TELA Bio, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Telebio third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Greg Hudacek from the Gil Martin Group. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Felicia, and good afternoon, everyone. Earlier today, Telebio released financial results for the third quarter of 2022. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Joining me on today's call are Tony Koblish, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Roberto Cuca, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that during this conference call, the company may make projections and forward-looking statements regarding future events. We encourage you to review the company's past and future filings with the SEC, including, without limitation, the company's 2021 Form 10Q, excuse me, 10K and Form 10Qs, which identify the specific factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those described in these forward-looking statements. These factors may include, without limitation, statements regarding product development and pipeline opportunities, Product potential, the impact of COVID-19, the regulatory environment, sales and marketing strategies, capital resources, or operating performance. With that, I will turn the call over to Tony.

Thank you, Greg. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today for our third quarter 2022 earnings call. I'm pleased to report that Telebio had another strong quarterly performance. Third quarter revenue was $11.2 million, a 46% increase from the same period in 2021. While we are pleased to see further revenue growth, I continue to believe we haven't seen the full potential of our products as hospitals are still contending with staffing shortages, reduced operating hours resulting in postponed surgeries, and healthcare professionals taking longer than usual vacations during the summer after having put them off last year due to COVID. The good news is the magnitude of these headwinds continues to lessen, which we believe will result in increased procedural volumes and further revenue growth. In particular, the backlog of surgeries we've described on past calls remains high, showing substantial future market opportunity. And notwithstanding headwinds affecting the entire industry, we continue to see Ovatex gain market share each quarter. Our success has been driven by our continued focus on the five factors driving our revenue and revenue growth. These are group purchasing organization access, compelling clinical data, Salesforce size, sales rep productivity, and product portfolio expansion from internal R&D and business development. By improving on even one of these factors, we can grow revenues. By enhancing multiple factors, We can achieve the sort of revenue growth we're reporting today, and by fostering all of them going forward, we can tap into even higher growth potential. Let's take them one by one. Our GPO access efforts are progressing very much on track. As you know, we already have an agreement in place with Health Trust, and that organization's members routinely account for approximately a third of our revenues. October 1st was the day that our recently signed contract with Premier became effective. Premier is the second largest group purchasing organization in the nation, representing over 225,000 providers and 4,400 hospitals. We are pleased to see that Premier has gotten off to a good start with sales to the organization's members already accounting for a noticeable portion of our revenues in October. GPO access is critical to our success as it allows physicians to use our products off the hospital supply room shelf rather than having to go through the utilization committee process. To accelerate uptake in premier hospitals, we've established a compensation incentive premium for our sales force when selling products to this GPO's members for the first six months of the contract. We believe this will increase the adoption rate and align the sales reps with our long-term goal of significant penetration in premier facilities. We are also continuing to pursue contracts with a range of additional GPOs to increase our footprint to cover all significant purchasers in the U.S. We have also been advancing another factor contributing to revenues and their growth, clinical data. We have been pleased with the high-quality outcomes data from recent studies, and we believe these compelling results will enable us to continue capturing market share. In September, two Ovitex studies were presented at the American Hernia Society meeting, demonstrating a low recurrence rate in both ventral and inguinal hernia repair. The 24-month BRAVO study measured the clinical performance of Ovitex for primary and recurrent ventral hernias in an open and minimally invasive procedure study. patients experienced an impressively low recurrence rate of 2.6% compared to the double-digit recurrence rates of competitive products. As seen in the recent publication of our 24-month BRAVO data in the Annals of Medicine and Surgery, we are committed to compiling additional data supporting our products and are progressing with recruitment of BRAVO II, which will have focus on robotic hernia repair. Today, 40% of Ovitex procedures are conducted with the use of a surgical robot in a minimally invasive setting. The use of a surgical robot system in general surgery continues to grow, and we believe Ovitex is well-positioned to take advantage of this trend. Moving on to our sales force, as we noted in our last quarterly call, we reached 57 reps at the end of June, and we are on track to finish 2022 with at least 60 sales reps. We are in the midst of our 2023 budget process and expect to deploy some of the proceeds of our August equity raise to further growing our sales force. We will have more details on what that looks like during our fourth quarter call. Rep productivity is also an essential component of future expansion. The latest metrics from our Playbook 90 program continue to indicate that our newest reps are reaching break-even within three to six months' time. We've had great success with this training process. We are currently preparing additional selling materials based on our 24-month Ovitex clinical data. We anticipate this will make the case for Ovitex even more persuasive in our REST communication with surgeons. And finally, the fifth aspect of our strategy to create stakeholder value is growing our product portfolio. We continue to evaluate product expansion through strategic collaborations, partnerships, or acquisitions, and we are also advancing product development internally on our own and in collaboration with our contract manufacturer. We want to leverage our accomplished sales force by providing them with additional standout products with the same call point as Ovatex and continue to build out our soft tissue preservation and restoration portfolio. We expect to begin rolling out additional products in 2023 and we'll have more to say on that at a later date. With that, I'll turn the call over to Roberto for more details on our third quarter financial results.