Applied DNA Provides Preliminary Estimated Fiscal Second Quarter 2021 Revenue Range and Business Update

Applied DNA Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: APDN) (“Applied DNA” or the “Company”), a leader in Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)-based DNA manufacturing, today provided a preliminary estimated revenue range for the fiscal second quarter ended March 31, 2021 and a business update. The Company expects revenues for its fiscal second quarter to be in the range of $2.5 million to $2.7 million. This compares to revenues of $1.6 million in the fiscal first quarter of 2021 and $552 thousand in the fiscal second quarter of 2020. The sequential growth in quarterly revenues was driven principally by demand for safeCircle, the Company’s pooled COVID-19 surveillance testing program, and from sales of its Linea COVID-19 Assay Kit (the “Assay Kit”).

Concurrently, the Company announced that it had received notification during the fiscal quarter that a loan of approximately $847 thousand received in May 2020 under the Paycheck Protection Program of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act was fully forgiven. As a result of the full forgiveness of the loan, the Company is debt-free.

These preliminary unaudited results are based on management’s initial analysis of operations for the second fiscal quarter of 2021 ended March 31, 2021 and are subject to review and revision. The Company expects to issue full financial results for the second fiscal quarter of 2021 in mid-May 2021.

Dr. James A. Hayward, president and CEO, stated, “We are pleased to preliminarily report a second consecutive quarter of revenue growth that was driven primarily by the continued adoption of safeCircle as the surveillance testing component of clients’ COVID-19 ‘normalization’ strategies. The high sensitivity of our Assay Kit that powers safeCircle and its resultant ability to detect asymptomatic infections, coupled with the favorable economics of pooled testing, offers compelling value to communities that continue to see significant transmission alongside expanding vaccine eligibility. As such, under-vaccinated populations and organizations implementing reopening compliance strategies are target market segments for us and we are evolving our sales strategy to match.

“Our diagnostics business model has been made more resilient through product diversification and service improvements to develop adjacent revenue streams. In particular, the launch of our Selective Genomic Surveillance (SGS) Mutation Panel (SGS Panel) is coincident with the rising need for tools to supplement and strengthen the nation’s genomic sequencing capacity. Our SGS Panel can quickly and cost-effectively identify COVID-19 mutations and potentially influence vaccine/booster or therapeutics design. We also continued to demonstrate the potential for our LinearDNA platform as an alternative to plasmids to produce nucleic acid-based therapies, notably reporting compelling positive preliminary Phase I results for our LinearDNA COVID-19 vaccine candidate in felines,” concluded Dr. Hayward.