OmniAb, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the OmniAB Inc's First Quarter 2023 Financial Results and Business Update conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Kurt Gustafson, OmniAB Inc's Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. and good morning everyone thank you all for joining our first quarter 2023 financial results conference call there are slides to accompany today's remarks and they are available in the investors section of our website at omniab.com before we begin i would like to remind listeners that comments made during this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws these forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from any anticipated results. These forward looking statements are qualified by the cautionary statements contained in today's press release and our SEC filing. Importantly, this conference call contains time sensitive information that is accurate only as of the date of this live broadcast today, May 11th, 2023. That is required by law. OmniAd undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this call. Joining me on the call today is Matt Foer, President and CEO. During today's call, Matt and I will provide highlights on the company's operations, partner and technology updates, and our recent financial results. At the conclusion of the prepared remarks, we'll open the call to questions. With that, let me turn the call over to Matt Foer.

Thanks, Kurt. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our first quarter 2023 financial results conference call. Omniab has been an independent publicly traded company for just about six months now. So I'd like to start off this morning by taking a quick moment to welcome our new investors and new analysts who are joining today and to just briefly describe a bit of what we do. OmniApp's business model is focused on licensing our proprietary discovery platform to enable our partners to rapidly discover innovative therapeutics. We generate revenue from upfront payments for access to our technology stack, from collaboration or service revenue when a partner asks us to do work for and with them, from milestone payments related to advancement of clinical phases, regulatory or commercial achievement, and from royalties on net sales of our partner's products. We believe OmniAb has the most diverse host systems for fully human and bispecific antibody discovery with the industry's only four species platform. Our technology stack is driven at its core by the biological intelligence of our engineered transgenic animals paired with our high throughput screening technologies to enable the discovery of high quality, fully human antibody therapeutic candidates for a wide range of diseases. Our robust base of experience coupled with our close collaborations with partners gives us critical insight into the industry, and creates a positive feedback loop to advance and expand our proprietary platform. We strive to keep our technology offerings at the forefront of our industry. And in a few slides, I'll discuss our branded OmniDeep offering, which leverages in silico capabilities, such as structural modeling, artificial intelligence, and machine learning across our technology platforms in order to further enable our partners' work. OmniDeep is the first of our technology launches this year, as we also plan to launch our novel heavy-chain-only chicken in the fourth quarter. Leveraging our highly scalable business model, the number of programs underway by partners continues to grow, and that provides significant validation of the value our technology brings to our partners. And we continue to drive business development efforts. to attract additional partners as we participate in this large and growing market, which is projected to reach about $279 billion in 2025. With our current resources and our dedicated staff of over 100 employees and a proven technology platform, we believe we're positioned for growth to address major unmet medical needs for novel therapeutics. We continue to expand partner relationships, which totaled 70 partners at the end of the first quarter, with the addition of a new license with the Scripps Research Institute related to assets now being developed by Cessation Therapeutics. Subsequent to quarter end, we also signed a new platform license agreement with Neurocrine Biosciences. Our partners represent a wide range of pharma companies, and we continue to attract high-quality partners that are seeking our discovery platform and our team's scientific collaboration services. Approximately 20% of our partners are among the world's top 20 pharmaceutical companies as measured by global revenue. I'll also highlight here that this industry is constantly expanding and consolidating with new companies being formed and companies being acquired, and that dynamic will sometimes impact the number of partners that we report. That's expected to be the case with Cgen and Pfizer, given their previously announced and planned consolidation. I note here, too, that our agreements are generally all structured so that the economics to OmniAB are tied and maintained to the program, even in instances where there are changes in ownership. As I mentioned, our portfolio continues to grow and reached over 300 programs with 27 programs in the clinic or approved for commercialization at the end of Q1. During the quarter, we added a net of 10 new programs to our portfolio. The pie chart on this slide breaks out our 301 programs by stage of development. The discovery phase is large and growing, with a base totaling 260 programs, in addition to 14 programs in the preclinical stage. In the clinic, our partners have 20 programs in phase one, two in phase two, and two in phase three. There are three approved drugs utilizing OmniAb-derived antibodies, and we're recognizing royalty revenue from commercial sales of Zimbarilumab and melamab in China, both of which are also being pursued in other markets. In the first quarter, we had a new program enter the clinic with Segen, who initiated a Phase I clinical trial of SGN-BB228, which is a CD228 and 4,1-BB bispecific molecule that's in clinical development for advanced melanoma and other solid tumors. As I mentioned on our last quarterly call, based on discussions with partners, we see potential for three to five new omniab-derived antibodies to enter the clinic in 2023. We strive to provide utmost flexibility to meet our partners' evolving scientific needs, as we believe generating large and diverse repertoires of high-quality antibodies increases the likelihood of success in optimizing desired therapeutic characteristics. The science behind individual programs drives our partners' use of our different engineered animals, and in many cases, they use more than one source for a program. Partners currently have antibodies in clinical trials that are rat-derived, that are mouse-derived, and are chicken-derived, and we continue to see the versatility of our platform showing in the number of modalities and formats being employed by our partners both preclinically and clinically. Our partners made a number of public announcements about their clinical and commercial progress during the first quarter and in recent weeks. Notably, in January, we received $35 million in milestone payments from Janssen related to Tecvali, which Kurt will discuss. Regarding other progress, I'll start with Batoclumab. Batoclumab is in clinical development by Hanol, by Harbor Biomed, and by ImmunoVan. Harbor Biomed announced positive top-line results from its Phase III clinical trial in China for the treatment of generalized myasthenia gravis. The panel has announced that they're making progress on plans to initiate a Phase III in Japan later this year, also for the treatment of generalized myasthenia gravis. In addition, Immunivan announced that it expects to report initial results from its Phase II clinical trial in Graves' disease in the second half of this year. Immunovant is also running clinical trials in generalized myasthenia gravis, thyroid eye disease, and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy. And for the next generation anti-FCRN IMVT-1402, which was discovered using our OmniRAT technology, Immunovant announced plans to initiate a Phase I clinical trial for autoimmune disease. I want to make one clarifying note regarding the economics for both beta-climaz and the 1402 programs, which is that these molecules were originally discovered by Hanol using OmniRAT, and any payments that we receive will come from Hanol through defined sharing economics that are built into our agreement with them. As I mentioned, CGEN recently initiated a Phase I clinical trial of SGM-BB228, a CD228 and 41BB bispecific molecule in advanced melanoma and other solid tumors. And a comment also here on ASCO. I'll note that based on the titles and presentations that have been disclosed, we expect a number of our partners will present new clinical data for OmniAB-derived programs at the ASCO annual meeting that is taking place coming up here in June. As mentioned in our press release this morning, we'll be launching our OmniDeep platform at next week's PEGS meeting in Boston. Our head of systems engineering, Bob Chen, will be presenting case studies highlighting OmniDeep. OmniDeep is a suite of in silico tools for therapeutic discovery and optimization that have been woven throughout OmniAB's various technologies and capabilities. These tools include structural modeling, molecular dynamic simulations, large proprietary multi-species antibody databases, AI and machine and deep learning sequence models, and additional features. Leveraged with the biological intelligence of our engineered animals and our screening technologies, such as exploration, OmniDeep allows for rapid identification of candidates with the right affinity, specificity, and developability profiles to lead to more effective and efficient drug development. These proprietary capabilities have been part of our internal research efforts for many years, and we've recently expanded them, especially for programs with some of our larger partners. Our extensive capabilities centered around ion channels and transporters also leverage OmniDeep, which we view as a differentiated tool for viable target-to-lead delivery. We have capabilities that are particularly effective for difficult and high-value ion channel targets. capabilities were originally established and built around small molecules and are now being applied to multiple formats and modalities for our partners. Not only do we value the relationships we have with our partners, we also help to create value through their feedback on the discovery process and areas that they find of interest to their pipeline expansion plans. We utilize this input to further enhance and innovate our technology platform to maintain what we see as a leading position within the industry. We have a highly scalable business model, and we're poised to facilitate the development of therapeutic candidates into the clinic by our partners, as well as to continue to do new deals with structures that create value for all stakeholders, and also that expand our portfolio with new partners. And we look forward to keeping you updated as we execute on this strategy. So with that, let me now turn the call back over to Kurt for a discussion of the first quarter financials. Kurt? Thanks, Matt.