Alimera Sciences, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Good morning and welcome to the Alamira Sciences Second Quarter 2023 Financial Results 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 telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Participants of this call are advised that the audio of this conference call is being broadcast live over the internet and is also being recorded for playback purposes. A webcast replay of the call will be available approximately one hour after the end of the call through November 10, 2023. I would now like to turn the call over to Scott Gordon of CoreIR, the company's investor relations firm. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning, and thank you all for participating in today's conference call. Joining me from Alamair's leadership team are Rick Eisworth, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Russell Skidstead, Chief Financial Officer. During this call, management will be making forward-looking statements, including statements that address Alamair's expectations for future performance or operational results. Forward-looking statements involve risks and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. For more information about these risks, please refer to the risk factors described in Alamara's most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q, as well as Alamara's press release that accompanies this call, particularly the cautionary statement in it. Today's conference call includes adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net product revenue, non-GAAP financial measures that Alamara believes can be useful in evaluating its performance. We should not consider this additional information in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. For reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, please see the reconciliation table located in Alamira's Earnings Press release. The content of this call contains time-centered information that is accurate only as of today, August 10th, 2023, except as required by law Alimera displays any obligation to publicly update or revise any information to reflect events or circumstances that occur after this call. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Rick Eisler. Rick, please go ahead.

Thanks, Scott, and good morning to everyone on the call. The second quarter has been full of exciting developments and strong performance for Alimera, and I'm encouraged by the foundation we are building to transform Alimera into the place to be in treating retina disease. As you probably know, we made a transformative transaction during the second quarter to acquire the commercial rights to UT from iPoint Pharmaceuticals. This brings together the only two approved long-term intervitreal therapies that help patients maintain vision longer with fewer injections by delivering continuous microdosing to reduce the recurrence of retinal disease. Importantly, this transaction has allowed us to leverage our U.S. commercial infrastructure with a second indication as we already have in our international markets, and it provides a critical mass of revenue to help ensure the long-term stability of Almera. The second half of Q2 primarily focused on incorporating UTIC into our operations and cross-training our teams to sell both Illuvian and UTIC. Our expanded team, now covering 35 territories across six regions, up from 29 territories in the first half of the year, was fully trained and in the field selling both Aleveon and ET beginning the week of July 24th. We have also expanded our thought leader liaison, medical science liaison, and reimbursement support teams in the field. I want to thank everyone at Almera for the significant effort that went into achieving this important milestone in less than 10 weeks since the closing of the transaction. Despite some distractions created by this process, the acquisition had an immediate positive impact on Almera allowing us to deliver positive adjusted EBIT on the second quarter, despite only having the product in our portfolio for six weeks during the quarter. Our global business continues to grow, as we saw record quarterly global Alluvian end-user demand of 1,601 units, up 13.5% over Q2 of 2022, including outstanding growth in our international segment, which was up 25% over the second quarter of last year. And since the acquisition, we added another 440 units of UTIC end-user demand during the quarter, bringing total demand to over 2,000 units for our flucinolone acetanide franchise. Based on numbers reported by I-Point, the UTIC end-user demand for the full quarter was 1,001 units, up 11% over the second quarter of 2022. That demand drove record quarterly revenue of $17.5 million. We are pleased with this result, but we believe revenue could have been even higher during the quarter as a result of some aspects of planning for the acquisition of UT and the incorporation of UT into our commercial infrastructure. Prior to the transaction, we had some turnover in our field team associated with the new commercial entrance in Retina, who were building their sales teams. And we maintained those vacancies longer into Q2 than we normally would in order to sort out the new territory alignment with UT on board. We also invested time out of the field for the legacy of Lubion Salesforce to learn about UT and chronic non-infectious uveitis affecting the posterior segment. Further, we had distributors reducing inventory on hand to UTIC and a shifting timing discrepancy with our international distribution partners as we combined UTIC into our supply chain. In the second half of the year, we not only expect this to correct itself, but we also believe that further incorporating UTIC in our commercial structure will yield further revenue growth and increase adjusted EBITDA for the second half of the year. Now that both products are merged together, we expect to have a broader presence with our customers at industry meetings. Recently, at the American Society of Retinal Surgeons, we showcased both products at the booth and were pleased with the feedback we received from physicians on having the product combined in our company. We were also able to hold Alameda's first UT advisory boards at that meeting. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Russell to review our financials in more detail.