ImmunoPrecise Antibodies Ltd.

Greetings. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ImmunoPrecise first quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, John Mullaly. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you and welcome. Dr. Jennifer Bath, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Immunoprecise Antibodies, and Ms. Lisa Hevling, Chief Financial Officer, will be the speakers on today's call. A Q&A period and some pre-submitted questions will follow their summary of the quarter, followed by closing remarks. Before Dr. Beth begins, I've been asked by Immunoprecise Antibodies to read the following safe harbor regarding forward-looking statements. I would like to remind everyone that Immunoprecise remarks today contain forward-looking statements about its current and future plans, expectations, and intentions. results, levels of activity, performance, goals or achievements, or other future events or developments. In preparing these forward-looking statements, several assumptions were made by immunoprecise, and there are risks that results actually obtained by the company may differ materially from those statements. As a consequence, the company cannot guarantee that any forward-looking statement will materialize, and you are cautioned to not place undue reliance on them. Immunoprecise refers current and potential investors to the forward-looking information section of its manager's discussion and analysis issued today at www.cedr.com and on Egger at www.sec.gov. Forward-looking statements represent Immunoprecise's expectations as of September 9, 2021. Except as may be required by security laws, Immunoprecise does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dr. Bath.

Thank you, John, and good afternoon, everyone. We're happy to see such a strong turnout today for our second webcasted earnings call. As you can start to glean from our recent flurry of press releases, this quarter marks an exciting leap toward earning our position on the market as progressive thinkers, formidable competitors, and emerging leaders in our space. Our investments in major strategic initiatives support our bold vision and reinforce our infrastructure to enable us to unite in our mission and continue our fast growth trajectory on a global scale. We've embarked on significant investments that will enable us to achieve great new potential in our contract research, our internally owned therapeutic assets, and new research and manufacturing services. In the previous quarters, our operational sites focused on the development of complementary revenue-generating service offerings, services which are now resulting in new revenue streams. Under the guidance of our recently appointed CSO, Ilsa Ruding, this quarter also saw unprecedented investments driving later stage preclinical asset development toward clinical manufacturing and lead candidate functional validation, which we will provide some insight for you here today. We progress these assets with a real sense of excitement and great anticipation while remaining diligent in our dedication to contract research. I look forward to sharing more details today about several strategic growth events, including exciting progress in our commercial partnerships with Eurofins Discovery and our recently approved French R&D credit, tax credit. We have a lot to look forward to this fiscal year, and we're grateful for the ongoing support of our investors, which enable these tremendous strides forward. This quarter demonstrates the continued successful execution for our strategic development plan. As part of that foundation, we have actively expanded IPA's human capital by investing in key strategic essential hires, including Ms. Carla Dahl, who most recently served as the Global Senior Director of Marketing and Communications at Medtronic. Ms. Dahl's experience leading major global launches, successful brand development campaigns, and operational efficiencies will serve us well at this juncture. As IPA's new Vice President of Marketing, she will intensify our active global marketing efforts, including the aforementioned Europe in Partnership. We have further promoted Dr. Barry Duplantis to Global Vice President of Sales. One of its main objectives is to amplify our increasing presence in North America by actively expanding our world-class sales team. We've also added professional scientific writers to support grant applications, technical documentation, and patent filing. In addition, a candidate was identified to fill the role of IPA's pre-clinical specialist who will oversee aspects of our rapidly progressing programs in Tallam starting this fall. These global roles support additional technical hires at the operational site, hires that are foundational in our ongoing expansion into new markets. In this period, we also named Dr. Dion Neame from Sanofi as our second strategic advisory board member. He joins IPA with broad industry experience and an extensive network and is a welcome addition and resource for IPA. We look forward to ongoing contributions from Dr. Neame. The company also continues to expand its physical footprint. Our Dutch sites are rapidly approaching their expansion date, as next spring the UTREC campus from IPA Europe is anticipated to complete its move into the accelerator building, which is alongside major biopharmaceutical powerhouses Merck, or excuse me, Meris, and Genvab. This is effectively doubling the square footage of usable laboratory space. About one year later, we prepare for the expansion of our Oath Campus from IPA Europe into expanded premises within the current Pivot Park Campus. As we retain our focus on integrating a relatively fragmented service market, we've begun to build a critical mass while being recognized as a CRO leader and an industry partner of choice. This is clearly reflected in our top line results with a revenue increase of 22% year over year. Of note, is the continued increase in the number of clients and the size of current contracts, while also recognizing revenue from recently developed and or expanded services in areas such as high throughput, label, and fluidic-free antibody characterization, hybridoma sequencing, our advanced second-generation B-cell select platform, and the geographical expansion of our manufacturing services. As usual, our CFO, Lisa Heldling, will provide more details on our financial results for the quarter. We have a lot to share with you today as we connect the dots for our listeners as to how our new marketing approaches, tax incentive programs, and also commercial partnerships are designed to catalyze growth in both our contract research and also column partnering relationships. as well as details on how we have enhanced the potential commercial value of our therapeutic assets in TALIM. We've begun building a robust and global marketing team headed up by the aforementioned hire of Ms. Carla Dahl. The foundational building blocks are in place for IPA to soar for a market-leading position. With swift and smart marketing strategies, savvy brand evolutions, and omnichannel communications, Ms. Dahl is now leading efforts to highlight and differentiate our value on the market and compete to win. We've already begun putting processes in place to drive internal marketing efficiencies and fast-track our efforts to support company growth goals and world-class marketing programs. On a related note, our robust co-marketing programs with Eurofins are poised to position IPA on a global scale. This marks the first of many partnerships highlighting the value of our unique suite of antibody products and services to industry-leading organizations and sets the stage for our market narrative as the emerging leader in end-to-end services. Combining the complementary strengths of Eurofins' in vitro pharmacology services, and IPAs in vitro and in vivo characterization and discovery technologies, this collaboration provides greater access to solutions that empower scientists to pursue life-changing medicines in a diverse range of indications. Many notable advancements along this collaboration will be seen over the course of the next couple of months, as both companies actively promote this unique commercial opportunity at conference exhibitions, through presentations, through co-marketing materials, and also in website integration. Further complementing our Eurofins marketing efforts will be a surround sound approach to announcing our CIR tax accreditation status to eligible French companies who engage with us in Europe. This added benefit to the full service advantage of IPA fortifies our platform of industry recognition, added value, and our ongoing expansion in France. Lastly, additional action on our business development front has been the advancement of sales and partnering activities throughout Brazil, Korea, and Japan, as our global BD platform in conjunction with a few key collaborations have been successful in generating new leads from those jurisdictions. Our column assets are key drivers in IPS value creation. This underpins the importance of our recent appointment of Dr. Ruding, to the role of chief scientific officer, where her impressive within broad scientific disciplines help to propel IPA and TALIM in tangible and measurable ways. Dr. Rudink is actively expanding her scientific team to support the rapidly maturing TALIM assets. She's finalized the discovery phase of our earlier stage programs, as well as the conclusion as to exactly how later stage lead candidates carry out their specific functions. called modes of action. Most recently, her team worked to gain insight into the functional diversity of lead molecules to determine their specific but different clinical applications. For instance, for our TATX 112 program, which we recently announced, we supported pharma inquiries by identifying molecules which are suitable for antibody drug conjugation, also known as ADC-based therapies, due to their ability to enter a cell upon binding a target, a process called internalization. Additionally, we've confirmed that antibodies in the same program have the ability to interfere with a ligand binding to its target, which has spurred an investigation at IPA of exactly which candidates may enhance signals meant to communicate inside the target cells and which block this critical message. Now, why this is important is that each function may impart different potential therapeutic uses and distinctly different market opportunities. Additionally, we are pleased to announce that we are finalizing the in vitro functionality screening with the aim of nominating the best lead candidates for further development in our collaboration with Twist Biopharma. We also have exciting times ahead of us for our TATX21 program, another one that we recently shared with our investment community, as we are currently evaluating the ability of those leads to directly interfere with LDL uptake in vitro. These initial proof-of-concept studies are crucial and of value at staff in determining the potential of these assets to both prevent and treat cardiovascular disease. Now over to our SARS-CoV-2 programs, we're actively preparing for first-in-human studies. We are excited to announce that we have committed to ChemPartner Biologics for clinical batch production. This global CMO has a rare capability and capacity of producing all five components of our therapeutic cocktail in parallel and in a relatively short timeframe. We're also looking forward to reporting data on additional preclinical data points. And currently, we're working with Eurotins yet again to fine-tune the final details of the IMD-enabling toxin PK studies, which are scheduled to start in October. In parallel to these and with the support of our third-party regulatory team, we are compiling the required data for the IMD submission. To facilitate a successful IMD application, we also have engaged the FDA, and we expect feedback on our proposed clinical strategy and supporting data package at the end of our fiscal quarter two. Overall, as the CDC and global regulatory authorities decide on the recourse for addressing COVID and associated variants in the long term, I am again suggesting that COVID is unfortunately here to stay and is a long-term problem that will require a sustainable solution. We firmly believe that IPA's polytope program has the potential to address all current and future SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, and we're very excited that our cocktail therapy, which has been shown to have 100% efficacy in a very well-established SARS-CoV-2 animal model in both the treatment and protection of SARS-CoV-2 infection, has held up in in vitro preclinical screenings to all tested variants of interest and all variants of concern. We believe that we have developed and possessed the only first-generation anti-SARS therapeutic that has retained this broad efficacy. Also importantly, our strategy has enabled us to rationally design a sustained efficacious antibody cocktail as our platform has been designed to enable the rapid prediction and reformulation should be required. Lastly, these internal projects are designed to ultimately drive transformative revenue generation opportunities for IPA with upfront payments as well as clinical milestones and competitive commercial royalties. In the case of our assets developed through TALIM, the majority of the novel molecules' commercial rights are completely unencumbered, providing for strong upside on the commercial end for IPA across a class of assets, including monotherapies and cocktail therapies, as well as across multiple disease indications. These efforts to unlock shareholder value while nascent are extremely promising, and we are leaving no stone unturned. in realizing the success of programs that are selected to move forward for development. And with this, I'd like to turn the call over to Lisa to discuss the course financial results.