Gubra A S

Thank you for standing by. My name is Cath and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Gruber earnings release second quarter 2024. 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 would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Henrik Blu, CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, operator. We are very pleased today to be able to present to you the key results and achievements from the first half of this year. So today with me, I'm Henrik Blok, CEO, and I have Christian Borbos, our CFO, and Louise Delvaux, our CSO, and they will help out as we go along. So first, generally, Group Run has a hybrid business model. We are experts, specialists in preclinical services, research services for the metabolic diseases. That's a CRO business. And in that we've built up a core research engine and that engine we can also use for our internal research programs, the discovery and partnership part of the business. So we build a pipeline of programs, we mature them to the right level, and then we seek partnerships typically with pharma or biotech companies who then take these programs further towards the market. It's very high interest right now in the services we deliver, and we are growing in the organization at a high pace. We are now 235 colleagues here at Goobra, and we've seen still a very nice interest from US customers. More than half of our revenue in the service business derives from US customers. we are or have been servicing 15 out of 20 pharma companies in the world and also we are servicing a long range of biotech companies as well so key highlights from the first half of this year first of all we have grown the revenue in the cro business by 34 compared to the same period last year So we were pleased with this high growth rate and recently, yesterday, we were out and adjusting the outlook for the CRO business for the full year based on current trading and the order book and of course the achievements in the first half of the year in the service business. Another great news is that in our DNP part of the business, the AMALYN program, the most advanced, not yet partnered obesity program, our AMALYN program. We managed to enroll the subjects needed for the key cohorts in June this year. So well in accordance with the plan that we laid out long ago for this program. And also we have seen some favorable safety data so far from that trial. And that means that we've actually been able to include the optional cohort five and six, meaning that we can dose at higher levels in that trial. And these cohorts are currently in active trial. Also recently, we received final approval from the British health authorities that we are now able to start multiple ascending dosing in the Amelie program, the MAD part of phase one, and that will be initiated in September this year. Another obesity program, UCM2 for healthy weight loss, We are pushing that forward at speed. We are currently getting a batch produced of the drug substance, meaning we can initiate toxicology testing this year in the programme. Also, from our pipeline, and that's from the second partnership with Berger Ingenheim, early July, We could announce that that molecule from the second partnership has been moved into clinical phase one testing. It's a triple agonist. It's a peptide like all our programs. And we are quite excited that that is in clinical testing now as well. So a whole range of very nice news from this half of We, in our CRO business, we have a focus on metabolic diseases. Goobra started back in 2008 with a focus on diabetes and obesity, and we've continued to be active in these areas also for quite a number of years where, for example, not a lot of companies showed an interest in obesity. Luckily, that has changed, and now the recent growth is is primarily driven by a rise in interest in our obesity services. However, we also see a nice business in our liver models, primarily MASH, and in kidney models, and in a range of other organs, again, generally related to metabolic syndrome and the core focus area for Goober throughout the years. Goobra is a one-stop shop when it comes to preclinical studies. We have all the laboratories in-house. We have the testing facilities. And that means that our customers, when they come to Goobra and place a preclinical study with us, we can deliver a full data package. We can control quality. We can control speed. And that is of high value generally to our customers. And in my opinion, it's probably a One of the reasons why our services are so popular.

Christian. Thank you, Henrik. And just continuing on the CRO business, on the financials. And as Henrik talked about, we had a great first half of the year with revenue growing 34% compared to the same period last year. And that's growth across many disease areas, but the obesity area in particular. so as you know you know the obesity area is getting a lot of attention at the moment and and more projects are tried out and that we can see in our order books as well so again reiterating that goober has been in the obesity space since the company was formed back in 2008 and so it's great to see you know that customers are turning to goober to test their new compounds so with the strong revenue we also deliver very solid earnings and the um EBIT margin was up at 32% in the first half and compared to 27% last year. And along the lines of growing activity, we also increase our labor to accommodate the high activity level. So with that, I'll leave the word over to Luise and the DMP business. Sorry, Henrik.