PAVmed Inc.

Good day, and welcome to the PathMed Third Quarter 2023 Business Update Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode, and should you need any assistance during the call, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone, and if you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please also note that today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Michael Parks, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Michael.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's third quarter 2023 business update call. The press release announcing our business update for the company and financial results for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2023 is available on the PABMED website. Please take a moment to read the disclaimer about forward-looking statements. The business update press release and this conference call both include forward-looking statements, and these forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from statements made. Factors that could cause actual results to differ are described in the disclaimer and in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. For a list and description of these and other important risk factors or risk factors and uncertainties that may affect future operations, see Part 1, Item 1A, entitled Risk Factors in PABED's most recent annual report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC and subsequent updates filed in quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and any subsequent Form 8-K filings. Except as required by law, PABED disclaims any intentions or obligations to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect changes in expectations or in events, conditions, or circumstances on which the expectations may be based, or that may affect the likelihood that actual results will differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements. I would now like to turn the call over to Dr. Leshawn Acklog, PAVMED Chairman and CEO. Dr. Acklog?

Thanks, Mike, and thanks, everyone, for joining us this morning. We look forward to providing you with this update on PAVMED's business and finances. First, a quick reminder that we held a separate business update call for PAVMED subsidiary Lucid Diagnostics yesterday. Today, I will limit my comments on Lucid's business to key highlights. I would encourage you to view the recording of yesterday's call, which is available on the Lucid website, for further details from Lucid's business update. First, some quick background. PadMed is a commercial stage medical technology company with two subsidiaries, which are marketing commercial products, privately held Veris Health and NASDAQ-listed Lucid Diagnostics. As the parent company, PadMed provides a shared services infrastructure, including management services, to each subsidiary. The model drives substantial economies of scale and an infrastructure which facilitates licensing or acquisition of high-value assets, such as Lucid and Veris. We implemented a strategic restructuring in early 2023 to focus substantially all of our resources and efforts on our two commercial enterprises, Lucid and Veris, and this update will reflect that strategy. That said, I'll briefly note that we have one active internal R&D project in partnership with Novasound to develop a next-generation intravascular ultrasound device. That progress is progressing very well, having completed two or three milestones. I will also note, as I have in recent calls, we remain very active on the business development side, since current market conditions offer a plethora of high-value assets, which may provide real opportunities to enhance PadMed shareholder values. Let me start with some highlights for Veris and Lucid before proceeding to a deeper dive Veris update. Veris Health is undergoing a commercial restructuring and expansion that is currently underway under the leadership of our president, Gary Manning, who started several months ago. We have active strategic discussions with large academic medical centers and feel there's great promise there. Our next generation VAERS cancer care platform is scheduled to launch this quarter. And we have active discussions with large biopharma companies on the cancer care platform's biopharma module to serve as a digital companion for novel cancer therapeutics. Finally, the implantable model, monitor, excuse me, is progressing towards FDA submission and commercial launch in 2024. As I mentioned yesterday, Q3 has been the most important quarter in Lucid's history as we've crossed several critical milestones in translating study test volume growth into revenue and revenue growth. Briefly, quarterly e-cigar test volume grew 17 percent, and quarterly revenue growth increased 376 percent. Our revenue cycle management upgrade has demonstrated some solid progress in the first full quarter reporting. Clinical utility studies with near-perfect results have had their results released, and two of them have been accepted for peer review publication. One is pending. Our Direct Contracting Initiative has netted its first employer contract, and our new VP of Employer Markets is pursuing offering eSAGARD as a benefit to employers. And finally, as we announced this week, eSAGARD 2.0 has launched with clear benefits in performance as well as in the per-sample assay costs. Let's now proceed to a deeper update on VERUS.