Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Alexandria Real Estate Equity's fourth quarter and year-end 2020 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 star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Paula Schwartz. 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 It's 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, Paula, and welcome everybody today. With me, as usual, Jenna Fogler, Steve Richardson, Peter Moglia, and Dean Shigenaga. I want to welcome everybody and extend our thoughts and prayers to each one of you to continue to be well, safe, and stay COVID-free. Just over one year ago, January 21st of 2020, the United States had its first reported case of COVID-19 in Seattle. And just today, a little more than a year later, we've lost more than 443,000 Americans, a number that's actually quite astounding to imagine. And that does not even count the number of the millions, probably tens of millions of Americans who have suffered from really irreparable personal, mental, and financial harm due to the worldwide pandemic. President Roosevelt on Pearl Harbor Day referred to that day as a day that would live in infamy, and I think we will all feel that 2020 is a year that will live in infamy in all of our memories. Talking about the pandemic, there's much work to do to control the virus's spread. We need to enhance manufacturing supply chains as well as a big effort on distribution, administration of the vaccines as well as continued testing. And we as a country, I think for decades, have been ill-prepared and behind the curve to respond to a true worldwide and global kind of a 100-year pandemic. I think our readiness just has not been there, unfortunately. Much work to do to rebuild businesses and lives so devastatingly impacted, and I would say it's going to take a good part of this decade to do that for many people who've been really so devastated. We still have not discovered the root cause of the virus, natural or human-made, or brought those responsible to an accounting We at Alexandria, at the Vanguard, in the heart of the life science industry, are honored, proud, and yet humbled to serve this mission-critical industry, which has been on the forefront 24-7, really as the savior of humankind in this pandemic. It really doesn't get more important or impactful than that, truly. There are two primary causes behind the COVID vaccine's rescue of humanity from this pandemic, I firmly believe. The first one is our free market system here in the United States, the economic system that facilitated the innovation, competition, and cooperation between our biotech and pharma industries and government. That literally doesn't happen in other countries around the world. There would likely be no multiple COVID vaccines today had there not been venture capitalists prepared to invest before a product or profit was really visible. And no corporate leadership would be willing to double down other than those in our country with the company's own money in the spring of 2020 to fund a crash effort to produce a safe and effective vaccine by year end. Really, truly unheard of. The revolutionary, I think, cooperation and coordination between government and the private sector, the collaboration, cooperation, and really ingenuity of Operation Warp Speed really led by the world's probably foremost vaccine expert, Monsef Slaoui, who is empowered to allocate billions of dollars outside of the normal government contracting procedures. And he was able to bring forth multiple technology platforms with multiple vaccines in absolute record time. As Americans, we can now look forward to getting vaccinated and getting our lives back into a somewhat non-pandemic normal environment during 2021. It probably will never be the same again. And we pause to give thanks to the remarkable group of scientists and entrepreneurs whose free market drive, passion, and mission truly pushed them to venture into the unknown. Our solemn mission with our remarkable life science team and life-saving life science industry colleagues has been to do everything in our power to help the industry repatriate mission-critical and novel research development and manufacturing capability back to the United States and to control the research development and manufacturing in the future of complex medicines. Policymakers and legislatures must absolutely avoid the awful temptation to raise corporate taxes and reverse what is the mission-critical onshoring of our critical R&D and manufacturing in this country and to its citizens. Let me make a few comments generally about the life science industry and particularly the number one cluster in the world and our number one region, Greater Boston. Peter will highlight Alexandria's highly insightful strategic and collaborative entry into and our intent to create a new life science cluster in the Fenway sub-market of our greater Boston region. And contrary to incorrect recent news reports, Alexandria is in fact the absolute leading, largest, and most dominant life science owner, operator, and developer of office lab space in our Cambridge sub-market. With three mega campuses, 33 properties, and approximately 5.2 million square feet, including our 325 Binney Street development. We're also the leading, largest, and most dominant life science owner, operator, and developer in our greater Boston region. Currently, as of this date, February 2nd, Groundhog Day, as all of us know, we have approximately 14.6 million square feet of office laboratory assets, including operating properties, plus our entire value creation pipeline, near-term, intermediate, and future, which also includes the recent Fenway acquisition. With respect to the industry, 2020 is the ultimate paradox, the worst year of our lives, yet the greatest year ever for the life science industry. Science won the day in 2020. Our R&D laboratories operated continuously 24-7, and ARE was on the front lines, of making that happen. The FDA approved a record setting second place all time 53 new medicines in 2020, including a number of breakthrough medicines for pediatric neuroblastoma, spinal muscular atrophy, and thyroid eye disease. Great clinical progress was made for many medicines in 2020 as well. With this impressive scientific backdrop, it was not a surprise that the capital markets boomed in 2020. Biotech equity markets had the best year ever. Every major biotech index hit an all-time high in 2020. Biotech IPOs hit their all-time high for both volume and deal activity. And the IPO class of 2020 had very strong post-IPO performance. Follow-on equity financings in biotech hit their all-time high as well. And venture funding in biotech hit an all-time high. Two other thoughts I'd like to share with everybody. First of all, a truly profound thank you to each and every one of the members of our team whose everyday operational excellence during this continuous operation to keep our R&D labs going 24-7 during a horrendous worldwide pandemic. really is a testament to their great passion, fortitude, and mission-driven excellence. And thank you to each and everyone who worked collectively and contributed to our record-setting results for the fourth quarter and for 2020, and wish each of you to stay safe and God bless. And before I turn it over to Jenna, I want to end with a timely quote from Confucius. He once said, our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail. The greater the obstacle, the more the glory in overcoming it. So with that, I turn it over to Jenna for a deep dive on vaccines.