Evogene Ltd.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to EvoGen's first quarter 2021 results conference call. All participants are at present in a listen-only mode. Following management's formal presentation, instructions will be given for the question and answer session. For operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded May 26, 2021. Before we begin, I would like to caution that certain statements made during this earnings conference call by Evagenz Management will constitute forward-looking statements that relate to future events. I encourage you to review Evagenz's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and read the note regarding forward-looking statements in today's earnings release which states that statements made in the earnings release and, in a similar way, on this earnings conference call, their non-historical facts may be deemed forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. For example, Evagen is using forward-looking statement in this call when it discusses its expected paths to value creation, its and its subsidiaries' expected trial studies, product advancements, commercializations, launches, pipelines, milestones, All forward-looking statements made herein speak only as of the date of the announcement of results. Many of the factors that impact whether forward-looking statements will come true are beyond the control of Evogen and may cause actual results to differ materially from anticipated results. Evogen is under no obligation to update publicly or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as otherwise required by law. We expressly disclaim any obligation to do so. More detailed information about the risk factors potentially adversely impacting our performance can be found in our reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That said, I would now like to turn over the call to Ofer Haviv Evagen, CEO. Ofer, please go ahead.

Thank you and good day, everyone. We appreciate your joining us today for our first quarter 2021 conference call. Joining me today are Mrs. Dorit Kleiner, our CFO, and Mr. Idozor, the CEO of our subsidiary Labibio, which focuses on ag biologicals, the fastest growing segment in the ag industry today. Following my initial remarks, IDO will provide an update about Abib Ayo, and following IDO, the week will summarize Evogen financial results for the first quarter 2021. We will then open the call for your questions. My remarks in today's call will focus on our strategy for value creation through the Evogen subsidiaries and its recognition by the capital markets. Before I reach this topic, I would like to recap the main topics I covered in the previous analytics call. First, our broadly applicable computational predictive biology platform, the CPB, and the three engines relying on this platform, Microboost AI, Campus AI, and Generator AI. As stated many times, we believe these capabilities provide a significant competitive advantage in the discovery and development of life science based products in multiple industries. The CPB platform and the three engines aim to reduce time and cost of product development and most importantly to improve the probability for success to reach commercial product. Second, our proven ability to create subsidiaries in multiple life science based fields by utilizing the CPP platform and the three engines, with each subsidiary demonstrating its ability to rapidly discover and develop very promising product pipelines. We are pleased to see our subsidiaries receiving growing recognition for their pipelines by major companies in the field of focus. Lastly, I stated our intention to continue to initiate New Activities in Additional Life Science-Based Fields In our last call, I mentioned various new fields we are currently evaluating, including using MicroBoost AI to identify microbes for the aquaculture industry, and using Campus AI for drug optimization for human health. Moving now to what I would like to focus on today, value creation within the Evogen subsidiaries and market recognition of this value. Investing in life science-based companies such as those within the Evogen group present both financial advantages and risk for their investors. The primary advantage is that, in general, if successful, life science-based products can be very profitable. In addition, and very importantly for investors, companies with promising life science-based products in their pipelines, like Evogen subsidiaries, can have very significant market values long before the products are actually commercialized. On the other hand, the primary risk in investing in lifetime best companies is that such products typically have very high failure rates. Furthermore, those that are successful generally take a relatively long time to be commercialized. With respect to the advantage as stated, each of our subsidiaries has a very promising product pipeline and their activities are aiming to advance the product candidates towards commercialization. In 2021 and 2022, all our subsidiaries have a significant milestone for pipeline advancement and some of them are even expected to reach first product launch. We believe that announcing the achievement of such milestones as they are reached will enable the capital market to properly appreciate the value created by the subsidiaries and will also be reflected in Evogen's value recognition. Turning to the risk, we believe that the technology utilized by our subsidiaries, which relies on Evogen unique technology, provide a substantial advantage with respect to dealing with the challenges of high failure rate and time to market. We believe that the power of the technology is demonstrated and can be recognized through the rapid progress of our subsidiary discovery and development pipelines. Moreover, any strategic collaboration, such as between Agplanus and Corteva, Our equity investment in a subsidiary biostrategic partner such as Corteva's investment in LaviBio is a vote on confidence in the unique advantage of our technology. As previously disclosed, some of our subsidiaries are targeting to achieve additional strategic collaborations during 2021 and 2022. We expect that such collaboration will enable the capital market to recognize the unique technological value of our subsidiaries, those reflecting on Evogen's value as well. I'm pleased to report that both Evogen and our subsidiaries have been progressing in accordance with their plans, and I would like to highlight the following events that took place since the beginning of the year. Biomica, Evogen subsidiary, focusing on developing innovative microbiome-based therapeutics, announced additional positive preclinical results in its immune oncology program, demonstrating efficacy of its live biotherapeutic product consortium, BMC128, this time in melanoma. As demonstrated in our previous trial The treatment with BMC-128 in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors, immune therapy, significantly enhance anti-tumor activity. We are very excited with the results of this study demonstrating the effectiveness of BMC-128 in treating additional types of solid cancer tumors. We look forward to providing Incremental updates as we walk towards a first in human proof-of-concept clinical trial later this year. Canonic Ltd., our subsidiary focused on the development of medical cannabis products, announced that it entered into an agreement for the production and distribution in Israel of Canonic's medical cannabis products with Tikkun Olam Cannabid Pharmaceuticals Ltd., These agreements are expected to support the successful launch of Canonic's first product in 2022. Evogen's Ag-C division, focusing on discovery and development of C trait, announced a collaboration agreement with a U.S. company, Plastomics, targeting novel insect control trait for soybean. As part of the collaboration, Plastomics utilizing its disruptive new technology will introduce Herbogen insect control gene, demonstrating new mode of action into soybean. There is a dire need for new mode of action insect control traits, and we are looking forward to addressing it through our joint efforts. La Vie Bio, our subsidiary, focusing on all biologicals through the introduction of microbiome-based products, announced the joining of Mr. Ross Patland, SVP Commercial. RAS brings significant commercial experience to the LaviBio team and together with management will prepare the company for its next phase focusing on commercializing its products starting from 2022. With this, I hand over to Ido, LaviBio's CEO. Thank you. Ido?

Thank you, Ofer. I would like to begin by introducing myself. My name is Ido Do and I serve as La Vie Bio CEO. I joined Evogen at the end of 2011 and held various business and managerial related roles. Since 2015, I lead the Ag Biological Division within Evogen, which we spun off as La Vie Bio in February 2019. My background is in engineering and I hold an MBA and started my career in management consulting for roughly six years. Additional 6 years in leading sales and channel organization for SAP in Israel I will start with a short introduction of LaviBio, which is addressing the need for a more sustainable food system with stronger focus on the quality of food and nutrients of the produce In the last few years, we have seen a trend where consumers are more aware and demand better practices to drive sustainability and food quality In a way, the folk influences the farm. However, the fact that in agriculture, farmers use more than $200 billion every year in fertilizer and chemicals, crop protection, in order to secure production is quite a significant conflict. And this conflict needs to be balanced and shifted. And agri-biologicals are one of the key solutions in driving this revolution of improving the way we produce our food. LaviBio is focusing on improving food quality, sustainability and ag-productivity by harnessing the power of microbiome technologies to develop innovative ag-biological products. Ag-biologicals are externally applied products from biological sources such as microbial and naturally derived biochemicals designed to improve crop productivity. The microbiome is a sub-segment and refers to the microbial population living close or within the plant or other organisms. These microorganisms have a unique functional composition that La Vie Bio is harnessing in order to develop novel ag-biological products. La Vie Bio's approach is focused on biology-driven design, or BDD, for the discovery, optimization, and development of effective, stable, and cost-effective microbial-based ag-biologicals. LaviBio's BDD platform facilitates and accelerates the development of microbiome-based products through the decoding of complex microbiome-host interactions and the utilization of key genetic elements governing these interactions for product development. The enabling technologies for the establishment of the BDD platform are the MicroBoost AI engine a component of Evergen's CPB platform, and the Taxonia platform, which harnesses genomics informatics to develop its transformative applications to agriculture, acquired as part of the Corteva investment in LaviBio. LaviBio is focused on developing two main types of products, biopesticides, which are agri-biologicals for crop protection, addressing biotic stresses such as insect diseases and weeds. and also biostimulants which are biological for crop enhancement directly impacting crop yield or antibiotic stress tolerance resistance. In 2020, we saw significant advancement in La Vie Bio product pipeline. In December 2020, La Vie Bio announced that its stimulant candidate 2-1-1, Lab 2-1-1 was successfully advancing into the pre-commercial phase following field trials in target locations meeting development criteria and outperforming trials control, which includes competitor benchmarks. Product launch is expected in 2022. In October 2020, we also shared results demonstrating the power of biotesticide candidate Lab312 to protect DRAVE from botrytis based on results obtained from multi-location trials in target geographies. We expect this product to reach the market in 2024. For further updates on the pipeline status and advancements, I would also like to guide you to our publication from December 2020, which has a broader view of all of our product programs. Since the beginning of 2021, Labibio has continued to progress well with its product pipeline and its main milestones for 2021 are, first, to conduct pre-commercial trials. for its biostimulant product for spring wheat and to finalize all the stages planned in order to commercialize in 2022. And second, to continue product advancement on its biofungicide product for fruit rot, LAB 311 and 312, toward regulation, which is planned to be filed in the first half to 2022. With respect to the first milestone, the last 2.1.1, we are in the last season before launch, working with our early farmer adopters network, conducting commercial trials under commercial practices in North America, specifically North Dakota. In parallel, we are working to extend the product to new crops and territories and establishing the commercial path for 2022 initial sales. To this end, I'm very pleased with the joining of Mr. Ras Potlan to our team as VP Commercial. Ras brings significant commercial experience to the La Vie Biotech management team, including more than 30 years of leadership within large multinational ag companies. Ras will lead La Vie Biotech's commercial strategy and execution, focusing on establishment, the relationship and partnership with strategic and channel partners, driving revenue from ag biological Stimulants and Biopesticide product lines. With respect to the second milestone, our first biofungicide target this year includes multiple trials in Europe, US and South Africa that will help us to further improve the formulation and cost of production. We target to advance formulation and production technology by the end of the year and we will be able to file the leading candidate for regulation in the first half of 2022. In addition, we see significant progress, which we are excited about, in each of our other pipeline activities. The Mildew program, corn rootworm and seedling diseases, and bio-stimulants for crop other than wheat. I am pleased to update that our collaboration with Corteva is developing with our focused product concepts. In addition, I would like to update that we are actively engaged in seeking partnerships For accelerating and expanding our product pipeline and creating new business opportunities benefiting from our robust technological capabilities. These efforts will focus on one or more of the following. The first one is early commercialization of certain of our pipeline candidates through a partnership. And the second one is optimization of partners' candidate products using our BDD platform. I will keep reflecting on the progress as we move forward with this commercial effort. To summarize, the opportunity we found in the agri-biological market for our product is unique and has significant potential. The team and I believe we are on track to meet the company goals and are excited to be close to our first product launch. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Dorit. Dorit?