Evogene Ltd.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Evagen's second quarter 2022 results conference call. All participants are present in 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 August 31st, 2022. Before we begin, I would like to caution that certain statements made during this earnings conference call by Evagen's management will constitute forward-looking statements that relate to future events, risks, and uncertainties regarding business strategy, operations, and future performance and results of Evogen. I encourage you to review Evogen's filings with the US 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 that are not 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 including potential fundraisings at the subsidiary level its and its subsidiaries expected trials and their expected results studies, product advancements, commercializations, launches, pipelines, milestones, potential collaborations, and other plans for 2021 and 2022, expected burn rate, the potential advantages of its technology, and its anticipated entry into new fields of activity. 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 Evagen and may cause actual results to differ materially from anticipated results. Evagen 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 the call over to Ofer Khabib, Evogen's CEO. Ofer, please go ahead.

Thank you for joining us today for our second quarter 2022 conference call. We are very happy to have you with us and review with you important recent events that took place in Evogen Group. The first patient dose in the phase one clinical trial announced by Biomica, and the announcement on the strategic collaboration and the $10 million investment of ICL in La Vie Bio. We are very pleased with these developments, which we believe provide evidence to the value that La Vie Bio and Biomica have and continue to create, and I will cover this shortly. Today, joining me on the call is Ross Patland, EBP commercial and general manager of La Vie Bio Inc., to provide some additional color on their activities and go over some of the upcoming milestones to be expected. The financial stats themselves can be found in today's press release, and Yaron Eldad, our CFO, will provide a short summary. Following that, we will all be happy to take your questions. Before I start to review the recent events, I want to emphasize that we continue to strengthen Avogen's management team. As I discussed last quarter, we made a number of changes to expand Avogen management and I'm very happy to announce the latest addition to our team. In June, we added Eyal Ronen as Executive Vice President of Business Development. Eyal brings us over 20 years of extensive business development experience with biotech companies. Eyal's focus is to create and bring us additional value by building new partnerships or forming new subsidiaries, leveraging our technology engines and expanding our activity into new areas. Evogen has significant untapped potential held within its technology engines and Eyal's focus is to realize some of that value. I congratulate Eyal and trust he will be a key asset to Evogen. We are already seeing some of his positive impact. I would like to now discuss the two important events took place in the last few months. The first event was reported on July 26 by Biomica, our subsidiary focusing on developing drugs based on human microbiome. The company announced that the first patient was those in its phase one clinical trial taking place in Rambam Healthcare Campus, a hospital in the north of Israel in Haifa. The trial is designed, preliminary, to evaluate the safety and tolerability of Biomicase Microbiome-Based Immune Oncology drug candidate, BMC-128, in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitor in patients with either non-small cell lung cancer, melanoma, or renal cell carcinoma. The drug candidate is a consortium of microbes, which we identify and selected through a detailed functional microbiome analysis using Prism tools, a high resolution microbiome analysis platform, which is powered by Evogen's MicroBoost AI tech engine. As the trial is open label, we expect preliminary results and the first data point read out in early 2023, as the first patients conclude their treatment programs. We are targeting to complete this in the second half of 2023. This development demonstrates that our tech engines can be leveraged across multiple industries. While Avogen is traditionally leveraging its tech engines to cultures, Biomica's latest achievement is a proof that there is a huge market of human that we are uniquely positioned for playing an important role. The second important event was announced on August 17. A strategic collaboration and a $10 million investment by ICL in Labibio are focusing on developing AgBiologicals. I would like to provide you some color on the collaboration and investment. Labibio and ICL engage in a multi-year strategic collaboration to develop novel biostimulants. For those of you who are less familiar with ICL, ICL Group is a leading global speciality minerals company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and in Tel Aviv with a $13 billion market cap. ICL Group creates solutions for the global food agricultural markets via its global resources of roaming potash and pot fat. It is highly focused on technological innovation to create impactful solutions for sustainability challenges in the global food and agriculture markets, especially in a time of food scarcity, high prices, and macroeconomic uncertainty. La Vie Bio and ICL's shared vision is to enhance global food quality agriculture sustainability, and increase productivity. The goal of the strategic collaboration is to combine La Vie Bio's agri-biological expertise and MicroBoost AI power technology with ICL's fertilizer experience, enabling the development of new and innovative products for agriculture. As part of this collaboration, ICL has made a $10 million investment in LaviBio. The investment was structured under a SAFE, a simple agreement for future equity. The $10 million investment that has already been received allows LaviBio to build a pipeline of products focused on developing novel biostimulant products to enrich fertilizer efficiency. ICL will join as a shareholder of LaviBio to Evogen and Corteva, a major agriculture company listed in New York with a market cap of $44 billion. And I'm very proud that these two agriculture giants have shown a strong interest in what Labib Bio has to offer. I believe Labib Bio is now well set on a phase for significant achievement and success over the coming years. From the Evogen standpoint, This investment in LaVie Bio is an additional key milestone that demonstrates the power of our business model, whereby we are leveraging the value of our tech engines through dedicated subsidiaries. It shows that our hard work in building, investing in, enhancing our subsidiaries, all of which are leveraging our underlying computational predictive biological tech engines, is the right strategy and bears fruit. The $10 million investment in Labibbio will also allow its activity to power ahead while lowering the need for Evogen financial resources. This will enable Evogen to advance other new promising activities while ensuring that Labibbio is moving ahead at full speed. I want to hand over to Russ Patland, EVP at LaVie Bio, who will go into some more details on the recent activities and progress. Russ, please go ahead.

Thank you, Ofer. I'm very happy to have been asked to participate in the Evagen Analyst Call today. It's the first time I've participated in such a call, and given that, I'd like to introduce myself. As Ofer mentioned, my name is Russ Putland, and I am LaVie Bio's Executive Vice President of Commercial and General Manager of LaVie Bio's U.S. subsidiary. I joined LiviBio in May of 2021 and have previous experience in commercial leadership and strategy with FMC, DuPont and Cargill spanning over 30 years. I'm excited to be able to share LiviBio's progress and direction with you today. I'll start at a high level and then we can work down into some of the detail. The world's population continues to grow and consumer sophistication is increasing. We are faced with the challenge of producing food not only sustainably, but also profitably for farmers. We at Levy Bio have accepted this challenge and are well positioned to lead agriculture in this biological segment. Levy Bio uses microbiome selected naturally occurring microbes that create positive effects in plants. Levy uses these microbes to establish living factories in chosen crops, surpassing the efficacy, consistency, and the stability of not only other existing biological competing products, but measuring up to current synthetic commercial products. We are fortunate to be blessed with the strong proven partners in Corteva Agriscience, a global leader in crop protection and seeds, and now ICL and our new collaboration agreement focusing on novel biostimulant products that will enrich and improve fertilizer efficiency. When you have access to leverage Corteva and ICL's successful organizations and couple them with Evagen, our parent company's core competency of computational biology, this is where unique and breakthrough products are born. In early 2022, we sold out of our planned production of Thrivis Inoculant, the brand name of our new product, for use in wheat crops in the US, and it was part of our first soft launch. It was a relatively small amount, and our intended purpose was to demonstrate our launch capability in the areas that include production, marketing, and sales, all in preparation for a significant accelerated growth in 2023. I want to add that we recently made a decision to change our bioinoculants name from Result to Thrivus, as we believe the new name Thrivus strongly represents our brand and its expected performance. Thrivus, our inoculant for use in spring wheat, was launched in the market at exactly the right time. When you consider increasing global supply shortages resulting from unfavorable environmental conditions in these key growing geographies. Also, we need to highlight the Russia-Ukraine war. as these are two of the largest wheat exporters. This further supports the immediate need for increasing wheat yields globally. We have chosen to distribute our products through two distinct routes to market, direct, and as is the case in 2022 with United Agronomy, and indirect in the future. It is important that farmers have the necessary access to purchase Thrivis and realize the benefit of increased root development, biomass, and ultimately three to four bushels of yield per acre. representing an average of 4% to 6% in increased wheat yield. As our strategy marches toward 2023, we are finalizing the expanded production for next year's growing season. Our increased production will fuel expansion in North Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota, the spring wheat belt of the United States. We are on track with our plans to launch in Western Canada for the 2024 growing season, and in parallel, we are continuing with our plans to expand through this into new geographies namely Europe and Israel, from 2025 onward with partners from around the globe. Additionally, we will be working to advance and broaden the crop use label with additional crops such as durum, oats, barley, soybeans, and canola, and we'll update with you when we have news to report there. Moving to our biopesticides pipeline, our biofungicide fruit rot program is progressing as we'd expect, and we continue to see exciting results in our field trials conducted in vineyards. Prior to the end of 2022, we expect to submit a regulatory dossier with the federal U.S. EPA for our leading candidate, Lab 311. The standard timeline registration tends to take about 18 months, and we will continue to update as we progress. Our intent is to soft launch in 2024 growing season pending regulatory approval. It is important for me to emphasize that this significant progress I described could not be achieved without the fruitful activity between the R&D group at Levy Bio and Avagen, and more specifically, the MicroBoost tech engine that boosts our pipeline. I want to thank OFER and all the Avagen staff for their ongoing support of our activities at Levy Bio. Thank you for spending this time with Levy Bio. We look forward to speaking with you again as we hit our goals and achieve our milestones. With that, I'll turn things back to OFER. Back to you, OFER.