Cibus, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the CBIS third quarter 2023 results conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. At that time, if you have a question, please press the 1 followed by the 4 on your telephone keypad. If at any time during the conference you need to reach an operator, please press star 0. Please also note, today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Wade King, Chief Financial Officer. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon. This is Wade King, the Chief Financial Officer of CBIS. I would like to thank you for taking time to join us for CBIS Third Quarter 2023 Financial Results and Corporate Update Conference Call and Webcast. Beginning with me today is Rory Riggs, our Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman, and Peter Beetham, Co-Founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer. Before we begin the conference call, I'd like to remind everyone that statements made on the call and webcast, including those regarding future financial results and future operational goals and industry prospects, are forward-looking and may be subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the call. please refer to SEVIS SEC filings for a list of associated risks. This conference call is being webcast. The webcast link, along with our press release and corporate presentation, are available on the investor relations section of SEVIS.com to assist in your analysis of the business. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Riggs. Go ahead, Rory.

Thanks, Wade. And welcome to everybody on the call. I'll begin by highlighting several of our recent business and commercial updates. Then Peter and I will walk you through where we are and where we are headed. Lastly, Wade will finish with a brief discussion of the financials. The goal of this format is to provide you with an educational overview of our business, its pipeline, and their prospects so that you're better equipped with a solid foundation to better understand our company, and to track our events and progress. With that, I'd like to discuss some of our recent business and commercial updates. Since going public in June of this year, we have been laser focused on driving our evolution from an R&D company to a commercial company. As part of this transition, we underwent a strategic alignment in October aimed at bringing enhanced focus to our primary commercial goal, which is furthering the advancement of our commercial activities. All of our resources and operations are now centered on completing the launch of our initial traits. Importantly, our three developed traits, pod shatter reduction, often referred to as PSR in canola, and in rice, HT1, herbicide tolerance number one, and HT3, herbicide tolerance number three, as well as the advancement of our soybean platform, and bolstering the development of our advanced traits, square of senior resistance and HT2 in both canola and soybean. Notably, our realigned efforts have captured this focus and priorities. I'll speak to our progress in each of these traits a little later on. Concurrent with our strategic realignment, we have also implemented some necessary cost reduction measures. with the objectives of preserving capital resources for the advancement of these five traits. We believe that refocusing on our strengths and top priorities will position us well to achieve our strategic objectives in a more timely manner. We're working hard to make sure that happens. So let me take you to our five traits three crop business model. Although royalties haven't started yet, Our commercialization efforts are well underway. They are centered around advancing five traits with applications in three major crops, rice, canola, and soybean. Combined, we believe this represents an addressable market opportunity of over 250 million acres and over $1 billion in potential royalties across canola, rice, and soybeans. We believe that this five-trade, three-crop model is just the beginning of what our capabilities can ultimately address. One of our key accomplishments of our scientists has been their mastery of oligonucleotide-directed mutagenesis, our single-cell editing technology, and our production system supporting each crop platform. For many, The even bigger accomplishment is the fact that with this technology platform, the team at SEVIS has been able to generate a product pipeline of five important traits. Three of these traits are fully developed, have multiple years of successful field trials, and strong intellectual property. Important for each trait, we now have a strong customer base. In addition, SEVIS has built two crop platforms at canola and waste, as well as being close to a third crop platform in soybeans. Our soybean platform has been under active development for several years, and we expect to have the soybean platform operational in Q4 2023. Now that we have these three traits developed and we've been commercializing them through a high-throughput editing process, accelerating our development timeline, we are very excited about the prospects for these three traits. In this process, we edit our customers' proprietary germplasm and then transfer their germplasm back to them with our traits. we can now execute this process very quickly, allowing the customer to accelerate their commercialization process. Once satisfied and the results are confirmed, then the customer develops a registration dossier, initiates its marketing plan, bulks up its seed inventory, and ultimately distributes the seed to farmers, at which point the royalties begin being paid to see this. We consider our first trade product to be our pod shatter-resistant trade, PSR. It's strengthened the sheath around the canola seeds, which protects the crops in extreme weather conditions. We have shown PSR's efficacy in multiple field trials. Based on these field trials, we now have 10 different customers that we estimate represent over 20 million acres of canola WOSR. We now have edited these crops and have started returning to customers that are leaf germplasm with our PSR trait. As we have stated, we expect to complete transfers to six customers in 2023. Additionally, we expect in 2024 to transfer the remaining customers and increase our market penetration with additional customers. We estimate that the annual trade royalty from PSR could be approximately $200 million annually. In addition to PSR, the two developed trades are HD1, HD3, and RICE. They are important genetic traits for herbicide tolerance or weed management. Over 95% of canola, soybean, and corn currently utilize GMO-based herbicide traits for weed management. Rice has never had GMO traits. This is why these two traits are in high demand in rice. We have already transferred our first HD1, HD3 traits in rice to Nutrin for the North American market. We now have three customers who we believe represent over 4 million acres in North and South America. We expect additional customers in North America and South America in 2024. We estimate that the annual trade world sheet for use for HD1, HD3, and rice could be approximately $150 million a year. These HD traits are now fully developed and validated, and similar to our work in PSR, we'll be tracking the progression to customers' commercial lines that will generate our future royalty streams. The progression of these three traits has accelerated significantly in 2023. We are shipping edited traits back to customers and are also adding new customers across both canola and soybean. We look forward to updating you on the progress of these three traits in these two crops over the preceding quarters. In addition to our developed traits, our two advanced traits are critically important. They're both multi-crop traits, meaning they have potential efficacy across multiple crop types. The first advanced trait is HT2, or herbicide resistance number two, for weed management. Because of the extensive overuse of certain modes of action over the last 20 years, many weeds have become resistant to those herbicides. For crops like canola and soybean, there is extensive demand for new broad-spectrum herbicides and associated herbicide traits that target broad-leaf weeds. That is the market for HD2. We expect important greenhouse results next summer for this trait. Because of its demand in both canola and soybean, we believe it has the potential to be the first GMO-based trait to exceed 100 million acres. From perspective, the industry estimates that GMO-based herbicide traits are utilized currently on over 300 million planted acres. The second advanced trait is for sclerotinia, or white mold resistance. Sclerotinia is the most damaging disease in canola and one of the major diseases impacting soybean. As a disease trait, this is not a single mode of action trait. In order to be durable, this trait needs to address multiple parts of disease conditions. If successful, this would be the first major disease trait that would be applicable to multiple crops. If this trait is successful and deployed across both canola and soybean, we believe that this trait has the potential to be the largest gene-edited trait to date. The development of these two traits have progressed well in 2023. Over the next years, we will track the progression of these two traits also and their advancement to customers' commercial lines and to their royalty payouts. These traits and their royalty fans will be a significant component of our economic base and profitability. We will follow this progress on a quarterly basis very closely. Soybean is the last component of our five-trade, three-crop business plan. We have had significant progress in completing our soybean single-cell editing platform. As we have stated, we still believe that we will complete development of this platform in FY2023. Over the next few years, we will track the progression of our soybean business. Once we have achieved our platform, we expect significant growth in soybean customers based on initial discussions we have had to date. This is a large 200 million plus acre crop in just North and South America. Many of the major soybean seed companies are already customers of Seabus and other crops. We believe that soybeans will be a major contributor contributor of our economic space going forward and a central pillar of the growth of gene editing in agriculture. As is clear, our five-trade, three-crop model is the central focus of our corporate strategy. We intend to track the progression of each trait as it is deployed in the elite germplasm, and the progression of each will be central to our quarterly updates going forward as each trait by crop combination starts generating royalty revenue. With that, I'd like to pass the call over to Peter for his remarks.