Agenus Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Agenus First Quarter 2020 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dr. Jennifer Buell, President and Chief Operating Officer of Agilent. Dr. Buell, please go ahead.

Thank you. Thank you, Sian. Today's call is being webcast and will be available on our website with our accompanying slide material for replay. Before we start, we'd like to remind you that this call will include forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our clinical development and regulatory plans and timelines, as well as timelines for data release and cash projections. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and we refer you to our SEC filings for more details on these risks. As a reminder, this call is being recorded for audio broadcast. I'm Jennifer Buell, President and Chief Operating Officer of Agenus, and joining me today are Dr. Garo Armen, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Dan Chan, Head of Drug Discovery, Dr. Birju Yit, Lead Scientist for Allogeneic INK T-cells, and Christine Klaskin, our Vice President of Finance. I will now turn the call over to Garo.

Thank you very much, Jen. And a special thank you to all of you for joining us during this time when the world has turned upside down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I hope you and your families are safe and well. Our team at Agenis has found a productive way to operate in this new norm. At the earliest signal of the pandemic, Our team reacted swiftly and took proactive measures to protect our employees, their families, and our business. As a result, our operations in Burpee, Lexington, and Cambridge have remained open with a rotating work schedule for safety and with limited interruption to our key priority. We operate with approximately one-third of the workforce onsite and the remainder working from home. And that has not disrupted any part of our operations so far. And importantly, to the best of our knowledge, none of our employees have been infected with the virus so far and would like to keep it that way. Earlier this year, we projected Receipt of approximately 60 million in cash milestone payments for 2020. As we have announced, we've already received 15 million based on the sales of Shingrix, which has our QS21 adjuvant in it. However, given the environment, the remaining 45 million is uncertain. because of the disruptions caused by COVID. And hence, we've taken measures to result in annualized cost savings of approximately $50 million. These savings are driven by reductions of both external and internal expenditures. And importantly, they will result in slowing down all several programs, but we do not expect these steps to affect our near-term or medium-term commercial launch prospects. We also expect that our high priority clinical development and research programs will proceed as planned. Our proactive measures are designed to deliver our key milestones this year. including plans for our BLA filings, our acceleration of clinical development of our next-gen multipurpose CTLA-4 molecule 1181 about which you will hear much more from Dr. Buell, our advancing of INKT cell therapy to the clinic for the treatment of cancer and COVID-19 patients, that you will hear from Dr. Bourdieu, who will also tell you about the advantages of our INKT cells, including, for example, substantially reduced costs associated with cell therapy when we practice INKTs. And also, you will hear that we're advancing important programs like our TIGIT molecules into the clinic. And as you know, we have started this program a number of years ago, and now we're ready to take that into the clinic. I will now turn the presentation to Dr. Jen Buell, our president and chief operating officer, to provide you with an update on our highest priority programs, starting with AGEN 1181, our multipurpose NextGen CTLA-4. Jen?