcing doctors to stop treatment even in patients who are responding well.

Avacta attaches doxorubicin to a molecular 'lock' that is only unlocked by an enzyme called FAP, which is found almost exclusively inside tumors. In the bloodstream, the drug is inactive. Inside the tumor, the enzyme cuts the lock off and releases the active drug - achieving a 100:1 concentration difference between tumor and healthy tissue.

Crucially, the FDA has formally agreed that Avacta’s version of doxorubicin can be given without the usual lifetime dose limit, because the delivery system changes its safety profile. This is a significant regulatory precedent: it means the same platform could potentially rehabilitate other powerful drugs that were previously too toxic for broad use.

The FDA precedent is the headline for any BD conversation. This is a 'formal acknowledgement by the agency that the toxicology of a payload can be fundamentally modified by the delivery architecture around it.' That platform optionality – applying the same FAP-cleavage mechanism to other constrained drug classes – is exactly what sophisticated BD evaluators price into deal frameworks.

ProQR Therapeutics – correcting disease at the RNA level

ProQR is developing RNA-editing medicines through its proprietary Axiomer™ platform. The technology uses short, chemically modified editing oligonucleotides, or EONs, which bind to a specific RNA sequence and recruit endogenous ADAR enzymes. ADAR converts adenosine (A) into inosine (I), which the cell reads as guanosine (G), creating a targeted, transient A-to-G change at the RNA level without altering the patient’s DNA permanently.

This differs from simple gene silencing. RNAi or knockdown approaches mainly reduce expression of a target gene, whereas Axiomer can, in principle, correct mutations, modulate protein function, or introduce protective or partial-loss-of-function variants. ProQR describes the platform as applicable to both rare and prevalent diseases, with early programs focused on liver and nervous-system disorders.

ProQR’s current lead clinical program is AX-0810, an Axiomer EON targeting NTCP for cholestatic liver diseases. NTCP is involved in bile-acid reuptake into hepatocytes; AX-0810 is designed to introduce a human-genetics-supported loss-of-function variant that may reduce toxic bile-acid accumulation in the liver. The program is in a Phase 1 study in healthy volunteers.

The pipeline then branches into two strategic directions. The first is rare genetic disease, including AX-0422 for Hurler syndrome, targeting the IDUA mutation, and AX-2402 for Rett syndrome, targeting MECP2. These programs fit a classic precision-medicine profile: genetically defined populations, strong mechanistic rationale, and high unmet need. AX-0422 is intended to address both peripheral and neurological manifestations of Hurler syndrome, while AX-2402 aims to restore MECP2 function in a defined Rett mutation subgroup.

The second direction is larger-market liver disease. ProQR’s MASH/MASLD program, AX-2911, targets PNPLA3, one of the strongest known genetic risk factors for MASH progression. This opportunity is commercially broader than the rare-disease programs, but also more competitive and clinically demanding. Importantly, AX-2911 is not ProQR’s current lead clinical asset; it is earlier stage, with first-in-human investigator-initiated clinical work planned for 2027, according to the company’s latest updates.

Commercially, ProQR operates across two distinct contexts. In rare diseases such as Rett and Hurler syndrome, the value proposition is precision correction in small, genetically defined patient groups, which may appeal to rare-disease or CNS/liver-focused partners. In liver disease, AX-0810 and AX-0811 are designed to validate Axiomer clinically through NTCP modulation in cholestatic disease, while AX-2911 offers a potentially larger MASH opportunity if RNA editing can translate PNPLA3 genetics into meaningful reductions in liver fat, fibrosis risk, or downstream clinical outcomes.

Avipero Bio – targeting integrins without the side effects

Integrins are proteins that help cells stick to their surroundings and receive survival signals. Beta-1 integrin is important in fibrosis, inflammation, and cancer but drugs that block it directly have caused serious side effects because the protein is active everywhere in the body.

Avipero targets a different spot on the same protein: an allosteric site that controls how the receptor switches between active and inactive states. Rather than blocking the receptor entirely, they shift its balance toward the inactive state. This is inherently safer because the drug’s effect is stronger where the receptor is already overactivated (in diseased tissue) and weaker where it is resting normally (in healthy tissue). The therapeutic window is wider by design.

The platform is relevant to fibrosis, inflammation, and oncology, giving Avipero a broad range of potential partnership discussions.

Avipero demonstrates a platform breadth that several BD panelists specifically called out as attractive: a single, defensible mechanism with multiple therapeutic applications. The BD sessions were clear that what pharma wants is not 'we can do everything' - it is 'we understand one thing deeply and it applies in multiple places.' Avipero’s allosteric differentiation also directly addresses a real pharma frustration: everyone has already screened orthosteric integrin blockers and found them toxic. Coming in with a structurally distinct mechanism is a strong opening line. To this end Avipero Bio is currently developing a novel therapeutic to shrink solid tumors and halt metastases in late state cancers and has been exploring applications in neurodegenerative medicine. If the approach holds, Avipero offers something integrin biology has promised for decades but never safely delivered: a way to quiet disease-driving signals without silencing the same protein everywhere it does essential work, turning a target long abandoned as too dangerous into one patients might finally benefit from.

Scientific optimism and capital efficiency paradox

Markus Queisser (Scientific Director at GSK), who moderated one of the R&D sessions, noted that the removal of the term 'undruggable' from the pharmaceutical vocabulary now appears to be a realistic near-term prospect as biophysical and computational tools continue to mature. This view was reinforced by the empirical evidence presented across all three R&D panels.

Across the discussions, a consistent theme emerged: targets historically labelled as 'undruggable' were often constrained more by the limitations of the available technological toolkit at the time of their discovery than by any fundamental biological or physical barriers.

Despite this optimism, a capital paradox emerged. The platforms with the strongest biological differentiation and, in turn, the most defensible long-term competitive advantage, also tend to require the longest development timelines and the most capital-intensive IND-enabling packages. In today’s financing environment, where capital is disproportionately flowing toward later-stage, de-risked assets, early-stage platform companies often face significant valuation pressure and limited access to funding. The result is a difficult dynamic: some of the most promising platform technologies, despite their long-term value potential, struggle to raise the capital needed to generate the data required to fully unlock that value.

From local ecosystem to global impact

The conversations at UK Biotech Day 2026 reiterated a clear message: as new technologies expand the boundaries of what can be treated and partnerships become increasingly central to innovation, success will depend not only on discovering breakthrough science, but also on building the right collaborations, making thoughtful capital allocation decisions, and having the conviction to invest ahead of certainty. The opportunities ahead are extraordinary for those willing to embrace both complexity and possibility.

Authorship & Conflict of Interest

Contributions: The named author take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, and have given their approval for this version to be published.

Disclosure and potential conflicts of interest: The author has no conflicts of interest. 

Funding declaration:The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article. 

AI process statement: The author used Claude (Anthropic) to assist with grammar and spell checking. All content has been reviewed and verified by the author for accuracy and originality.

Article & Copyright Information

Copyright: Published by Cell & Gene Therapy Insights under Creative Commons License Deed CC BY NC ND 4.0 which allows anyone to copy, distribute, and transmit the article provided it is properly attributed in the manner specified below. No commercial use without permission.

Attribution: Copyright © 2026 Fabio D'Agostino. Published by Cell & Gene Therapy Insights under Creative Commons License Deed CC BY NC ND 4.0.

Revised manuscript received: Jun 19, 2026. 

Publication date: Jun 25, 2026.