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 first quarter 2023. 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 would like to introduce Sarah Sherman, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sarah, you may begin.

Thank you, Operator. A press release and 6K were issued this morning with our first quarter 2023 financial results and business update. 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, Dave Hallett, Chief Scientific Officer, and Ben Taylor, CFO and Chief Strategy Officer. Gary Peridot, Chief Technology Officer, and Mike Krems, Chief Quantitative Medicine 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. Today, we're going to talk about a differentiated approach to personalized medicine. how we use complex primary patient tissue samples as preclinical models. Combining this with our in-house multi-homeless capabilities, we can go from targeted identification all the way through to the clinic. 2023 is off to an exciting start as we continue to advance our pipeline and strengthen our business. We've made significant progress across our internal and partner programs, including advancing two molecules into the clinic, EXS4318 and EXS21546. An additional molecule, DSP2342, was advanced by Sumitomo Pharma, which was a result of an early collaboration with Accenture that is now complete. This marks our sixth novel molecule created for Accenture's generative AI platform to enter the clinical stage. We've expanded our precision oncology pipeline by initiating IND enabling programs for EXS74539, an LSD1 inhibitor, and EXS73565, a MULT1 protease inhibitor. More recently, we presented multiple posters of the AACR annual meeting, highlighting research that continues to validate our end-to-end approach and demonstrates the potential of a platform to rapidly advance high-quality drug candidates towards a clinic. Our team's commitment to strong execution has enabled us to rapidly move programs from discovery through to the clinic. We have achieved a number of milestones already this year. In March, we announced two new wholly-owned precision design molecules, an LSD1 inhibitor 539 and a MULT1 inhibitor 565. Both programs continue to progress through IND-enabled studies. We expect to provide an update on clinical development plans in the second half of this year. We remain on track to meet our target of four candidates with meaningful economics for Accenture in clinical development by 2024. In February, Bristol-Myers Scripps initiated the first in-human study of EXS4318, our potential first-in-class selective PKC theta inhibitor. 4318 was designed by Accenture and is currently in Phase 1 clinical trials in the United States. Earlier this month, the first patient was dosed in IGNITE, our Phase 1-2 trial evaluating EXS21546 or 546, our A2A receptor antagonist. This was the first AI-designed immuno-oncology drug in the clinic. and we remain on track to dose the first patient in a Phase 1-2 study of GTA-EXS617, our precision-designed CDK7 inhibitor, co-owned with GTA-PARION, in the coming weeks. We also remain well capitalized, with $553 million in cash at the end of the quarter. This provides us with several years' runway to advance our near-term programs without the need to raise external capital. On today's call, we'd like to provide more detail on our approach of combining precision design with personalized medicine. Before handing over to Dave Hallett, our CSO, I want to highlight a recent scientific presence at this year's AACR meeting. We presented data further validating our ability to efficiently design high-quality drug candidates and to identify and predict the right patient populations that may benefit the most from treatment. Firstly, For 546, we presented research on our adenosine burden score, or ABS. It showed that 546 reverses the effect of adenosine analogs ex vivo in patient tissue samples and other complex models. The ABS has been validated in our ongoing IGNITE Phase 1-2 clinical study of 546 and will be discussed further today. IGNITE was designed based on extensive simulations to enable the most effective continuous reassessment method settings. to predict and accurately evaluate the anti-tumor effects of 546 in combination with checkpoint inhibition. The team also presented preclinical data on EXS74539, our precision-designed LSD1 inhibitor. We designed 539 to optimally target LSD1 in future oncology and hematological patient populations. demonstrator at 5C9 has the potential to overcome significant safety limitations of other LSD1 inhibitors through its differentiated profile, combining reversibility and brain penetrance. Lastly, we highlighted the benefits of using data generated with Accenture's precision medicine platform in combination with its proprietary methodology for multi-omics and multi-mobile mapping. By better understanding disease mechanisms, These tools combined can be leveraged to improve patient outcomes by uncovering clinically relevant drug targets already at the discovery stage. We'll go into more depth in this topic shortly. In summary, we have five programs of economics, whether either in the clinic or in IND-enabled studies. all are a testament to the power of our platform and our approach. We are thrilled in our recent advances and look forward to sharing more details of our clinical development plans in the second half of 2023. Today, we would like to focus on how we advance towards our goal of increasing the probability of success within drug discovery and development through an end-to-end, patient-centric approach. In our pipeline to date, we have developed precision design compounds with a patient-driven data approach in a faster and more efficient way than existing methods. I'll now hand over to Dave to walk through how we are working towards predicting clinical responses preclinically.