Chembio Diagnostics, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for standing by, and thank you for joining us today for this ChemBio first quarter 2020 earnings conference call and webcast. As a reminder, all phone participants are in a listen-only mode, but later you will have the opportunity to ask questions, and instructions on how to do so will be shared at that time. And now to get us started with opening remarks and introductions, I am pleased to turn the floor over to Philip Taylor with Investor Relations. Good afternoon, Philip.

Thank you. Before we begin today, let me remind you that the company's remarks made during this conference call today, May 4, 2020, include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 concerning the current beliefs of the company. Forward-looking statements are subject to numerous assumptions, risks, and uncertainties, many of which are beyond ChemBio's control, including risks and uncertainties described from time to time in ChemBio's SEC filings. including those under risk factors and elsewhere in ChemBio's annual report on Form 10-K for 2019. ChemBio's results may differ materially from those projected. ChemBio undertakes no obligation to publicly revise or update any forward-looking statement made today. I encourage you to review all of the company's filings with the SEC concerning these and other matters. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Gail Page, Executive Chair.

Thank you, Triv. Thank you all for joining us today. I'm pleased to be speaking with you as Executive Chair of the ChemBioDiagnostics Board of Directors. I will start the call with an overview of our corporate strategic pivot to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Next, President and Chief Executive Officer Rick Everly will discuss the operational changes we have made in order to execute this opportunity. Then Chief Financial Officer Neil Goleman will detail the financial results of the first quarter before we open up the call for Q&A. To begin, we must address how the COVID-19 pandemic has completely disrupted society and our company as we know it. And I would like to recognize and commend the dedication of the entire Tobio organization throughout these unprecedented circumstances. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented our team with an opportunity to leverage our expertise to help society and drive significant new revenue for the business. We have acted quickly to make the strategic shift required to position the business to capture this opportunity. At the same time, the appropriate adjustments have been made and all possible precautions have been taken to ensure the health and safety of our employees, customers, and community. There is now a seasoned team leading the transformation of ChemBio while instilling a new corporate culture in the organization. A significant component of our transformation is underway through Project Renaissance, which we touched on in our year-end 2019 earnings call. With this initiative, we have made changes to increase efficiency while better aligning costs with revenues. We will continue to develop as a proactive, nimble, and strategic organization that anticipates the needs of our customers while maintaining the highest level of quality across our products and services. We are excited to announce that in the near future, we will be launching new marketing and PR initiatives to showcase the new Camp I-O. Now I will take time to describe our strategic transition. After broad considerations and diligent evaluation, we took a measured approach to address the needs of the COVID-19 testing market with a commercially viable solution. We identified a clinically significant opportunity to meet the needs of the market with a serial logical test that can create long-term value for the company and provide customers with the necessary tools to address various testing needs. Methodically, we pivoted the organization to focus on the development and commercialization of such a test. With our expertise in infectious disease point of care testing, we are fortunate to be ideally positioned to address specific needs and offer valuable solutions for the significant problems posed by this and other pandemics. We are a known entity that responds in an expeditious manner as was demonstrated by our response to the Ebola and Zika outbreak and now COVID-19. These achievements are credited to our proprietary DPP technology, which is a highly versatile, advanced lateral flow testing platform with the ability to multi-place or detect multiple biomarkers from a single patient sample. We were confident that we had the technology and the team led by Javon Espindari, our Chief Science and Technology Officer capable of creating a premier antibody test. In a noticeably short period of time, we developed a COVID-19 serological testing system, received FDA EUA, and began shipping tests to customers in the U.S. and Brazil. The system incorporates both portable micro-reader 1 and micro-reader 2 analyzers, both produced by ChemBio Germany, to read the test in just 15 seconds and provide numerical results. The numerical results help monitor infection progressions and reduces the possibility of human error and visual interpretation required with other tests in the market. These features allow for decent pro-life testing and enable healthcare providers to utilize the system in a variety of healthcare locations. The highly contagious and deadly nature of this virus is changing the way people interact and function in everyday life. This situation has created unique needs and expanded the use cases for diagnostic testing. We believe our test provides benefits like ease of use with finger stick blood, quick 15-minute test times with 15-second read times, high sensitivity and specificity, and small portable analyzers that provide discrete numerical readings for both IgG and IgM antibodies. And this makes it highly versatile. Applications for the DPP COVID-19 system include improving clinical outcomes through monitoring infection progression in individuals, community population surveillance to determine herd immunity, and helping to evaluate potential therapeutic treatments for the virus, as well as the vaccine development process. Because the test uses a finger stick blood sample, the test could be conducted in a wide variety of settings that do not have significant infrastructure. All of these features make it a desirable tool in many existing markets in addition to those that are emerging. This broad utility provides access to a diverse customer base. These potential customers range from various hospital departments, state and city health departments, ambulatory surgery centers, physician's offices, health clinics, earth-care centers, pharmacies, and nursing homes. Additionally, outside the non-healthcare arena, there has been interest from larger institutions and employers as the world thinks about their path back to work and for individuals who would like to know if they've been exposed and their own immune status. We are pleased to be experiencing significant demand from across these groups. Currently, our focus and target customers are hospitals, labs, state and city health departments in the regions that have been most affected by the pandemic. Our long-term goal is to utilize this time of change as a catalyst for which we will position Combi to fully realize the potential of the technology and the team behind it. To not only serve the infectious disease market, but to explore those opportunities that complement the infrastructure we have built. We are seeing unprecedented needs and we are working hard to address those in a thoughtful manner which serves our customers and our shareholders alike. Now I would like to turn the call over to President and CEO Rick Everly to discuss further internal operations.