Exscientia Plc

Hello everyone, my name is Chris and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to Accenture's business update call for the second quarter of 2022. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. At this time, I'd like to introduce Sarah Sherman, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sarah, you may begin.

Thank you, Operator. A press release in 6K were issued yesterday after U.S. market closed with our first half and second quarter 2022 financial results and business updates. These documents can be found on our website at www.investors.extension.ai, along with the presentation for today's webcast. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements on our call. These may include statements about our projected growth, revenue, business models, preclinical and clinical results, and business performance. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these statements. Unless required by law, Accenture does not undertake any obligation to update these statements regarding the future or to confirm these statements in relation to actual results. On today's call, I'm joined by Andrew Hopkins, Chief Executive Officer, Rich Law, Chief Business Officer, and Ben Taylor, CFO and Chief Strategy Officer. Dave Hallett, Chief Operating Officer, and Gary Paradue, Chief Technology Officer, will also be available for the Q&A session. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Andrew.

Thank you, Sarah. In the first half of 2022, we made significant advances across the business to scale our team and operations. We have continued to deliver progress across our collaborations and pipeline, positioning us for long-term growth. A detailed overview of our pipeline progress is included in our press release. We believe the decisive actions we've taken to continuously refine and focus our strategy have put us in a strong position to deliver across our portfolio of drug projects. Whilst remaining agile, and entrepreneurial in our approach. We are well capitalized with $732 million in cash at the end of the quarter, providing several years' runway, which is highly pertinent in today's market. On the operational front, our unique, nearly equal balance of talent between drug discovery scientists and technologists continues to be an area of strength. It's what underlines our ability to combine expert drug hunter knowledge with tech scalability. In the first half of this year, we continue to add new talent for our team in key areas of growth for the company, including Dr. Mike Crams as our Chief Quantitative Medicine Officer, whose expertise is invaluable as we begin to plan for clinical development in the coming years, and Professor Charlotte Dean, who joined to lead Biologics AI in January. Charlotte is a renowned leader in the field and was recently awarded an appointment to the most excellent order of the British Empire, for leading the UK Research and Innovation's rapid response call for projects addressing issues arising from the pandemic. And also, Eileen Jennings-Brown has joined us as our Chief Information Officer from her previous position as Head of Technology at the Wellcome Trust. We've also gone through a period of transformative growth. At the time of our IPO in October 2021, our team was around 200 employees. By the end of June in 2022, we had grown to more than 400 employees at locations across the world, building new areas of expertise and growth for the company, such as our clinical and precision medicine infrastructure. During this time, we've also made considerable progress in our pipeline, adding additional programs and progressing existing programs to later stages of discovery. We started the year by announcing our historic deal with Sanofi to develop a portfolio of AI, precision engineering, and medicines. Together with Sanofi, we have formally accepted two programs into the collaboration, one in oncology and the other in immunology and inflammation. We are also exploring the potential role of dozens of additional targets identified using a central biologist AI platform in these therapeutic areas, and we look forward to providing additional updates this year. Beyond small molecules, you may recall that our collaboration with Sanofi includes leveraging our translational platform for biologics. We're pleased to say that we have initiated our first project to help Sanofi select patients for one of the important antibody discovery programs. By leveraging our translational platform for our partners, we aim to potentially increase the probability of success for the patients we are seeking to help. Our journey to achieve automation in drug discovery development is well underway. We're working towards alternating not just design, but also some of the biggest bottlenecks in the design-make-test cycle, such as compound synthesis and molecular profiling. Our state-of-the-art automation suite will become operational next year, and we're excited about the potential to usher in a new era of what's possible in accelerated productivity. And with the announcement of top-line data in our A2A program, EXS 21506, one of our first-ever AI-designed molecules to enter clinical trials, We demonstrated the ability of our AI platform to create novel molecules based upon defined design objectives. We're engaged in ongoing translational work to establish a predictive biomarker to enable targeting patients most likely to benefit from a molecule. This has the potential to unlock the key challenge in effectively treating patients with high adenosine signature cancers. We look forward to sharing more details on our progress. We're using simulation-guided clinical trial design to plan our clinical trial for EXS21546, which we're calling Ignite AI. Identifying the right patients remains core to our approach. We're also using our translation platform and innovative approach to trial design as we plan our CDK7 CTA submission by the end of the year. We expect to start a trial in patients in the first half of 2023. Overall, We look forward to nominating additional drug candidates and reporting further pipeline progress in the second half of the year. And now, I want to take a deeper dive into the interplay between our business models and our technology strategy and how we're able to achieve productivity and why we are so confident in our ability to achieve success in the future. In short, the more we do, the more we learn. Accenture's overarching mission is to create better drugs for patients by applying AI and novel technologies, which allows us to be faster and more scalable than traditional methods. We apply the same tech-enabled strategy to all our programs, whether we're developing new medicines for our own pipeline or for a partner. A fundamental aspect of what we do is based on the scalability of our technology platform. In previous earnings calls, we described how different aspects of our pioneering approach to AI-first drug discovery and precision medicine and why we differentiate it. It is not simply our differentiated technology platform that is key to success, but also the opportunity tech scaling gives to a strategic interplay across our drug discovery pipeline, between our partnerships and our own internal pipeline. The scalability and systems of a technology company means we can create a different way to balance risk compared to a traditional biotech. In our internal pipeline, our focus hones in on areas where we have an established expertise and where we believe our precision medicine platform can provide the greatest probability of success. Our CFO, Ben Taylor, will provide more details on this in a few minutes. Our partnerships not only generate substantial standalone value, but also have the practical application of allowing us to scale. The more we do, the more our platform learns and improves. By applying our tech to new challenges, we're expanding our knowledge base, and more than that, increasing the impact that we can bring to the world. So how does this translate into the actual pipeline? Because of our technology capabilities, today we're able to progress a multitude of discovery programs in our pipeline, balanced between internal and partner programs. We have a phase one asset about to enter a phase one B2. three programs in IND enabling studies, news of which we expect to announce in the coming months, and a rich pipeline of early drug discovery programs that we've highlighted here. Furthermore, beyond what we have presented here, we have an active program of early stage portfolio of target implication and validation projects. We continue to generate targets for our partners, including Sanofi, as mentioned earlier, and have two approved programs moving into design. Focus is critical for us. We have prioritized our resources in those areas where we can have the greatest impact on better drug development, translation, and patient selection. This has resulted in deciding to de-prioritize a few early stage programs so that those resources can be moved to our core areas where we believe our patient-based translational platform can be applied to increase the overall probability of success in selecting the right patients. Our message today is one of focus. and how we can leverage all our platforms and truly impact the probability of success in the clinic going forward. In previous earnings calls, we've talked about Accenture's AI-first end-to-end process to drug creation. We originally pioneered AI-driven drug design, but as the business has grown, we have grown downstream into clinical development and upstream into target identification. We have a number of parallel and complementary approaches to generate new projects for our pipeline and our partnerships. New projects can come via our center bulges, which applies deep learning to genome scale knowledge graphs to identify connections and predict target disease associations. This technology is being actively used to prioritize targets for validation as part of our collaboration with Sanofi. We can also use our patient tissue translational platform to identify new drug targets. You may recall at the AACR earlier this year, we presented an example of how we discovered ALK as a potential new target for ovarian cancer using our human tissue precision medicine platform. We are also sourcing new assays, models, and targets from outside Accenture with programs such as Exelomics, where we're seeking to accelerate early stage research with phenotypic screening of novel disease models with academic labs. I'd like to highlight an example where using our capabilities, in just one quarter, we were able to identify around 20 novel target hypotheses with high confidence from an initial genome-wide search in a collaboration with one of our partners for an inflammation and immunology indication. This is a nice example of the power of our operations, technology, and platform, and we continue to improve them. We plan to present a deep dive of our experimental and AI-driven approaches to target identification and validation at a future earnings goal. I'm now happy to hand over to Richard Law, our Chief Business Officer, who will walk us through how we think about our platform and business development strategies tied together. As evidenced by our news flow, Richard and the business development team are quite prolific and create exceptional value for the company.