Cibus, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the CBIS Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Carlo Bruce, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Carlo Bruce Thank you and good afternoon. I would like to thank you for taking time to join us for CBIS Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results and Business 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 you in your analysis of our business. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Ricks. Go ahead, Rory.

Thanks, Carlo, and good afternoon, everyone. Before I begin, I'd like to recognize Carlo's participation on today's call as our chief financial officer. Carlo has stepped in for Wade King following Wade's leave of absence. Although Carlo is new to the investment community, he is a skilled financial leader who brings nearly 14 years of experience at CBUS alone and decades in a variety of roles, including his role as head of finance for the EMEA region and CFO for Netherlands and Belgium at Syngenta. as well as his work in audit during his early years at Deloitte. We are grateful for his ability to seamlessly step in for Wade and look forward to his contributions as a member of our executive team as we look ahead to the future as a commercial enterprise. With that, I'd like to begin today's call with a high-level update on our business activities this quarter and year-to-date. Following my remarks, Peter will provide more detail on our recent developments and how we are progressing within our crop platforms. Carla will then conclude with a financial discussion. As we reflect on the first nine months of 2024, it's clear that this has been a transformative period for CBIS as we evolved from an R&D-based business to the first commercial gene-editing company in the industry. This continued transformation from an R&D-focused company to the first commercial-stage gene editing company was central to the streamlining of our organization to more efficiently focus our efforts on executing on our product launches with our herbicide-resistant traits in rice and traits for pod chowder reduction in canola, while maintaining the ability to capitalize on our positive progress in developing our soybean platform and advancing our traits for sclerotinia resistance and herbicide tolerance, our H2 trait. Our evolution has been achieved through a series of successful milestones associated with three cornerstones of our business. The first cornerstone is the completion of our trait machine process, an industrial technology breeding platform that creates a time-bound and predictable trait development process. The second cornerstone is operationalizing or scaling the trait machine platform to develop a multi-trait pipeline with the goal of commercializing plant traits with multiple customers and with multiple crops. Our third cornerstone is represented by our ongoing collaborations with major seed company customers with the goal to develop, to license, and to commercialize these traits in their seeds for trade fees or royalties. These three cornerstones are the foundation of this new technology business in agriculture for the development of productivity traits, or traits that make farming more productive, economical, and sustainable. Our first cornerstone is the trade machine process. It is a paradigm shift in the breeding of complex traits. For each of our crop platforms in canola and rice, and for each of our traits for these crops, we can now complete our edits in a customer's elite germplasm and regenerate the edited germplasm to a plant within just 12 months. This breakthrough in speed and predictability of technology-based breeding is foundational to developing each trait and to accelerate the timetable to commercialization for each trait once developed. We believe that this timetable will also accrue to our soybean platform. A predictable timetable for integrating our traits into a customer's germplasm is a key part of the commercialization of a customer trait, which begins with the receipt of a customer's germplasm. Evidence of our ability to use the trait machine process to edit and deliver to the greenhouse in a time-bound and predictable fashion can be seen in our recent announcement of successful greenhouse data for our HT2 trait in canola. It took less than 12 months from edit to greenhouse results for this trait. We have also announced successful edits in our disease program with which we also expect greenhouse results within 12 months of the edit. We now have a pipeline of five different traits. For each of these traits, we have completed edits and have had either successful field trials or expected greenhouse results for each of those traits. Our ability to develop so many traits within a compressed timeframe is a testament of the efficiency we develop with the trait machine process. Our second cornerstone is operationalizing or scaling our trait machine process to develop a pipeline of traits. This is also a paradigm shift in breeding new traits. Our ability to industrialize the transfer of traits and the development of new traits shows the power of our trait machine process to shorten the development timeline, commercialization timeline, and the cost of developing new traits. The third quarter was a great quarter to show our ability to scale our trait machine process as an ongoing production system with multiple different crops and multiple traits. In rice, we now have multiple customers, each having multiple lines. The initial edit happened within a 12-month framework, and we expect the gene edit of the HT3 trait in multiple customer lines will all occur within this 12-month production target. In winter oilseed rape, with multiple customer germplasms, we completed the first field trials for a pod chatter reduction trait. These trials were completed in the elite germplasm of several customers. These edits were completed in the greenhouse within a 12-month timeframe. In addition, we had the first successful field trial with stacked gene-edited traits using our HD1 and HD3 traits in rice. We expect to develop a family of stacked herbicide-tolerant traits for our customers in rice. This ability to efficiently develop a family of stacked traits is a key strength of the trait machine process. It's expected that our sclerotinia-resistant disease trait in canola will consist of multiple modes of action, which will be combined to form our sclerotinia-resistant product. It's expected that we will offer multiple gene-edited herbicide traits across the entire industry. We expect that these traits for sclerotinia-resistant will have a similar scale opportunity in soybean. We expect that our technology will be able to attain this scale in a similar time-bound and predictable manner. This is what we mean by operationalizing the trade machine process. Our third cornerstone is our collaboration with major seed company customers with the goal to develop, to license, and to commercialize these trades in their seeds for trade fees or royalties. This is an important validation of our technology as a commercial platform. The development of gene editing as an extension of the breeding programs for our seed company customers is a key part of the development of this new gene editing trait industry. This cornerstone is about the use of the trait machine process as the key engine for the commercialization of our traits across multiple crops, multiple traits, and multiple customer lines in an efficient, time-bound, and predictable manner. This is the underlying framework and validation of our commercial process model for gene editing and agriculture. The speed of our trait machine process will enable materially faster commercialization timelines for new traits, as well as updates for new traits once launched. This momentum with existing customers with the goal of commercializing our traits in different customer germplasm in different crops continued in the third quarter. We have now established collaborations with major seed companies in each of our platforms. In each case, we have received the elite germplasm of each customer for a specific crop. Each of these collaborations with seed companies are being made with the goal to develop, license, and commercialize a trait in their germplasm for trade fees. For soybean, the goal right now is to develop the trait machine crop platform. In rice, Each of our collaborations were made with the goal of developing our herbicide-resistant trait in their germplasm for commercialization. In the U.S., we also signed an important agreement with ABA and RTDC to continue our collaboration for supplying colostrum herbicide to support the expected launch of our custom-tolerant rice trait, our HT3 trait, to our U.S. rice seed customers, utilizing ABA's herbicide registration, and crop protection expertise. This partnership is a key part of the ongoing commercialization of herbicide-tolerant traits as an economic partnership between the seed company, the chemical company, and the trait company. Our ongoing field trials for our pod shatter reduction trait in canola and winter royal seed rape in customer germplasm are also key elements of the commercialization of our pod shatter trait with seed company customers. In soybean, our initial platform is being developed with GDM germplasm. This was established with the goal to develop a platform for the development and commercialization of selected traits in soybean, like our HC2 trait and our trait for sclerotinia. The ongoing work with our traits and customers germplasm as part of their commercialization program is a model for how this new gene editing industry operates. As we enter the last quarter this year, we're excited about the technological and commercial base we have built to establish the first commercial trade business. Through each cornerstone of our model, we are differentiating and establishing ourselves as an important element within the seed and trade industry that is able to drive value for our seed customers and the grower community. Now, Peter would like to provide some more background on our commercial activities and technological updates. Peter?