Ligand Pharmaceuticals Incorporated

Welcome to the Ligon Pharmaceutical second quarter earnings conference call. My name is Vanessa, and I will be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. To queue up with your question, you can press zero, then one on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to your host, Simon Ledemer. You may begin.

Thank you. Welcome to Ligon's second quarter of 2022 financial results and business update conference call. Some 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'll 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, and the expected timing, completion, and effects of our previously announced plans to spin off the OmniAd business to become a standalone public company pursuant to a business combination with Avista Public Acquisition Corp 2. Additional information concerning our risk factors and other matters concerning Ligon can be found on 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 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. Thanks for joining Ligand's second quarter 2002 financial results conference call. We are executing well across the organization and are pleased to share our success this quarter, highlighted by strong royalty growth, major partner news, and good progress toward our OmniApp spinout. All aspects of the business are on or ahead of plan financially. As Matt Kornberg will go into, we are raising full year 2022 guidance due to our royalty revenue momentum. A couple of years ago in 2020, our initial outlook for royalties within the low 30 million range. Now we are forecasting more than 60 million in 2022. With our current portfolio of royalty generating assets, we are increasingly confident we are on a trend ultimately to surpass 100 million in annual royalties, excluding any contribution from OmniApp. After the spin out is completed and we have more updates on late stage regulatory approvals by partners, we will provide a more detailed framework for our financial outlook. We're excited about our business with the backdrop of what appears to be an improving environment for the equity capital markets. The industry has seen some major positive developments emerge very recently, and there has been significant M&A announced, both in number of deals and size of deals, which indicates the strength and the durability of our industry. We are increasingly excited for a spin out of OmniAb and we believe the market environment is strengthening for the debut of this special company. OmniAb has what we believe are best in class antibody discovery tools that are highly sought out by major industry players to help advance their work in drug discovery. As a standalone company, OmniAb will have a dedicated capital structure and a board and senior leadership team with deep domain expertise to drive the investments and strategy for the company. The very high caliber of partners and the recent string of positive developments and regulatory events underscore how valuable this platform is in the exciting field of antibody drug discovery. As for the actual spin-out process to split Ligand into two independent publicly traded companies, we've advanced the SEC review process In Avista, our SPAC spin-out partner has filed the second amendment to the S-4 in response to comments from the SEC. After the review is fully completed and the registration statements for Avista and OmniApp are declared effective, we will then proceed to the shareholder vote by the Avista SPAC shareholders and the spin-off of OmniApp through the merger with the SPAC. The outlook on timing to close the spin-off and merger and have two independent public companies is currently Q4, 2022. strategically ligand remainco is focused on three primary areas one acquiring royalty rights to late stage assets consistent with what we've done the last five to ten years two continuing to strike partnerships for our capsul and pelican technologies and three refocusing our capital markets activity and messaging for ligand remainco following the omni have spin outs We have good momentum with our royalty portfolio, and our goal is to continue to expand the number of partner assets through acquisition or technology licensing. It's an attractive market to be looking for assets to acquire or invest in. We are ready for RemainCo to operate separately from OmniAb. As a standalone company, we are highly optimistic that RemainCo's business model and growth prospects will create opportunities for both existing and new shareholders and for analysts to engage with YGANDA. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Matt Kornberg to review our financial results and guidance in more detail.