Ligand Pharmaceuticals Incorporated

Good afternoon and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Lignin Pharmaceuticals Quarter 1 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star and then the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Simon Letmer. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thanks, Rachel. Welcome to Ligon's first quarter of 2021 financial results and business update conference call. All of our speakers for today's call are in separate locations. Speaking today for Ligon will be John Higgins, CEO, Matt Foer, COO, and Matt Kornberg, CFO. We will use non-GAAP financial measures, and some of our statements will be forward-looking, including those related to our financial condition, results of operations, financial guidance, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Additional information concerning risk factors and other matters concerning lagging can be found in our earnings press release and our periodic filings with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this conference call. A reconciliation between the non-GAAP financial measures we discussed and the closest GAAP financial measure can be found in our earnings release issued today. I'd now like to turn the call over to John Higgins.

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining our first quarter 2021 earnings call. This year is off to an excellent start for LIGAN both operationally and financially. It feels great to be well into 2021 as now we are really beginning to leverage our acquisitions from last year scientifically. and the U.S. is advancing into a better phase of the pandemic. As the health environment improves in the U.S., we are seeing an uptick in business activity. The Ligand team across the board has done an excellent job managing the business this past year, and now we see increasing interest for licensing our platforms and expanding work with partners, including with new and existing big pharma partners who see the value our technologies bring. Also, I'm very pleased to report business travel is coming back for the leadership at Ligand. It's invigorating to be able to interact directly with our scientists once again across our multiple laboratories in the U.S., especially since we added many new members to our team through acquisitions during the pandemic. MAT4 will give an update on the business, and I note that each of our major tech platforms is performing very well. We have rebranded our protein expression platform from Phoenix to Pelican. The team of scientists we brought on board with that company is outstanding, and we see promising opportunities for new deals later this year and good progress on some early-stage internal programs. Our IcaGen ion channel unit is firing on all cylinders, and, again, the team driving that platform is A+. They're brilliant scientists with great instincts for partner support that fits so well with our business model. Our IcaGen team closed a major new deal with GSK a few months ago, and continues to deliver superb support to our partner Roche for multiple targets. The outlook for iCogen is very promising as we've been investing in an internal program that we believe may be up for licensing in the coming months. Our OmniApp platform has been a big success over the past five years and is primed to really flourish now over the next couple of years. More licensing deals coming online, the most advanced late-stage calendar of clinical and regulatory news, and expectations for our first Omnia-based product royalties beginning later this year. Five years ago, we started to build our antibody platform. Today, I can say we are very pleased to be a market leader in the space. Antibody research is a primary focus for R&D investment by pharma and big biotech. Significant amounts of money are being allocated to antibody discovery programs for promising medical targets. We have an end-to-end integrated discovery platform with a deep tech stack built on artificial intelligence and a rich history and foundation of biological intelligence. Our partners get access to what we believe is the world's most advanced antibody repertoires in screening technologies to enable unparalleled discovery of next generation therapeutics. As for Captisol, we expect that 2021 will be our largest year ever in terms of sales. After stepping up to support Gilead and the Remdesivir Consortium last year, our manufacturing work was radically rescaled to provide many-fold higher quantities of capsaicin to support demand. The trends with the pandemic are shifting rapidly, and forecasting is challenging at this time. Matt Kornberg will go into that more, and the fact is driving flex to our planning. But nonetheless, we are proud to be serving a vital role supporting this major COVID-19 treatment, and we will be there to support our global partners for whatever they require. Our thoughts are with those in India and other countries who are now facing the worst of the pandemic. We acquired Capsul 10 years ago, and it has been an amazing and important success on many levels. In addition to Remdesivir, we are proud to know that Capsul is an integral proprietary ingredient in many life-saving medicines. The outlook for the rest of the year is promising as we see as many as four new royalty-bearing partner products being approved and getting launched. Two are from our Omnia business, and two are from our Pelican unit. And as we look to next year, we have growing anticipation for the potential approval of sparsantin from Travere. Given the quality of clinical data Travere announced in Q1, along with the market need and the size of our royalty, we believe this product has the potential to become one of our largest royalty-bearing assets. Now, with that, I will turn the call over to Matt Kornberg for a more detailed review of our financial performance.