Neurocrine Biosciences, Inc.

Vice President of Investor Relations

Thank you, operator. Good morning and thanks for joining us on our fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings call. Joining me today are Kevin Gorman, our chief executive officer, Matt Abernethy, our chief financial officer, Eiry Roberts, our chief medical officer, Eric Benevich, our chief commercial officer, and Kyle Gano, our chief business development and strategy officer. I'd like to remind everyone that during today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. I encourage you to review the risk factors discussed in our latest SEC filings. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. With that, I'll hand the call over to Kevin Gorman.

Thank you, Todd. Good morning. Today, we want to look back at the challenge in 2021 and the last ones we've made. We will also be looking forward to 2022. A year that we believe will set us up for tremendous growth for the next several years. 2021 was bracketed in Q1 and Q4 by rising infections, office closures, and significant staffing shortages that constrained our efforts. However, we did make progress identifying many new healthcare professional customers and how to effectively work with them in a very challenging and changing environment. Eric will go into this in more detail at a moment. Turning our attention to the future, The guidance that we released this morning is founded on the lower end by a continuing unpredictable epidemic that bends and flows. The upper end is less constrained by COVID, anticipates reopening of plants for sufficient staff, and the impact in the second half of the year of an expanded sales force more focused on specific points of care than previously. We believe these internal and external events will allow us to bring advice to many more patients who are needlessly suffering with TB. and we'll lead to significant growth both this year and beyond. We have made a good start in addressing this market and we will now re-accelerate growth. Concurrent with our commercial efforts, we have developed a neuroscience portfolio second to none. We have 12 phase two, phase three programs addressing diseases and disorders in neurology, neuropsychiatry and neuroendocrinology. We acknowledge the historical challenges in developing medicines for these diseases. And we have designed this pipeline With multiple compounds, each addressing a different mechanism to treat a specific disease, such as the way we are approaching schizophrenia and the way we're approaching major depression. But the flip side of this, we're developing other compounds where each one of these can address multiple diseases. By attacking diseases from these two fronts, we believe we will be successful in addressing otherwise intractable diseases and disorders. Over the next 18 months, this pipeline will have a number of significant redoubts, and Eiry will go into these in more detail. At this time, I'd like to turn it over to Matt.