Cibus, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the CBIS first quarter 2024 results conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. 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. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon. This is Wade King, Chief Financial Officer of CBIS. I would like to thank you for taking time to join us for SEVA's first quarter 2024 financial results and corporate update conference call and webcast. Presenting 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 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 CBIS 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 CBIS.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. I'll begin today's call with a high-level update of our business this quarter. Then Peter will walk you through our recent Q1 commercial progress and discuss how we're doing on our expected 2024 milestones. Wade will then come back and finish with a discussion of financials. This was an amazing quarter for our commercial accomplishments and for the positive developments in the regulatory environment for gene editing. Much about this quarter is our successful transformation from an R&D-focused company to being the first commercial-stage gene editing company. By commercial-stage gene editing company, we mean that we are in the business of commercializing validated gene-edited traits. Our customers are seed companies. We're not in the seed business. Our business is to sell validated traits to seed companies for annual royalties. In other words, we license traits that we have developed with our gene editing technology to seed companies. Our traits provide economic benefits to farmers, such as helping manage or control weeds or providing resistance to specific diseases, such as white mold or sclerotinia. Our economic model is based on receiving annual royalties on bags of seeds sold with our traits based on these benefits. This is a common practice in the seed industry. There are many traits that are licensed to seed companies for royalties. However, largely this practice is the purview of licenses by seed companies to other seed companies. With the advent of gene editing, we believe that gene editing technology companies, like CBIS, will be the leaders in licensing new traits to seed companies in exchange for royalties. We refer to our gene editing technology as the trait machine. The underpinnings of our trait machine is our Precision Rapid Trait Development System, or RTDS. RTDS is a crop-specific platform technology that comprises a system of gene editing technologies that is covered by over 400 patents issued or applied for. When we state that we have a platform crop, it means that we have successfully developed our RTDS technology in the specific crop that enables us to edit a single cell of a customer's elite germplasm, regenerate the edited cell, and return the edited seed to the customer. This technology is especially important in complex traits requiring multiple edits, such as our pod shadow reduction trait in canola and our square tinny resistant trait for canola and soybean. CMIS has developed commercial RTDS platforms in canola and rice, and we just recently developed an RTDS platform for wheat for which we are exploring commercial opportunities. Lastly, a key 2024 milestone is to develop an RTDS platform for soybean. Soybean is such an important opportunity for us because it has grown on over 200 million acres in just Brazil and the United States alone. We're excited that our trait machine was recently given an award by Fast Company Magazine for being one of its top 100 innovations of 2024. As noted in Fast Company's article on the trait machine, commercialization of this technology presents an analog to digital moment in breeding. The trait machine fundamentally changes the speed and cost of developing and commercializing complex traits. It enables us to do new complex trait development in as little as three years as compared to a traditional breeding process or GMO process, which takes over a decade. We can also do this at a fraction of the cost as well. The trait machine has also enabled us to speed up the commercialization of our traits because it allows us on a shortened timeline to transfer complex traits directly in the elite germplasm or seed of our customers for commercialization. Peter will review in greater detail our progress this year for our developed platforms in canola and rice and in our development of new platforms for wheat and soybean. But I would like to touch on a couple highlights for which we are really encouraged. First, we're ending this quarter with 10 customers for our pod shatter reduction trade in canola, demonstrating our success in building out our canola platform. Each of these customers has already delivered to us their early germplasm, enabling us to apply the pod shatter trait gene editing process. Our success in canola is why we consider this the year as the time we became a fully integrated commercial scale gene editing company. In rice, We've also signed up some of the largest companies in the United States and Latin America, including Nutrium and Interoc, for our two proprietary herbicide-resistant traits, HD1 and HD3. Herbicide-resistant traits are an agricultural mainstay because they fundamentally change how farmers manage one of the toughest challenges, weeds. The positive response to date for our two HD traits in rice is emblematic of the demand for these traits. and it is why we are working on advancing our third herbicide trait, HD2, in other crops, including canola and soybean. We believe that this HD2 trait has the potential to be the first gene-edited trait to achieve 100 million acres of yearly use, representing an immense opportunity for us. Lastly, I would like to provide a brief update on the recent regulatory advances for gene editing. The highlight for us at SEVIS was February 7th. This is when the EU parliament voted to endorse the regulation of gene editing similarly to conventional breeding. This EU vote was an important inflection point in the global movement to regulate the new genomic techniques differently from GMO technologies. While the EU still has work to do to negotiate and finalize its regulations, the importance of this parliamentary vote cannot be overstated as the EU was notorious for having the strictest regulations in the world. Importantly, for the first time, we see with the EU parliamentary vote a powerful new alignment across the three major agricultural growing regions, North America, South America, and now the EU and the UK. This development has been followed by similar ones in many other countries such as Canada and Uruguay. With that, I'll pass the call over to Peter to go into some greater detail on the progression of our pipelines, trade platforms, and the potential we have to deliver significant value for our shareholders. Peter?