AbCellera Biologics Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to Absolera's Q1 2024 business update conference call. My name is Harry and I will facilitate the audio portion of today's interactive broadcast. If you would like operator support or are having any issues in hearing anything today, please dial star zero on your telephone keypad. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Trin Steinmark, Absolera's Chief Legal and Compliance Officer. Please go ahead.

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone listening around the world. Thank you for joining us for Abcelera's 2024 First Quarter Earnings Call. I'm Trinh Steimart, Abcelera's Chief Legal and Compliance Officer. Joining me on today's call are Dr. Carl Hansen, Abcelera's President and CEO, and Andrew Booth, Abcelera's Chief Financial Officer. During this call, we anticipate making projections and forward-looking statements based on our current expectations and pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Our actual results could differ materially due to several factors as set forth in our latest Form 10-K and subsequent Forms 10-Q and 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Abcelera does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Our presentation today, including our earnings press release issued earlier today, And our SEC filings are available on our investor relations website. The information we provide about our pipeline is for the benefit of the investment community and is not intended to be promotional. As we transition to our prepared remarks, please note that all dollars referred to during the call are in U.S. dollars. After our prepared remarks, we will open the lines for questions and answers. Now, I'll turn the call over to Carl.

Thanks, Trent. And thank you everyone for joining us today. As Abcelera continues to evolve into a clinical biotech company, we are directing our resources towards three main priorities. Our first priority is advancing our internal pipeline, including ABCL 635 and ABCL 575. Both programs are in manufacturing and IND enabling studies and are on track for IND submissions in 2025. Our second priority is completing platform investments that are focused on forward integration, including establishing our clinical manufacturing capabilities. We are on track to start our first engineering runs at our facility next year. And finally, our third priority is executing partnerships that we view as strategic to our long-term vision of becoming a scalable drug development company. This quarter, We presented new data on our TCE platform, which we view as both an important source of internal programs and as a basis for strategic partnerships. Over the past two years, we have built a platform to create TCEs, a class which we believe has potential to be one of the most important therapies for cancer and liquid tumors. Last month, We presented four posters at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research to update our progress on this effort. A highlight of this work is that we have shown we can reproducibly generate TCEs that show high tumor cell killing and remarkably low cytokine release. This graph shows results comparing Abcelera-generated TCEs against clinical benchmarks for three different tumor targets, PSMA, 5T4, and B7H4. The top row of the graph shows that our TCEs achieve equivalent tumor cell killing with potency that is comparable or superior to the three clinical benchmarks. The middle row shows interferon gamma secretion that in each case is below the level of the benchmarks, and the bottom row shows the secretion of TNF-alpha, a cytokine that is perhaps the most important mediator of excessive inflammatory responses. Abcelerous TCEs show remarkably low TNF-alpha secretion compared to the clinical benchmarks, And in the case of PSMA, PNF-alpha is close to zero across the entire range of antibody concentrations tested. When we started this work, it was our hypothesis that we would need a large number of anti-CD3s and that it would be a combinatorial problem to find the right pair of CD3 and tumor binding arms to achieve these results. Instead, what we have found is that within our panel of hundreds of CD3s, there are three small families of related CD3 binders that can be used to achieve the rare property of potent tumor cell killing with low cytokine release, and that this can be done repeatedly across different tumor targets. Starting with a large number of CD3 binding antibodies allowed us to identify these rare subsets that we are now prioritizing in TCE development. The focus of our work is now to test if these properties translate to in vivo models and to advance a subset of programs forward in development. From a technology development perspective, our TCE platform is now nearly complete. In addition to having highly differentiated and proprietary CD3s, we've also developed panels of antibodies that can be used to enhance T cell activation and survival via signal 2 co-stimulation and have demonstrated the ability to target MHC peptide antigens. These results were also shared at AACR. Moving to strategic partnerships. This quarter, we announced a collaboration with Biogen for a novel target that enables the delivery of biotherapeutics across the blood-brain barrier. And last week, we announced a collaboration with Viking and Aromark focused on the creation of asset-based companies, similar to what we previously did with Burson Ventures in the formation of Abdera. And with that, I will hand it over to Andrew to discuss our financials. Andrew?