AbCellera Biologics Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to Apsarela's Q2 2024 Business Update conference call. My name is Tamia and I will facilitate the audio portion of today's interactive broadcast. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Trent Steinmark, Apsarela's Chief Legal and Compliance Officer. You may proceed.

Thank you. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone listening around the world. Thank you for joining us for Abcelera's 2024 Second Quarter Earnings Call. I'm Trent Steinmart, Abcelera's Chief Legal and Compliance Officer. Joining me on today's call are Dr. Carl Hansen, 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. I'll turn the call over to Carl.

Thanks, Trin. And thank you everyone for joining us today. Through the second quarter, we continue to focus capital allocation on our three priorities. First, building and advancing our internal pipeline. Second, completing investments in our platforms and facilities. And third, executing on select strategic partnerships. Starting with our internal pipeline. Both ABCL 635 and ABCL 575 are progressing well, and we anticipate submitting clinical trial applications, the Canadian equivalent of an IND, in Q2 of 2025. Turning to our TCE efforts, we noted on the last call that our platform development is essentially complete and that we are moving leads from select programs into preclinical efficacy models. On the strength of data obtained in these studies, we may elect to bring one or more of these programs into our pipeline in 2025. Of the four programs currently being evaluated, three are in oncology, including PSMA, B7H4, and an undisclosed target. PSMA is a well validated target in prostate cancer, an area of high unmet medical need. To date, clinical TCEs targeting PSMA have either shown high tumor cell killing with high toxicity related to cytokine release or low tumor killing with low toxicity. In our in vitro studies, we have shown that our PSMA TCE leads have comparable tumor cell killing to the most potent clinical benchmarks while also having much lower cytokine release. We believe this profile has potential to achieve better safety, enabling higher dosing and better efficacy. B7H4 is a target expressed on malignant cells in various solid tumors, including breast, ovarian, and lung. Similar to our PSMA program, our B7H4 TCE leads show comparable tumor killing and lower cytokine release as compared to the only relevant clinical benchmark. As with our PSMA program, we believe this profile has the potential to improve both safety and efficacy. For both PSMA and B7H4, as well as for our third undisclosed target, There are currently no approved T cell engagement therapies. Our fourth program is a TCE targeting CD19 and is being developed for autoimmunity. CD19 is a target expressed broadly and specifically on B cells. The ablation of B cells with CD19 directed CAR T has recently been shown to be highly effective in the treatment of lupus and is recognized to have broad potential in other autoimmune disorders where B cells are implicated. As a modality, TCEs have clear commercial advantages over CAR T, namely cost, accessibility, and convenience. Because of this, CD19 TCEs that were originally designed for oncology are now being repurposed and evaluated in the treatment of autoimmune conditions. Most notably, in studies with a small number of patients, Blincyto has shown early signs of efficacy in both rheumatoid arthritis and systemic sclerosis. The goal of our CD19 program is to achieve deep B-cell ablation, comparable or approaching what is achieved with CAR-Ts, along with convenient delivery and a best-in-class safety profile. We will provide updates on these four programs as they become available. In addition to being a source of potential internal programs, we continue to view our TCE platform as a basis for strategic partnerships. Speaking of partnerships, we'd like to congratulate Abdera for receiving IMD clearance and FDA fast track designation for ABD147, a radioisotope antibody conjugate for the treatment of patients with small cell lung cancer. As a reminder, Abcelera is a founding partner in Abdera and discovered the antibody from which ABD147 is derived. Abcelera has a low single digit royalty in Abdera's programs, as well as a mid single digit equity ownership position in the company. We would also like to congratulate our partner Invitex on their upcoming acquisition by DECRA for up to $520 million in total consideration. Like with Abdera, Abseller was a founding partner in Invitex, which is a companion animal health company that launched in 2018. Through the partnership, Abseller has worked on multiple programs, three of which have reached clinical field studies. AvSolar has a low single-digit royalty in Invitex's programs, as well as a mid-single-digit equity ownership position in the company. Finally, we recently announced an expansion of our partnership with Eli Lilly. This builds on a successful collaboration that started in March of 2020 and included eight antibody therapeutics discovery programs, as well as our COVID-19 pandemic response efforts. We are excited to continue our productive collaboration with Lilly. And we note that this follows expansions with other top-tier partners, including Regeneron and Gilead. And with that, I'll hand it over to Andrew to discuss our financials. Andrew?