Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Alexandria Real Estate Equity second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press stars and one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press stars and two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Paula Schwartz and the best of relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. This conference call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. The company's actual results might differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements is contained in the company's periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Joel Marcus, Executive Chairman and Founder. Please go ahead, Joel.

Thank you very much, Paula, and welcome, everybody, to Alexandria's second quarter earnings call and our first full quarter done virtually. And as I always do, I want to thank the entire Alexandria family for an outstandingly executed second quarter, really in all respects and by all metrics, as I said, our first full reporting quarter virtually. It was once said, a couple of notes about change, everything changes but change. And as I've quoted before, the award-winning visionary author Jim Collins noted, to be built to last, you must be built to change. And Stephen Hawking said, intelligence is the ability to adopt a change. So Alexandria has always been, I think, resilient and very responsive to a changing environment. We're all blessed compared to many who are struggling during this pandemic, and I want to My heart goes out and wish everyone both safety and good health here. And Dean will talk about this, but huge kudos to the entire accounting and finance team on our win of NAREIT's Best Communications Gold Award once again. In our first quarter call, or on our first quarter call, I should say, we dialed back our growth in light of the uncertainties of the COVID onslaught. in all realms, but now that we've gotten through that quarter and through part of gotten through the second quarter certainly and into the third quarter, we have a much clearer, I think, view of the landscape going forward. I want to say a couple things about corporate responsibility. It's a lot in the press, but we're not new to this, and we've included in our press release the panoply of corporate responsibility initiatives We've worked on very hard over many, many years, many longstanding and impactful activities in our regional communities, our truly positively impactful sustainability initiatives, including our pioneering zero carbon building in South San Francisco. And more recently, in response to the COVID pandemic, we are in fact at the vanguard of the life science industry and advancing the search for solutions to COVID-19. I want to also hearken you back to our Project 115 with Alphabet, the subsidiary of Alphabet, Verily. 72,000 Americans died last year. Hard to imagine half of the number that have died of COVID this year, but an enormous number and more than in the entire Vietnam War of opioid addiction. In 2020, deaths are up 13%, and one could imagine why that may be. Last year, we announced our 115 project in Dayton, Ohio, to serve as a unique and complete care model, comprehensive care model, really, to attack the opioid crisis in America. Our hope was we would build a model that other communities could copy. We pioneered the design and development of the almost 60,000 square foot campus, and thank you to the great team that worked on this. on about four acres, which opened to outpatients in the fall of 2019. This month, we completed 115 living, the residential housing component of the campus. This facility is the so-called sober living facility for patients suffering from opioid addiction to live while accessing full on-campus treatment that will come over time, and really the first full treatment care facility from detox to job placement. Let me shift gears here for a moment, talk about the life science industry, and then I'm going to have Jenna speak after I finish and talk specifically about the three most advanced vaccine projects. As we all know, we're living in truly unprecedented times in history with the onslaught of a pandemic, the resultant recession and civil strife in many of our cities. We've seen a significant uptick, however, in demand. This quarter, across all of our markets, both from new and existing tenants, and that's given us, I think, good comfort. There's been strong bipartisan government support for Life Science R&D to solve COVID-19. For example, $10 billion has been committed to Operation Warp Speed, and they brought together some amazingly talented people. Of that amount, Or in addition to that, there's a large number, over 7 billion for CDC, over 6.5 billion to the so-called BARDA group, over 3.6 billion to the NIH, and over 160 million to the NIH, all supporting COVID-19 pandemic. So far this year, the FDA has approved 25 new drugs. Last year, they approved 48, so we're on our way to maybe a a beating of the 2019 number. During the first half of 2020, funds raised by life science companies via IPOs and follow-ons almost matched all of 2019. And this is amazing because this happened despite COVID. Venture capital was strong to the tune of about $9.5 billion and 10% more than 1Q this year. And we're pleased to say 80% of all venture capital funding in 2020 has been in Alexandria's region. So before I turn it over to Jenna, let me make a comment. Life probably won't return to normal until we have a widely distributed COVID-19 vaccine. And the good news is this may happen sooner than expected thanks to years of private investment and new cooperation between U.S. government and drug companies. this taxpayer money could not have been spent better, even if some vaccines made, candidates may actually end up failing. The potential return from resuming normal life is far greater than from all the transfer payments Congress has spent so far, and we hope that this combination of private innovation with faster regulatory action truly pays off. And with that, let me turn it over to Jenna Foger, our senior vice president who co-leads our life science team.