Cibus, Inc.

Please stand by. Your program is about to begin. If you need audio assistance during your call today, please press star zero. Good day and welcome to the CBIS second 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 a question. 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 SEVIS. I would like to thank you for taking time to join us for SEVIS second quarter of 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 webcasts, 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 SEVA's 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 would like to begin this call with a high-level update on our business activities in this quarter and in this year. Following my remarks, Peter will walk you through our recent developments in more detail. In addition, he will review the value proposition for all of our developed trades and discuss how we're doing on our expected 2024 milestones to help you understand why we are so excited with our progress. Wade will then finish with a discussion of the financials. I'd like to start by reviewing the business we created last year when we merged SEVIS and Calix. When we merged, we were the two leading gene editing companies in terms of owning the foundational patents and technology for gene editing in agriculture. These cover exclusive proprietary use of the foundational intellectual property in the agricultural gene editing industry, including our grand editing technology platform, the exclusive use of tailings in agriculture, and in certain geographies, the exclusive use of CRISPR technology in agriculture. When we created this gene-editing powerhouse, we had a stated mission to become the leading independent gene-edited trait developer for the major crops, canola, rice, soybean, wheat, and corn. Selling GMO-based traits to seed companies is a huge industry in which seed companies on an annual basis pay billions of dollars in royalties to trait developers for specific traits. These attributes are genetic expression in a plant that is associated with a specific plant attribute such as herbicide tolerance or disease resistance. A great example of our trait strategy is the traits we have developed for herbicide tolerance. Herbicide tolerance traits are the mainstay of the GMO trait industry. The principal attribute of a herbicide-tolerant trait is that the trait enables plants to survive when the farmer sprays herbicides on the plant. In other words, these traits enable farmers to kill the weeds with herbicides without killing the crop. The GMO herbicide-tolerant traits were developed using foreign materials from other plants, and as such, they had severe regulations or banning, which virtually stopped GMO trait innovation in crops such as rice and wheat. The difference is that with our genetic technology, we can develop herbicide-tolerant traits without using any foreign materials, and that our traits are indistinguishable from traits developed using conventional breeding. This is why, globally, regulations are changing to regulate traits from our technology as traits from conventional breeding. This is why we're excited about the prospects for our rice and wheat crop platform. We can now develop families of herbicide-resistant traits in crops that did not have GMO traits. In addition, gene editing has created opportunities in areas that have been difficult to develop using GMO technology because of the complexity required to develop the specific traits. Disease-resistant traits are a perfect example of complex traits. In disease-resistant traits, we are initially focused on sclerotinia, or white mold disease, that are critically important in canola and soybean. These are traits that have a direct positive impact on farming yield, cost, and efficiency. The promise of gene editing is that it can address areas like disease resistance. This is why traits that make plants resistant to disease is such an important focus for SEBAS. Agricultural trade royalties are very similar to the massive royalties paid in the pharmaceutical industry for technology associated with each drug. There are virtually no drug producers in the pharmaceutical industry, nor seed companies for the major crops that do not pay significant royalties to third parties for licensed technology for their products. This is our business model. Using our proprietary technologies, we can develop complex seed traits in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional or GMO breeding, and that with our technologies, we were able to accelerate the path toward commercialization. When we announced our merger, we established major milestones to track our progress in becoming the leading trade developer to seed companies in these major crops areas. We divided our milestones into three categories. First, new crops. We track milestones that follow our progress in developing new crop platforms and technologies. This, for example, means providing updates on a recent development of an operational platform for wheat, our expected soybean platform in 2024, and our recent patent expansions for new technologies.