Akebia Therapeutics, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. This is Roy, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the FQBF's 10th part of the 2026 Financial Results. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speech, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star followed by number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw a question, please press star one again. I would now like to turn our conference over to Mercedes Carrasco. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to Akebia's second quarter 2026 Financial Results and Business Updates conference call. Please note that a press release was issued earlier today, Wednesday, August 5th, detailing our second quarter 2026 financial results, and that release is available on the Investors section of our website. For your convenience, a replay of today's call will also be available on our website after we conclude. Joining me today, we have John Butler, Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Steven Burke, our Chief Medical Officer, Nick Grund, our Chief Commercial Officer, and Erik Ostrowski, Chief Financial and Chief Business Officer. I'd like to remind everyone that this call includes forward-looking statements. Each forward-looking statement on this call is subject to risks and uncertainties, that could cause actual risk results to differ materially from those described in these statements. Additional information describing these risks is included in the financial results press release that we issued on August 5th, as well as in the risk factors and management discussion and analysis section of our most recent annual and quarterly reports filed with the SEC. With that, I'd like to introduce our CEO, John Butler.

Thanks, Mercedes, and thanks to everyone for joining us this afternoon. As you know, we've been focused on two critical areas of our business that we believe will deliver both important therapeutic advances for patients and value to shareholders. Those are advancing our kidney disease pipeline and making Vafcio standard of care for the treatment of anemia due to CKD in dialysis patients. We've had incredibly important advances in both areas since we last spoke to you. Today, I'll start with research and development. I believe our pipeline is underappreciated, and clinical advancement of our rare disease pipeline specifically provides the greatest opportunity to build value. Earlier this week, we announced that we initiated the Phase II basket trial to evaluate abribifus, previously known as AKB097 and ADX097 in IgA nephropathy, lupus nephritis, and C3 glomerulopathy. We believe abribifus, a next-generation complement inhibitor, could be truly differentiated in the rare kidney disease space in these indications and others. Beyond this initial basket study, we're doing the work to prepare for a Phase II study in ANCA-associated vasculitis and expect to start that study next year. Our other rare kidney asset, perlisiguat, continues to enroll in its Phase II study in FSGS. As with every We believe there are multiple indications where PRALI can play an important therapeutic role. And again, we believe the mechanism of PRALI will allow it to occupy a unique competitive position in these rare diseases that each have significant unmet need. Our third kidney disease clinical candidate is AKB 9090, which was in a phase one study in Healthy Volunteers. 9090 continues to move successfully through the SADMAD study and we expect to report data early next year. Following that data readout, our plan is that next year our development team's efforts and our dollars will be focused on EBRI and PRALI, where we believe the largest opportunity to drive near-term value exists. Dr. Steven Burke, our Chief Medical Officer, is currently attending GLOMCON Hawaii, where medical professionals around the world have met to discuss treatments for glomerular disease. That's the reason we're having a call this afternoon rather than a normal morning timing. I'll now ask Steve to share a few remarks on EBRI and PRALI.