argenx SE

Good morning, my name is Sarah and I will be your conference operator today. I would like to welcome everyone to the call. At this time, all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one again. Thank you. I'd like to introduce Beth DelGiaco, Vice President, Global Head of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. You may now begin your conference.

Thank you, Operator. A press release was issued earlier today with our half-year 2023 financial results and a second quarter business update. This can be found on our website, along with the presentation for today's webcast. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you on slide two that forward-looking statements may be presented during this call. These may include statements about our future expectations, clinical developments, regulatory timelines, the potential success of our product candidates, financial projections, and upcoming milestones. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these statements. Argenix is not under any obligation to update statements regarding the future or to conform those statements in relation to actual results unless required by law. I'm joined on the call today by Tim Van Haremaren, Chief Executive Officer, Carl Gubitz, Chief Financial Officer, and Karen Massey, Chief Operating Officer. I'll now turn the call to Tim.

Thank you, Beth, and welcome, everyone. I'll begin on slide number three. This has been an incredibly exciting time at Argenix, and we are so happy to be delivering good news to the GMG and CIDP communities and patients living with autoimmune disease more broadly. We have successfully achieved several key milestones that we laid out at the beginning of the year, bringing us one step closer to our mission to transform treatment for people living with severe autoimmune diseases. Transformation to us means patients living their lives with minimal interruption due to their disease so they can have more time to do things that they enjoy. We see this as a time of hope for patients who have been waiting many years for meaningful innovation. Slide four. At the beginning of the year, we outlined an ambitious plan to create value for our key stakeholders by driving sustained growth across the business. Commercially, Our commitment was to expand into earlier GMG station segments and broaden into new geographies. We have made progress across both of these goals, which Karen will talk about later in the call. From the clinical side, we said we would advance our pick-em-up program forward to demonstrate the power of our SG fragments at the pipeline in a product opportunity. Our conviction in this opportunity has only grown following the positive CRDP data last week, and we expect more momentum later this year with two Phase C lead-outs in ITP and SpendVegas. We also committed to continued investment in innovation. This includes both our early stage programs, Empathic Rebar, and Argenix 119, but also our pipeline expansion through our immunology innovation program. I'm proud to say that we are right on track with our goals for 2023, having achieved the milestones we laid out, and the year is not over yet.