General Information (Policies)

9 Months Ended

Mar. 31, 2021

Organization Consolidation And Presentation Of Financial Statements [Abstract]

Basis of Presentation

Basis of Presentation – The accompanying unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements have been prepared in accordance with United States generally accepted accounting principles (“GAAP”) for interim financial information and the rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Accordingly, they do not include all of the information and footnotes required by GAAP for complete financial statements. In the opinion of management, all adjustments considered necessary for a fair presentation have been included. Operating results for the nine months ended March 31, 2021 are not necessarily indicative of the results that may be expected for the year ending June 30, 2021. These condensed consolidated financial statements should be read in conjunction with the consolidated financial statements and notes included in the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended June 30, 2020.

Our Business Units

Our Business Units

Astrotech Technologies, Inc.

Astrotech Technologies, Inc. (“ATI”) owns and licenses the Astrotech Mass Spectrometer Technology™ (the “AMS Technology”), the platform mass spectrometry technology originally developed by 1^st Detect Corporation (“1^st Detect”). The intellectual property includes 28 patents granted with two additional patents in process along with extensive trade secrets. With a number of diverse market opportunities for the core technology, ATI is structured to license the intellectual property for different fields of use. ATI currently licenses the AMS Technology to three wholly-owned subsidiaries of Astrotech, including to 1^st Detect for use in the security and detection market, to AgLAB Inc. (“AgLAB”) for use in the agriculture market, and to BreathTech Corporation (“BreathTech”) for use in breath analysis.

On March 24, 2021, ATI signed a Letter of Agreement (the “LOA”) effective as of March 24, 2021 by and among ATI and Sanmina Corporation (“Sanmina”).

Under the LOA, Sanmina will procure and inspect components, parts, and raw materials and manufacture, assemble, test, inspect, configure, store, and ship the products for any of the licensees of ATI.

1^st Detect Corporation

1^st Detect, a licensee of ATI for the security and detection market, has developed the TRACER 1000™, the world’s first mass spectrometer (“MS”) based explosives trace detector (“ETD”) certified by the European Civil Aviation Conference (“ECAC”), designed to replace the ETDs used at airports, cargo facilities, secured facilities, and borders worldwide. The Company believes that ETD customers are unsatisfied with the currently deployed ETD technology, which is driven by ion mobility spectrometry (“IMS”). The Company believes that IMS-based ETDs are fraught with false positives, as they often misidentify personal care products and other common household chemicals as explosives, causing unnecessary delays, frustration, and significant wasted security resources. In addition, there are hundreds of different types of explosives, but IMS-based ETDs have a very limited threat detection library reserved only for those several explosives of largest concern. Adding additional compounds to the detection library of an IMS-based ETD fundamentally reduces the instrument’s performance, further increasing the likelihood of false alarms. In contrast, adding additional compounds does not degrade the TRACER 1000’s detection capabilities, as it has a virtually unlimited and expandable threat library.

In order to sell the TRACER 1000 to airport and cargo security customers in the European Union, ECAC certification is required. Certain other countries also accept ECAC certification. After receiving ECAC certification for the TRACER 1000 on February 21, 2019, the Company is now marketing to and taking orders from airports and cargo facilities outside of the U.S. that accept ECAC certification.

On June 26, 2019, the Company announced the official launch of the TRACER 1000, and on November 22, 2019, also announced the first commercial sale of TRACER 1000 units to a global shipping and logistics company. 

In the United States, the Company is working with the Transportation Security Administration (“TSA”) towards Air Cargo certification. On March 27, 2018, the Company announced that the TRACER 1000 was accepted into TSA’s Air Cargo Screening Technology Qualification Test (“ACSQT”) and, on April 4, 2018, the Company announced that the TRACER 1000 was beginning testing with TSA for passenger screening at airports. On November 14, 2019, the Company announced that the TRACER 1000 had been selected by the TSA’s Innovation Task Force to conduct live checkpoint screening at Miami International Airport. With similar protocols as ECAC testing, the Company has received valuable feedback from all programs. Following ECAC certification and the Company's early traction within the cargo market, testing for cargo security continued with the TSA. With the COVID-19 pandemic, all testing within the TSA was put on hold; however, cargo non-detection testing resumed during the summer of 2020, and the Company subsequently announced on September 9, 2020 that the TRACER 1000 passed the non-detection testing portion of the TSA’s ACSQT. TSA cargo detection testing resumed during the fall of 2020 and continues to move forward. This is the next and final step to be listed on the Air Cargo Screening Technology List (“ACSTL”) as an “approved” device and, if approved, thereby approved for cargo sales in the United States. Given the deterioration in air traffic caused by the pandemic, TSA certification testing for passenger checkpoint security was put on indefinite hold. 

Finally, on October 28, 2020, the Company announced that it had surpassed $1.0 million in purchase orders for the TRACER 1000 and an additional $1.0 million in future service and support commitments, also announcing DHL (Deutsche Post AG) as its largest flagship customer.

AgLAB Inc.

AgLAB is a licensee of ATI and has developed the AgLAB-1000™ series of mass spectrometers for use in the agriculture industry for both process control and the detection of trace amounts of solvents and pesticides. The AgLAB product line is a derivative of the Company’s core AMS Technology.

BreathTech Corporation

BreathTech is developing the BreathTest-1000™, a breath analysis tool to screen for volatile organic compound (“VOC”) metabolites found in a person’s breath that could indicate they may have an infection, including COVID-19 or pneumonia.

Development of the BreathTest-1000 follows the Company’s results in pre-clinical trials for the BreathDetect-1000™, a rapid self-serve breathalyzer that is designed to detect bacterial infections in the respiratory tract, including pneumonia. The pre-clinical trials were conducted in collaboration with UT Health San Antonio in 2017.

On October 20, 2020, the Company announced a joint development agreement with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (the “Cleveland Clinic”) to explore leveraging the BreathTest-1000 to rapidly screen for COVID-19 or related indicators. The goal of the agreement is to develop a non-invasive device that will use breath samples to identify COVID-19 strains, with the potential to provide a low-cost, self-service screening option that could be deployed on a large-scale.

On March 31, 2021, BreathTech signed an Investigator-Initiated Study Agreement (the “Study Agreement”) with the Cleveland Clinic. Pursuant to the Study Agreement, the Cleveland Clinic will use BreathTech’s BreathTest-1000™ to compare exhaled breath from individuals who have tested positive on a COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction (“PCR”) test with that from subjects who have had a negative COVID-19 PCR test. The goal of the study will be to analyze different volatile organic compounds from the breath to determine the correlation with different disease states.