Cibus, Inc.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the CBIS fourth 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. Also note, today's event is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Carlo Bruce, Interim Chief Financial Officer. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon. We'd like to thank you for taking time to join us for CBIS fourth quarter 2024 financial results and business update conference call and webcast. Presenting with me today is Peter Beetham, co-founder, interim chief executive officer, president and COO. Greg Gochel, our chief scientific officer, will also be on today's call for participation during the Q&A session. 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 findings 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. And with that, I would like now to turn the call over to Peter.

Thanks, Talo, and good afternoon, everyone. Before diving into our results and business update, I'd like to address our recent leadership transition. As a co-founder of CBIS with Rory Riggs, our chairman, and Greg Gottschall, our chief scientific officer, and having served as President and COO since 2021 and CEO for the seven years prior to that, I'm deeply committed to our mission and vision. Leadership transitions can be significant moments for any company. Our strategic direction remains on track. I also want to acknowledge Rory's unwavering dedication to CBIS that has spanned more than two decades. since its formation. Rory has been instrumental in building SEVIS, investing behind our strategy and evolving its technologies into what they are today. A cutting edge agricultural company poised to transform the development and commercialization of crop traits. As he has stressed previously, SEVIS is at an important inflection point as we continue our transformation from an agricultural trait development company to a commercial trait company. SEVIS is a leader in developing gene-edited productivity traits that address critical productivity and sustainability challenges for farmers such as diseases and pests, which the United Nations estimates cost the global economy approximately $300 billion annually. Importantly, Sebus is not a seed company. Rather, we are a technology company that uses gene editing to develop and license traits to seed companies in exchange for annual royalties on seed sales. A key differentiator of our technology compared to existing modern plant breeding technologies like GMO is that the traits developed using our Rapid Trait Development System, or RTDS, are indistinguishable from traits developed via conventional breeding methodologies. Notably, in pending EU legislation, which I will speak more about later as there was some recent great news about the progress, they used the term conventional life. So, unlike GMO-based approaches that integrate foreign DNA, our gene editing approach allows us to make precise changes that could occur in nature. This distinction is critical from a regulatory perspective as it means our products are regulated similar to conventional breeding in many markets, significantly expanding our global addressable market compared to GMO traits that for nearly three decades faced significant regulatory obstacles around the world. We believe our business model will create a potential long-term revenue stream based on the cost savings realisable by farmers through application of specific crop traits. As I step into my expanded role, I'm energized by the momentum we're building across our key markets. The opportunities for our gene editor traits aren't years away. They're materializing right now. Our herbicide tolerance traits in rice are generating commercial interest across markets, including the United States, Uruguay, Colombia, Brazil, and Asia, representing significant future royalty potential. With our traits moving into customer germplasm and field trials showing promising results, and with a more harmonized global regulatory environment for gene-edited traits, I believe we are positioned to capture significant value for our shareholders. I'd really like to emphasize that CBIS's differentiation lies in our proprietary RTDS gene editing process, which enables us to edit the customer's elite germplasm and return it with a specific trait in under 12 months, creating a time-bound and predictable model for trait development and commercialization that's unlike anything agriculture has seen before. This is the significant value of our standardized platform, rapidly delivering traits that help farmers address their most pressing productivity challenges while positioning SEBAS to capture the significant commercial value through annual royalties per acre. I'll now highlight some of our recent achievements and progress from the past year. I'll start with rice. Our rice platform continues to gain substantial momentum. In December, we affirmed our collaboration with RTDC Corporation Limited and Allbar LLC to provide the herbicide plethodum as part of our new and exciting weed management solution for U.S. rice farmers using our HT3 trait. This collaboration is instrumental to our herbicide resistance rice trade commercialization efforts as we continue to work with U.S. rice seed customers. Including our agreement with FEDEROS, we now have agreements with four major rice seed companies in North and Latin America, representing approximately 40% of our estimated accessible rice acres across these regions. Importantly, we've received germplasm from each of these customers, which is a crucial step in this commercialization process. Further, we completed a successful series of US field trials with one of our rice customers' varieties containing our HT3 trade, showcasing the exciting continued progress we are making toward commercialization. Additionally, last summer, we received initial field trial results for stacked gene-edited herbicide tolerance traits in rice. As we announced at the time, we believe this represents the first field trial that uses a stacked gene-edited herbicide tolerance trait in rice, or for that matter, any major crop to improve weed management. A breakthrough that further differentiates our offering and stands to bring significant value to farmers. As we have presented, we believe our ability to add traits and improve existing traits in time-bound and predictable way paves the way for plant breeders to accelerate their best genetics to commercial seed production and sales to farmers. Let me go to canola. CBUS has developed productivity traits for pod shadow reduction or PSR in canola and winter oilseed rape, strengthens the sheet that is part of the pod around the canola seeds. This sheet is important to protect the pods improving shadow tolerance when faced with adverse impacts from high winds and extreme weather that can cause a loss of yield. Phoebus continues to make good progress on its canola and winter oilseed rape advanced productivity traits. These are geratinia resistance and HD2 that offer white mold, disease resistance, and broadleaf weed herbicide tolerance, respectively. I will discuss these in more detail in a moment. As previously discussed, CBUS has 10 customers for its developed and advanced traits in canola and winter oilseed waste, six of whom continue to work with the company to progress its developed PSR trait for approximately 7 million customer accessible acres, despite a shifting commercial landscape. And with that, I'd like to turn to our advanced traits. We've made substantial advances in our disease resistance program. In November, we announced a collaboration with Biographica, a UK-based leader in AI and machine learning for gene discovery, focusing on advanced disease resistance in oilseed rape and canola. This partnership leverages Biographica's proprietary AI platform to complement Phoebus's own computational biology team to identify and prioritize completely novel genetic targets for gene editing. We are really proud to partner with one of the leaders in the AI space who has technology to help decode crop genetics. Now, let me move to what I believe is one of our more significant advances over the past year. We've also reported on the significant results we have achieved over the past several months in the development of multiple modes of action for traits for resistance to white mold or sclerotinia. White mold is a devastating and widespread disease that can significantly impact farmers' crop yields. In the same way that antiviral cocktails are used to treat disease, like HIV in people, developing multiple independent modes of action for plant disease is expected to enable durable disease resistance. And what I mean by that is resistance that lasts. As we have discussed previously, developing this trait in one crop, like canola, is a guide to how we would add disease resistance to other crops like soybean. This is a great example of a multi-crop trait that will address and help to resolve a major disease impacting yield on over 100 million acres of crops. In November, we successfully completed edits in canola for the fourth mode of action for sclerotinia resistance with controlled environment assay results expected in the first quarter of 2025. This work builds upon our other work surrounding other modes of action, which continue to progress. For instance, we received field trial results for the second mode of action in canola, showing improved disease resistance, while the first bioassay results for our third mode of action showed improved resistance. What is impressive was how quickly the SEVIS team developed these third mode of action plants. Looking ahead, we expect to continue identifying, evaluating, and testing additional modes of action to support a trait that is durable and applicable to customers across all growing regions. This is important as gene editing in such a time-bound and predictable way can provide these multiplex traits where traditional techniques like advanced breeding, including GMO, have not. I believe that this methodical, multi-pronged approach exemplifies our commitment to developing robust traits that address a targeted solution for real-world challenges facing today's farmers.