Absci Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Abcite Corp third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star then zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Alexander Kahn. Investor Relations, please go ahead.

Thank you. Earlier today, Abzai released financial results for the quarter ended September 30th, 2021. If you have not received this news release, or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to investors at Abzai.com. Joining me today from Abzai are Sean McLean, founder and CEO, Greg Schiffman, CFO, and Matthew Weinstock, CTO, Kate Corcoran, VP Communications, and Jim Patricelli, our new VP, Investor Relations. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you the manager will make statements during this call that are forward-looking statements within the meanings of federal securities laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in the section entitled forward looking statements and the press release outside issued today. For more complete list the description to see the risk factors section of the company's most recent filings and forms 10 Q s one and other reports on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law outside this claims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial projections or forward looking statements, whether because of new information future events or otherwise. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast, November 9th, 2021. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Sean.

Thanks, Alex. Good morning, and thank you for joining our third quarter 2021 earnings call, our first as a public company. Our team at Limiters has built technology to enable better, faster, smarter biologic drug discovery and cell line development. And we are excited to share our latest financials and operational updates with you today. Indeed, our outlook has never been more encouraging. 2021 has continued to be a momentous, transformative year for Abcide, exemplified by tremendous growth and punctuated by strategic acquisitions and partnerships. Important additions to the team in key roles and our debut as a public company. all on top of the scientific innovation we do each and every day. At Abcide, we are translating ideas into drugs, channeling R&D investment in drug discovery and bionic protein technologies, and developing our innovative drug discovery and biomanufacturing platform as we continue to drive towards our goal to predict the absolute best protein-based therapy for patients at truly unprecedented speeds. This is where the industry is headed, and we're excited to share our progress with you all today. Through our integrated drug creation platform, we expect to get better drugs to patients at unprecedented speeds by merging AI and biology. One of the many exciting aspects of our technology is that we have the unique ability to generate billions of data points on protein functionality and manufacturability in a single experiment. And we are feeding this data into our AI deep learning models to allow us to predict better drug candidates for patients with unparalleled speeds. At AbSci, we have developed a differentiated business model that focuses on partnerships, wherein we develop the drug candidate and associated cell line, out-license that to our partners, and benefit from program fees, milestones, and royalties. This is the core of where the value of our platform lies in the MPV per program or the lifetime value of each program that we work on. At the end of the quarter, we had nine active programs with seven partners that have downstream economic potential. Subsequent to quarter end, we signed an exciting deal with EQRX, which I'll speak to in more detail later on. Along with our growing capabilities, and enterprise, we recently built and moved into a state-of-the-art campus, nearly 80,000 square feet of lab and office space, a truly inspiring place to work. Last week, we hosted Washington Governor Jay Inslee for a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony, and it was humbling to reflect on the journey over the last 10 years, starting from a basement to this beautiful one-of-a-kind facility. For Abcide, The move to this new facility strengthens our capabilities and bolsters our organizational transformation into an innovative and collaborative discovery space. This year alone, we have also announced two transformative acquisitions, taking off the year with our addition of Denovium in January, followed by Totion in June. With the integration of these two technologies and teams, we have significantly expanded our capabilities, advancing on the front end of target identification from disease tissue through our acquisition of Totient while incorporating deep learning AI across our entire platform to drive our in silico drug discovery and CLD goals through our acquisition of Denovium. Our collective skill set with Denovium and Totient enhancing the core AbSci platform represents the perfect synergy of groundbreaking synthetic biology and cutting edge deep learning AI to create in silico predictive protein drug design and cell line development capabilities with the potential to change the paradigm of biopharmaceutical discovery and development. Incorporating AI deep learning will allow us to explore all possible protein sequences in silico to identify drug candidates with optimal therapeutic properties and manufacturability. Combining that design power With proprietary data from our integrated drug creation platform, AbPsy can create a new gold standard for drug discovery and cell line development for next-generation biologics, while at the same time allowing for creation of novel biologies previously unattainable. As for TOTION, their innovative work identifying disease-relevant molecules has exciting therapeutic potential. We believe that the combination of the Totion technology with AppSci's platform and the inclusion of Denovium's AI provides us the framework and the data to enable in silico target drug design and ultimately achieve our goal of making the best medicines available to patients. Earlier this year, we announced an exciting biologics development collaboration with Zyphos, an Astellas company. and a strategic investment by Merck Global Health Innovation Fund. New partnerships are a key component to our future success while we execute on programs with our existing partners. Even with the continuing COVID environment and recent headquarters move, we resentlessly push forward executing against our plan. In Q1 of this year, we signed and initiated two cell line development programs with a undisclosed new partner. Then, last month, we announced a multi-program partnership with EQRx to discover and develop next-generation protein-based drugs. This partnership leverages Abcide's drug creation technology for discovery and development activities, along with EQRx's clinical development expertise and commercial capabilities to advance next-generation protein-based therapies at more affordable cost to patients. This collaboration with EQRx expands the reach of our AI-powered target discovery, drug design, and development technology. Together, we look forward to discovering differentiated next-generation biologics, driving efficiencies and accelerating timelines so that our future medicines can have the biggest impact possible to patients in need. As we sit here today, Things are moving forward on schedule with work planned for the first target already in progress, and we intend to initiate this program around year end. We also had success this year in advancing two important partnerships. In Q2, we entered into a global technology development and license agreement with PhaseBio to advance an active program for creation of a customized cell line that is expected to enable high-yield commercial production of that clinical candidate. This exciting agreement represents our nearest-term opportunity for potential royalty revenue. In addition, we signed a global technology development and license agreement with Alpha Cancer Technologies, extending our existing technology development partnership and entitling Abcide to contingent milestone payments and royalties on net sales of products comprising recombinant human alpha-beta protein manufactured using the producing cell line developed by AbSci. Leading up to our successful IPO in July, we had several key talents join our team, and our momentum has continued into the fall. In July, we announced two executive hires joining our team, Nikhil Goyal and Dr. Sarah Corman. These appointments came at a time of significant growth for AbSci, as we scale our technology development programs and partnerships and integrate the Denovium and Toshin acquisitions. We have also success in growing our talented and innovative team today, comprising nearly 220 Unlimiters, up from 74 when the year began. We have been successfully recruiting top talent to the Vancouver area in part because of the promise of our platform and our vision to revolutionize the industry. Our vision is to get better drugs to patients more quickly than ever before resonates with prospective candidates who are eager to contribute to this important mission and legacy. Of course, all of these ambitious activities, building, developing, hiring, and executing, take funding. We have successfully completed several financings this year, raising over $435 million, including both a key crossover round in March and subsequent July IPO. And we have no intention of stopping there. It took 10 years for Abcide to lay the foundation which will allow us to achieve our vision for the next 10 years. We now have access to capital, technology platform, and talented team in place to execute our vision. Late last year, we began building out our discovery pipeline and shortly thereafter executed on two key acquisitions. And in a couple of short quarters, it translated into an exciting new discovery deal and boosted our pipeline of future opportunities. This is further demonstration that with the right team, innovation can ramp quickly. Let me reiterate, we are very encouraged by our progress and excited by the feedback we are receiving in the marketplace in terms of our adoption rate. our ability to monetize acquisitions, and our focus on internal R&D efforts. We are hitting our stride as we host our first earnings call, and we look forward to many more to come. I'll now turn it over to Matthew to tell you more about some of our recent technical accomplishments.