Numinus Wellness Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to Numinous Wellness Inc's Fiscal First Quarter 2022 Results Conference Call. A question and answer session for analysts and institutional investors will follow the formal remarks. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn a conference call over to your host, Jamie Kokoska, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Thank you, Celine. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for joining us for our fiscal first quarter 2022 results conference call. Discussing the minutes of performance today are Peyton Nyquist, founder and CEO, and John Fong, chief financial officer. Joining them for analyst questions at the end of our formal remarks is Evan Wood, chief medical officer. The following discussion may include forward-looking statements that are based on current expectations and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual financial and operating results to differ significantly from our forward-looking statements are detailed in our MD&A for the quarter ended November 30th, 2021, and in our other Canadian securities filings available on CDAR. Numinous does not undertake to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect new events or circumstances, except as required by law. Our first quarter results were made available earlier this afternoon. We encourage you to review our earnings release, MD&A, and financial statements, which are available on our website, as well as CDAR.com. As a reminder, all figures discussed on today's call are in Canadian dollars. I'll turn the call over to Peyton Nyquist, Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks, Jamie, and good afternoon, everybody. Before I provide my comments, As I acknowledged in our last earnings call, again, I'd like to extend the utmost gratitude that our work is conducted on the unceded homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples and on the sovereign Indigenous lands and territories across Turtle Island. We are committed to a path towards reconciliation through continuous learning, reciprocity, and humility. Our first quarter laid the groundwork for many of the milestones we've achieved over the last several weeks. We completed the acquisition of the Neurology Centre of Toronto and developed a clinic integration process to follow as we continue building out our wellness clinic network. We launched ketamine-assisted psychotherapy for depression services and developed a formal training program for therapists that will allow us to further expand this offering. We completed the clinical trial protocols for the upcoming study for our proprietary natural psilocybin formulation, which will be enrolling participants as soon as regulatory approvals are granted. We began work on several interesting discoveries at Numinous Bioscience, some of which have already led the development of patent applications. And we prepared for our uplisting to the Toronto Stock Exchange, which occurred on December 16th. Even with all this work underway, I'm pleased to say that both of our business divisions saw meaningful revenue growth in the first quarter compared to the previous quarter. Numinous Health saw revenues increase 62%, and the Numinous Bioscience saw revenue growth of 56% sequentially from Q4 2021. So we're very pleased with how our business is performing and how our growth strategy is progressing. Now, let me discuss our recent activities in more detail. In Numinous Health, all five of our wellness clinics saw increase in client appointments compared to the previous quarter, with ongoing demand in traditional therapy services and increased interest in ketamine-assisted psychotherapies. Overall, client appointments throughout our wellness clinics increased 92% compared to the previous quarter, supported in part by the acquisition of the Neurology Center of Toronto in September. On a same-store basis, not including NCT, appointments still grew an impressive 42% relative to the last quarter. The amendments Health Canada made to the special access program just this month have further increased inquiries about accessing other psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies. This announcement was a major milestone for Canadians seeking access to non-traditional treatments, including the use of psychedelic medicines and we are continuing to work closely with Health Canada and in our clinics in order to provide those who qualify for the psychedelic assisted therapy treatments they need. Ketamine for depression treatments were initially launched in two of our locations during the fiscal first quarter. Initial interest in these services has been very positive, and we are in the process of expanding those services to two more clinics now. This is due in part to our recently finalized ketamine-assisted psychotherapy training program for therapists, which will soon be provided through virtual training sessions scheduled over the next two months. This training program will expand the number of numinous therapists qualified to provide CAP sessions to clients and will allow us to further scale these services as we grow our clinic network. We expect future training programs for other psychedelic therapies can be based on this training program and will ensure consistent quality care will be available to our clients with their chosen therapists at any of our wellness locations. As I mentioned earlier in September, we welcome the addition of the Neurology Center of Toronto. This acquisition has provided us with an important entry into the Toronto market with a well-respected and revenue-producing medical clinic that is providing incremental cash flows to our clinic operations. It will also expand our service offering to provide psychedelic-assisted care for those suffering with neurological conditions, something that further differentiates Numinous' wellness services from other providers in our sector. As a reminder, all of our wellness clinics provide a wide range of mental health care services, alongside psychedelic assisted treatments and these include traditional therapies group therapies couple therapy and now neurological care collectively these services will continue to drive reliable revenue streams and cash flows across our clinic network as we grow our psychedelic therapy offering in line with regulatory reform the recent changes to canada's special access program will now allow us to apply for patients to access psilocybin and MDMA-assisted therapies when approved by Health Canada. And we're pleased to be able to offer these therapies with some of the most highly trained therapists throughout our network of purpose-renovated clinics designed for these specific treatments. Our expertise and experience in providing these psychedelic therapies demonstrated through our involvement with MAPS-sponsored and in-house research trials is something that we're very proud of. In fact, we are about to launch two clinical studies to further advance research on the merits of both psilocybe formulation and MDMA during therapy. First, we're excited to begin the phase one study of our own proprietary naturally derived psilocybe extract formulation. The application for this two-part study, known as HOPE, has already been submitted to Health Canada. And following their anticipated approval, we will begin this clinical trial in partnership with a contract research organization to ensure its swift completion and full compliance with drug development expectations of health regulators. This proprietary formula was developed to stably deliver psilocybin and other synergistic compounds and is derived using a patent-pending technology developed in our lab. This first phase will specifically evaluate the bioavailability and tolerability of this formulation among healthy volunteers. We expect to begin enrolling volunteers for this study in the next few weeks. Assuming positive results from phase one, we anticipate this study will lead directly to a phase two clinical study to evaluate the efficacy of this product. And as we announced just yesterday, we are also very pleased to have completed the necessary steps to begin enrolling participants for the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation study to evaluate MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. This study has recently received regulatory approval from Health Canada, ethical approval from an institutional review board, and a Section 56 exemption from the Controlled Drug and Substances Act, which allows us to use MDMA throughout the duration of the clinical trial. This trial will be open to eligible Canadian participants who were previously enrolled in the placebo arm of the MAPS parent study who were unable to receive treatment due to COVID-19 restrictions. Numinous is hosting and managing the Canadian sites for this trial at its two new research clinics in Montreal and Vancouver. This is an exciting next steps for the MAPS extension study and MDMA assisted therapies. We look forward to collaborating with MAPS more closely in the future. At Numinous Bioscience, we are continuing to make remarkable discoveries and expect to submit additional patents in the coming quarters. Our key focus is on delivering products and formulations that can be implemented in therapy. And future patent applications will most likely be related to efficient processes, effective formulations, and the discovery of bioactive pathways. As a reminder, we are concentrating on defensible research and innovations, as well as establishing research excellence and compliance for regulatory bodies. Just recently we acquired several additional species of psychedelic mushrooms, which will further expand the breadth of our research and expect to make many more discoveries that are not yet published. Genetic testing of these mushroom species is already underway. During the first quarter, we also developed proprietary psychedelic drug tests with new toxicity and potency scans. These new tests have accelerated Numinous' research capabilities and may also generate new revenue streams through third-party product testing. Overall, we're pleased with how our business performed during the quarter, with strong revenue growth achieved in both our business divisions, positive gross margins, and some early indications margin expansion will continue as we benefit from the economies of scale and the standardization of clinic process. We're proud of the fact that we're building a business model that can scale rapidly and look forward to seeing the benefits of this strategy as we execute our growth strategy. With that, I'll now turn the call over to John to review the first quarter financial results in more detail, after which we'll provide some commentary on the outlook.