Altimmune, Inc.

Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the prepared remarks. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star then zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host for today's call, Ms. Stacey Jurchison, Senior Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications at Altamune. Stacey, you may begin.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for participating in Altimmune's year-end 2020 earnings conference call. Leading the call today will be Vipin Garg, our chief executive officer. Additional members of the Altimmune executive team participating on the call today are Will Brown, our chief financial officer, Scott Roberts, our chief scientific officer, and Scott Harris, our chief medical officer. Following the prepared remarks, we will hold a question-and-answer session. A press release with our year-end 2020 financial results was issued this morning and can be found on the IR section of the company's website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that remarks about future expectations, plans, and prospects constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Altamune cautions that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated, including those related to COVID-19 and its impact on our business operations, clinical trials, and results of operations. For a discussion of some of the risks and factors that could affect the company's future results, please see the risk factors and other cautionary statements contained in the company's filings with the SEC. I would also direct you to read the forward-looking statement disclaimer in our earnings press release issued this morning and now available on our website. Any statements made on this conference call speak only as of today's date, Thursday, February 25th, 2021, and the company does not undertake any obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur on or after today's date. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded and will be available for audio replay on Altimmune's website. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Dr. Vipin Garb, Chief Executive Officer of Altimmune.

Thank you, Stacey, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today for a discussion of our 2020 financial and operating results and the 2021 business outlook. Without hesitation, I can proudly say that 2020 was a transformative year for Altimmune and our shareholders. Our historical development efforts laid the groundwork to enable us to unlock the value of our portfolio as we advance our five novel product candidates in clinical development. I am pleased to say that each of our candidates has the opportunity to reach value inflection points in 2021 and beyond. Never in our history have we had such an impressive portfolio with so many opportunities to build value. As you will hear about in more detail shortly from Scott Roberts and Scott Harris, we believe the intranasal vaccines and peptide therapeutics we are developing may provide novel solutions to unmet medical needs and potentially have highly favorable attributes that are differentiated from existing therapies or treatment approaches. As a pioneer in intranasal vaccine development, Altimmune has a rich history of vaccine innovation in this field. Last year, we developed this expertise in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing our COVID-19 vaccine candidate, AdCOVID, from concept to clinical development and this morning we announced the enrollment of the first subject in our phase one clinical trial. If successful, we believe that ADCOVID could offer important benefits in our fight against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Unlike currently authorized vaccines, ADCOVID potentially offers ease of administration and deployment, optimal target product profile for use in pediatric population, the potential for improved tolerability and safety, and the ability to stimulate mucosal immunity in the nasal cavity, which we believe will be critical for preventing viral transmission. If the clinical data for ADCOVID parallel the preclinical findings and our clinical experience with our NasoVax influenza vaccine candidates, ADCOVID could become a leading candidate for COVID-19 vaccination and revaccination. And with the virus continuing to mutate, creating new variants, the need for improved vaccines with the potential to block transmission grows increasingly more urgent. We also progressed our novel investigation of T-COVID immunotherapeutic into clinical testing in 2020. and look forward to data from our Phase 1-2 study, evaluating, among other things, its ability to prevent progression to severe COVID-19. T-COVID may provide a truly differentiated approach toward treating COVID-19, and we are pleased with the ongoing progress on this program. During the past year, we also completed dosing in a Phase 1b clinical trial of NasoShield. our BARDA-funded intranasal vaccine for anthrax, and we expect to share the data from that trial with you in the coming weeks. Moving to our peptide-based liver disease programs, both ALT801 and hep T cell made important strides in 2020, with ALT801 beginning Phase I development and hep T cell advancing into Phase II development. We think Alt-801 is an especially promising candidate in the metabolic disease category. As a balanced GLP-1 glucagon dual agonist, Alt-801 may have best-in-class attributes, leveraging potent metabolic synergies and improved GI tolerability. Given its platform in a drug potential to address both NASH and obesity, in a multi-billion dollar market. We are excited to see this compound advance and reach significant data inflection points this year. Finally, 2020 was also a formidable year from a capital raising perspective. During the year, we strengthened our balance sheet ending 2020 with approximately $216 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments. So we are well capitalized to advance our portfolio through important upcoming value inflection points this year. I will now turn the call over to our Chief Scientific Officer, Scott Roberts, to give you an update on our pipeline. Scott?