Moolec Science SA

Good morning and welcome to Mulek's conference call. My name is Michael Bowen from ICR, Strategic Communications and Advisory. During this conference call, all participants will be muted. After management's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Please also note that today's session is being recorded. Mulek announced today its first quarter fiscal year 2024 business highlights. The document is now available on the company's investor relations website at ir.mulekscience.com. This morning, you will hear from Gaston Palladini, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Mulek Science, together with Amit Dhingra, Chief Science Officer, and Jose Lopez Lecoubet, Chief Financial Officer. In today's call, we will be referring to a presentation that will be available on the company's investor relations website. This conference call is mainly for informational purposes only, and during this call, the company will be making some forward-looking statements regarding future events and results. Statements that are not historical facts, including but not limited to statements about the company's beliefs and expectations are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Further information regarding these and other risks will be included in the company's annual report on Form 20F filed with the SEC, later also available on our investor relations website. Now I would like to turn the call over to Mulek's CEO to comment on our business and recent developments. Gaston, please go ahead.

Thank you, Michael. Hello, everyone. I am happy to present our quarterly business update conference call. I want to thank you all in advance for your interest and support. Not much time has passed since our last update, but this quarter has been another solid period of performance and development. After having a great 2023 fiscal year, where we announced many great breakthroughs in our development, we certainly continue to steadily deliver and execute on our strategies. I would like to start by outlining today's agenda on slide three. First, let me briefly review MULEC's business opportunity. Second, our chief science officer, Amit Dhingra, will walk you through our latest scientific and operational progress. Third, Bulex Chief Financial Officer Jose López-Necube will go through our financial highlights from Q1. Let's move now to slide four. This morning, I will start our remarks by quickly re-emphasizing the important work we do here at MOLEC. MOLEC is using science to bypass dependence on animals by genetically engineering plants to produce the proteins of animals in addition to the native plant proteins. MOLEC is at the forefront of contributing a solution to the current unsustainable food industry. We are a science-based food ingredient company using molecular farming, a cutting-edge technology to move away from traditional practices and over-consume resources and contribute to excessive gas emissions. Let's move now to slide six to quantify the massive market opportunity ahead. we are exposed to a very large agro market, sitting in an $829 billion market by 2025, mostly represented by processed meat, such as burgers, sausages, meatballs, brown meat, nuggets, cold cuts, Will it focus on these big markets on top of the alternative protein niche? Due to the good scientific and product development results we have obtained, and in comparison to the chart we showed last quarter, we have included iron supplementation as one of our addressable markets. Our ingredients can be applied not only to the food ingredient industry, but also to the pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, supplementation, and others. I would like to comment on our product development and research team for their excellent work in developing revolutionary products. And I would like to hand the call over to Amit, Boonex Chief Science Officer, to comment on our scientific and operational progress. Amit, over to you.

Thank you, Gaston. I will provide an update on our scientific and operational progress section of today's agenda. Let's go to slide eight. First, I will highlight the progress on our gamma little lake acid safflower oil, which we call GLASSO. During the first quarter of fiscal year 2024, which corresponds to calendar year June to September 2023, we successfully harvested 35 hectares of GLASSO with a notable yield of 1.8 tons per hectare, which exceeds average yields by approximately 50%. At the same time, we maintained expression levels of up to 60% from the previous harvest, exceeding our original expectations by 10%. We have been in the process of scaling up our operations as we move towards commercialization, and we expect to plant between 100 to 350 hectares in fiscal year 2024. In 2025, we still have plans to harvest, crush, and market our 2024 Glasso seed, and we continue to actively engage in discussions with potential clients and partners to expand and advance our Glasso business. This will result in risk reduction as we prepare to launch our inaugural molecular farming product Moreover, it represents a crucial step towards diversification in terms of our product portfolio, as well as resilience against potential challenges from weather and geography. On to slide nine. Let us walk together through our process of discovery to selection to get that one selected event of molecular seed for our Soy One, the first product of our Piggy Soy platform. Our ultimate goal is to get to that one transgenic event that has the best combination of the highest expression level of animal protein and yield performance. Then that seed is multiplied for further work. For discovery, we started by synthesizing DNA or the gene coding for animal proteins of interest. After that, the gene was inserted into an expression vector As I explained to you during our first conference call in May 2023, a vector is like a truck that allows us to deliver the cargo of gene expression components into the cells and integrate the DNA coding for animal protein into the plant DNA so that the animal protein can be expressed stably in the transgenic lines through different generations. During the genetic transformation stage, vectors are inserted into plant chromosomes Plants expressing the desired animal proteins were then selected by using PCR and were grown in cultures. In this project, we first started with 550 zero generation or T0 transgenic events that were narrowed down to 256 transgenic generation 1 or T1 events using PCR tests that allowed us to know whether or not those events contained the desired animal protein genes or not. Thereafter, the remaining events were further narrowed down using the main KPIs from the plants where we finally selected 140 second generation transgenic or T2 transgenic events. We are currently at the developmental stage. We have just finished harvesting and analyzing our third generation or T3 transgenic events using animal protein level of expression as our key selection criteria. I will discuss the results in the next slide. To complete the process first, we will select some of these transgenic events and we will test them in the field to see how they behave under real agronomic conditions in order to finally select the best event. In the next slide, I will provide details about the expression level of the animal protein, which is myoglobin observed in the soy one seeds. Slide 10 shows our soybean seeds consistently expressing high level of myoglobin, both in the second and third generation of seeds. The exceptional expression levels of myoglobin achieved in the Piggy Soy platform remains consistent across two generations. This chart shows 16 selected events and the corresponding level of animal protein expression for transgenic generation number two, or T2, which is the green bars. And that was tested in June this year. And generation number three, or T3, represented by gray bars, tested in November this year. You can see that the expression values for T3 correlate with T2, while expression values reached up to 26.6% total soluble protein in the T2 generation. And in T3, we were able to achieve 20.4% total soluble protein expression in one of the lines. This is a demonstration that the annual protein continues to express stably through the generations. We expect these expression values to stabilize with the advancement of generations and identification of completely homozygous lines. I would also like to point out that these T3 expression analyses were performed at our own lab, the Mu Labs located in College Station, Texas. As depicted in the prior slide, we will finally narrow our selection of events to the one best candidate after testing the performance of several selected events in the field. Now, an update on our fully equipped molecular biology lab. I'm very pleased to share with you that Mulek has successfully set up MooLabs, a fully owned plant molecular biology lab in a research incubator space operated by Texas A&M University College Station, Texas. Our lab became fully operational in September of 2023, and this is where I oversee our plant molecular farming team. As I said, the lab is currently 100% operational, and our aim is to focus efforts here in the molecular characterization of the transgenics produced by Molec. The company is able to now perform a significant part of R&D in plant biology projects here at this location. Compared to conducting research via third-party labs, as done in the past, the initiative to centralize MULEX molecular farming research will establish a clear chain of command, facilitate quick implementation of decisions, ensure higher standard quality control, and improve the timeliness and quality of work while reducing costs. These new facilities have already come to generate cost and time savings for each of the phases of the R&D projects we've completed there thus far, which have demonstrated accelerated and streamlined development compared to the use of third party labs. Overall, I would like to thank my research team for the quality work they've been producing. I will now hand it over to my colleague Jose for the financial overview. Thank you.