Ligand Pharmaceuticals Incorporated

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Ligon Pharmaceuticals second quarter 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 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to you. First speaker today, the head of investor relations, Mr. Simon Latimer. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Welcome to Ligon's second quarter of 2021 financial results and business update conference call. Our speakers for today's call are in separate locations. Speaking today for Ligon will be John Higgins, CEO, Matt Thor, 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 Wigan can be found in our earnings press release and our periodic filings with the FCC. 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 discuss and the closest GAAP financial measures can be found in our earnings release issued earlier today. I'd now like to turn the call over to John Higgins.

Good afternoon, and thanks for joining our second quarter 2021 earnings call. Outstanding financial performance and operating execution are the themes of our call today. We are very pleased with the business and how the company is doing. In Q2, Ligan posted one of the highest quarterly revenues in the company's history. Along with that strong top-line performance, we are also enjoying robust earnings and strong cash flows. While most of our revenue is currently driven by Captisol, we are very pleased to see the business flourishing across all technology platforms, as Captisol sales are expected to diminish later this year and next with lower demand for Remdesivir and the evolution of the COVID-19 medical landscape. We are delighted with the turnout for the call today. We've got a number of new investors who are beginning to look at the story. And for those who are new to Ligand, just a quick background. Our company offers integrated drug discovery services, and our service offerings are broader than ever, and our partner achievements with R&D and clinical success have been outstanding these past few months. The value of our services and the technology and inventions we provide are result in significant milestone revenue along with royalty economics on high-value medical treatments. Over the past two years, we have increased our investments in our laboratories and expanded our R&D team to provide more customized services to our partners. Our investments are paying off. Driving our investments is a shift in the industry. We are witnessing an evolution in how pharma and biotech partners tackle their R&D projects. Increasingly, they are looking to well-fitted, highly qualified partners like Ligan to help answer their needs in a more end-to-end fashion. Ligan enjoys a premier spot in the industry as a technology licensor. Now, with our expanded services, particularly with our OmniAb antibody business and with our protein expression platform, we provide both access to what we believe is best-in-class technology and also expert information. customer service, and partner support. Our investments are fueling our success as we've been securing more and bigger deals than ever before. In a moment, Matt Ford will walk through our roster of new and expanded deals. In addition to internal investments to expand our offerings, we continue to leverage M&A to build and strengthen our business. Last year, we closed four transactions, and all four are driving our deal-making. expanding our patents and generating revenue from license fees and royalty payments. Two excellent examples are the major partnerships with Jazz and Merck we gained through our acquisition of Phoenix less than a year ago. Both companies recently received regulatory approvals of medicines partnered with Ligand that will compete in global billion-dollar markets. Ligand will soon start to earn royalties from both products. This past quarter, we relocated our corporate headquarters to our Emeryville site in the San Francisco Bay Area. We've expanded our facilities and operations in Emeryville as we invest more to build our OmniApp business. We still have a strong and proud center of robust R&D and administrative operations in San Diego. Yet the move of our principal offices to the Bay Area is supported by the location of many of our partners and access to R&D services and talent to support our work. We look forward to hosting you at our new headquarters when you travel to San Francisco. As a final topic, after the close of the second quarter, we expanded and further diversified our board of directors with the appointment of Jennifer Cochran. Jennifer is a tremendous addition to the LIGAN board with impeccable credentials in bioengineering combined with a fantastic track record of building businesses and translating research into practical applications. She also has great intuition for where the industry is heading. We met Jennifer about a year ago during our acquisition of Accela, where she had been a co-founder. In addition to her entrepreneurial acumen for the past 15 years, Jennifer has been on the faculty at Stanford University, where she is the chair of the Department of Bioengineering, a faculty member of the Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering Department, and a member of the Cancer Biology, Biophysics, and Immunology programs. She has published nearly 100 research papers, and has named on more than 50 patents and invented the number of small molecule drugs, including one that is in phase three trials now for ovarian cancer. At Ligand, we are committed to excellence throughout the organization and to diversity and inclusion. And we're delighted that Jennifer is the third woman to be serving on our board. I will now turn the call over to Matt Kornberg to review our financials.