Ligand Pharmaceuticals Incorporated

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Ligand Third Quarter Earnings Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the conference over to Melanie Herman, Head of Investor Relations. Melanie, please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Legion's third quarter 2026 earnings call. With me on the call today are CEO Todd Davis, Chief Financial Officer Octavio Espinoza, Vice President of Portfolio Strategy and Investments Lauren Hay, and Paul Hadden, Senior Vice President of Investments and Business Development. During the call today, we will review the financial results released earlier today and provide commentary on our recent business development activity and partner portfolio, followed by a question and answer session. Before we get started, I would like to point out that we will be discussing non-GAAP results, which exclude certain items such as stock-based compensation, amortization of intangible assets, amortization or impairment of financial royalty assets, transaction costs, and gains or losses from derivative assets and marked market changes in investments, amongst others. I encourage you to review the reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures, which can be found in today's release available on our website. Reconciliations of forward-looking non-GAAP measures are not provided because of the unreasonable effort associated with providing such reconciliations due to the variability in the occurrence of the amounts of certain components thereof. We believe these suggested measures provide valuable insight into our core operating performance both historically and moving forward. Our earnings release and a link to today's webcast can be found in the investor relations section of our website at ligand.com. This call is being recorded and the audio portion will be archived in the investor section of our website. On today's call, we will make forward-looking statements regarding our financial results and other matters related to the company's business. Please refer to this safe harbor statement related to these forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. We remind you that actual events or results may differ materially from those projected or discussed, and that all forward-looking statements are based upon current available information. Lagan assumes no obligation to update these statements. To better understand the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ, we refer you to the documents that Ligand files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, that can be found on Ligand's website at ligand.com or on the SEC's website at sec.gov. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Todd Davis.

Thank you, Melanie, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. The third quarter was an important one for Ligand. Its royalty revenue growing 51% year-over-year to approximately $70 million. Pilsbari, O2VeR, and the addition of the Zoma commercial assets, the BISMO, Ojemda, and MyFIFA led that growth, with the Pilsbari launch at FSGS being a primary growth driver as well. We are also raising our adjusted diluted EPS funds to a range of $9.50 to $9.75 per share, Up from our previously stated range of $9 to $9.50 per share. We have scaled our portfolio meaningfully over the past few months, closing the Zoma acquisition on July 14, which added three key commercial assets and more than 100 pipeline programs. We also made two new investments this quarter, Avancel, an investment in a next-generation CAR-T platform technology, and Ryjunia, Our pipeline remains strong with more than 180 opportunities reviewed so far this year. We are entering an extremely catalyst-rich period at MyGand. and anticipate up to seven pivotal readouts across the portfolio through 2027, five of which came from the Zoma acquisition. I'll use the next few slides to cover the team we've built, what we've accomplished over the past several years and then Tavo will walk you through the financials. Lauren will provide an update on our portfolio and Paul will provide you an update on new investments and the origination pipeline. and Lee Brown. We also built out a systematic portfolio management system led by Lauren Hayne to drive value into our development stage partnerships. We're now focused on more proactively communicating with our partners and doing what we do best, identifying new opportunities within the portfolio, which may offer attractive investment opportunities, as well as increasing portfolio yield and the probability of success Over the past three years, Ligand has committed more than $1 billion across more than 20 investments using three distinct approaches, royalty monetization, project finance, and special situations. The third quarter built on that momentum with the $730 million ZOMA deal, which is the largest transaction in our history, as well as the Reginia and Avancel Investments. This slide shows the results and growth that our strategy has delivered. In 2022, we began shifting to a pure royalty aggregation model by spinning out the Omnia platform and then Phenix, a recombinant protein expression platform now referred to as Primrose Bio, which we spun out in 2023. This pivot transformed us into a capital-wide business model with an efficient cost structure built around a seasoned deal team. From 2022 to the midpoint of our 2026 guidance range, we anticipate royalty revenue would grow at a compound annual growth rate of 34%. Over the same period, adjusted EPS would grow at a compound annual growth rate of 41% This growth was achieved by simultaneously cutting our core OpEx from $92 million in 2022 to an expected $50 million in 2026. With that, I'll turn the call over to Thabo for the financial update. Thabo?