Gubra A S

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome everyone to the Gooba Earnings Release Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press the star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press the star followed by the one once again. Thank you. I will now hand the call over to Mr. Henrik Blau, Chief Executive Officer. You may begin your conference.

Great, thank you very much, Operator. It's a pleasure for us to present here today. I'm joined by Goobra co-founder and current CSO, Niels Frey, and also CFO, Christian Borbos. And today we will, of course, be focusing on the first quarter of the year. And first of all, zooming in. hubra what kind of company are we so really we are specialized in pre-clinical services we've built a core research engine we have the testing facilities we have all the labs needed to conduct the analysis when you develop novel drugs and our area of specialty that's metabolic diseases and this core research engine we are using for two purposes. One arm of the company is delivering services to biotech and pharma companies who are developing new drugs towards metabolic diseases. So that's one arm, that's the CRO of the company. The other arm of Google, that's our discovery and partnerships. This is where we use this core research engine to mature our own ideas for new therapies, new drugs. We mature them to the right level, and then we partner with biotech and pharma companies. So these two arms goes very well hand in hand, and there are a range of synergies for us when running our business in this way. So as of today, we are approximately 220 and actually a little more. Now we are growing rapidly. Employees, most of them located here in Hørsel, north of Copenhagen, Denmark. We have in the service business more than half of our revenue from customers located in the United States. We are in the CRO servicing a range of biotech and pharma companies, and we either have or have had 15 out of top 20 pharma companies in the world on the customer list. So zooming in on the recent highlights. In Q1, we experienced very significant growth of the revenue in the service business, 51% up compared to the same quarter last year. The obesity services were the main driver of this growth, and we definitely feel the increased interest in general across the industry in obesity, and especially when it comes to delivering services to other biotech and pharma companies, really obesity is the driver. However, we are also, of course, still delivering services within other diseases, such as MASH and other metabolic diseases. So in the discovery and partnership arm, we have our most advanced non-partner program. That's the Emmeline program, which is in phase one. We dosed the first patient a little more than five months ago, and that program is progressing according to plan. Also recently, we revealed the target for one of our other obesity pipeline programs, UCN2, and that program is focused on healthy weight loss. And these two programs, we will hear a lot more about today when Niels Vran will show you some more details on that one. Also, recently, as of today, actually, we announced that after July 1st, the new CSO, Chief Scientific Officer of GUBER, will be Louise Kjellerup-Dalbøe, And she's currently the research director in Gubra and has a long history within Gubra and has been a key player in developing the pipeline that we have today. And that means that our current CSO, co-founder Niels Frank, will transition into a new role as scientific advisor to the executive management. However, all this is only to be activated on July 1st. So zooming in on the core competencies of Gruber, it all started out within diabetes, within obesity. And from there, we've grown into other metabolic diseases, other related disease areas such as MASH, and we've also built up an extensive catalogue of kidney models. We are setting up IPF lung models, and also we have heart models, brain models, and a range of other services that we deliver. We're also a very technology-driven company. We have a range of very sophisticated technologies that support the research that we are doing. A key strength of Gubra is that we have in-house, the in vivo testing facility, and also in-house, we have a range of laboratories used for testing And that means that we control the research, the studies that we conduct from A to C, and therefore we control speed and quality. And that has high value both in the internal research programs and also when we deliver services to our customers. And with that, I will hand over the word to our CFO, Christian.

Thanks, Henrik. And this is just a repeat of what Henrik said, really. You know, we had a great start to the year in growing the CRO business by more than 50%. And the main driver, as Henrik talked about, was the obesity area. And the obesity area, I don't think it's become unnoticed by anyone that there's an very big drive within the whole pharma and biotech industry to develop new compounds in this area. That, of course, benefits Gubra since, you know, obesity is a stronghold that has been ever since the company was formed back in 2008. So we're clearly reaping the benefits of being a strong player in this area. Having strong revenue, it filters down to our earnings and we had an EBIT margin for the CRO business of 39% in the first quarter. And actually in absolute terms, it was a doubling of the EBIT level. compared to the same quarter last year. So all in all, very good start to the year. And I should also mention, we'd also see other disease categories growing apart from obesity, but obesity has been the strongest driver in the first quarter. With that, I'll leave the word over to Nils. Nils, please.