StageZero Life Sciences Ltd.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Stage Zero Life Sciences fourth quarter financials call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I would now like to turn the call over to the host, Head of Investor Relations, Rebecca Greco. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the Stage Zero fourth quarter and year-end 2021 earnings conference call. Joining me today is Stage Zero Chairman and CEO James Howard Tripp and CEO and CFO Matt Pietras. Please note that management's discussions today will contain forward-looking statements about anticipated results and future prospects. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, and Stage Zero's results may differ materially from those discussed today. Investors should consult the company's ongoing quarterly filings and annual reports for additional information on risks and uncertainties relating to these forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned not to rely on these forward-looking statements. The company disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements except as required by law. On today's call, management will refer to non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA. This metric excludes certain items discussed in our press release under the heading discussion of non-GAAP financial measures and any other items that management believes should be excluded when reviewing continuing operations. The reconciliations of Stage 0's non-GAAP measures to be comparable Gap measures are available in the financial tables of the Q4 2021 financial results press release on Stage Zero's website. With that, I would like to turn the call over to James Howard Tripp, Stage Zero's Chief Executive Officer. James, please go ahead.

Thank you, Rebecca. And good morning, everyone. It's good to be with you. 2021 for us was actually an amazing year. In fact, the last two years have been that way, but I think 2021 particularly. If you look at what we were able to do, it's actually quite amazing. We start with COVID, which I think upended everybody's world. But in our case, it actually allowed us to dramatically test and expand our capabilities. It actually helped us build to everything that we wanted to get to and to do it a lot faster. We'll expand on that as we go a little further into it. We closed the care oncology acquisition, which was absolutely critical for us in terms of where we wanted to go as a company. I will talk a lot to that too as we go forward. We launched Aristotle in the U.S. We also later on launched it into the greater Toronto area, sort of to get it up, get it moving, and actually begin to fulfill the promise that we had with us. We launched the AVERT program in the U.S. We established an on-site clinic in Richmond, Why was that important? Because we have the clinic. You'll see that as we talk to the telehealth side, about 50% of people want telehealth, but about 50% still want brick and mortar. This was our opportunity to begin to test the ability to do that from our side, particularly as we build out into other areas. We broaden strategic relationships, doing deals with Rexel, with Sobeys, with countries like Aruba, like Barbados, with IATA, now with Qantas, all of those demonstrate the fact that we actually can do big deals. We know we can, but this is really good demonstration of what we can do. These are not just limited to COVID. We start with COVID, but clearly we want to take them in other directions as well. We commence trading on the OTCQB. Why? It's part of the strategy of us continuing to build our market presence in the U.S., We wanted a proper platform to begin to work from, and so it has put us firmly there. We've dramatically expanded the company. In fact, we're four times larger now than we were two years ago. What that's done for us is really build out the management team. It's built out the staff, but also the management team. Matt, who's on the call with us and will speak a little later, It's clear evidence of that, but it goes beyond that. We've got a new head of IT who's incredibly experienced. We've got new physician groups. We've got new scientists in through this. They are world renowned. They bring all of their expertise with us and they've helped us build out the whole product development side as well as the partner side in all kinds of directions. And we've added to the board of directors. We will continue that over the next few quarters. We've raised money. Money is absolutely critical in terms of where we go. And one of the things that we will talk about is obviously the marketing aspect. And as we drive it, we're competing with really large groups out there. We need to be adequately funded. We will always try and make sure that we are adequately funded. We announced the formation of a scientific advisory board and the SAB in and of itself, not that important. The SAB, in terms of who they are and how they work with us, and particularly leading into the Healthy Conversations podcasts, the shared vision in terms of where all of this goes, and particularly the push through into, I guess, what is called integrative oncology, is absolutely critical. And if you haven't listened to any of the podcasts, we'll direct you to that. They're excellent. They're also very, very instructive. We're making money. We're generating revenue. We're 22% up on last year, sorry, 2021 over 2020, which is a nice climb. In addition to that, as we move from the fourth quarter and then particularly as we're even moving into the first quarter of this year, we're transitioning from COVID revenue to the cancer revenue, and that's critical for us. Matt will also talk to the changes in margin. It's obviously really beneficial for us. And so all of that's really good. Next slide, please. We got a lot of flack when we started to move into telehealth. I remember all of the emails saying, what are you guys doing? Why are you spending money going down there? We were absolutely right in choosing to go there and in what we did. Had we not moved into telehealth at the time that we did, we wouldn't have been able to do the COVID business. we wouldn't now be able to be taking the cancer programs out in the way that we are. Telehealth is absolutely critical. And I think as you can see from this slide and this analysis, telehealth has settled down to about 50% of patient consults. It stays that way, but it also allows you to have a very broad reach. So again, going back to what we're doing with the clinic in Richmond, what we're doing now in LA, what we're doing in London, England, is to begin to build some of the physical presence. 50% of the people want physical presence, but the other 50% are going to access healthcare via telehealth. And it also allows us to begin to move on. So we're talking to countries all over the world right now. None of this possible if we weren't there. Next slide, please. We're at an interesting intersection. I think people have known that we always do things with strategy. We always try to think it out as carefully as we can. We've talked for some time about the fact that the dynamics in the market are changing and that if you're going to be positioned in the marketplace to be successful, you've got to try and be a little ahead of where those pieces are, not trying to catch up. We believe that's where we are. And so we're setting it actually an amazing intersection of what we regard as the future of cancer care. Part of that is telehealth. So to some extent, we're a telehealth company. It's what we do. We have physicians. We have partnerships with groups that rely on this as well. It's how we do the testing is all through this. It's all connected through this amazing system of telehealth. So we're there. As we're moving out through AVERT, and I'll talk a little bit about that, clearly we're going to be surfacing a whole series of conditions that require broader help. The immediate question on our side is why should we not provide that? So if you're in telehealth, you're in telehealth. Build it out. So definitely that's something that you can look forward to as we move on forward. Separate from that is the liquid biopsy and then the early diagnostic space. And although they're somewhat together, they're also somewhat separate. You can be in the liquid biopsy space without being in early diagnostics because that's essentially where it began. But we're in both. And liquid biopsy extends beyond, for example, tests like Aristotle. Liquid biopsy can also work with the various metabolic pathway panels as you look at it. And if you were speaking to Dr. Vamadevan, who's the clinical lead on the AVERT programs for us, Dr. Vamadevan would tell you that in actual fact, metabolic pathway disease leading to chronic diseases in actual fact almost always is the precursor to cancer. So if you find it early and you look for it, you can then move to the more sophisticated testing. All of this ties together. So we work within an entire system. We'll talk a bit about what we're doing on the early detection side when we get to the Aristotle section. But the programs within that, as we look at clearly from Aristotle to AVERT to the COC protocol, which internally we typically refer to as TREAT. Next slide, please. But this is how we put it together. And I'm going to take a little bit of time across these others, I think, to make sure that we're as clear and as instructive as possible in terms of why we build things the way we have and what we're taking out. So first of all, we start at the bottom. Everything stands, all of the pillars stand on telehealth. As I said, it's one thing that connects everything. So we can get to you no matter where you are. We can talk with you. We have patients in New Zealand, in Australia. We have patients in India, patients in South Africa. We have a large presence in the UK and then out into Europe. Remember again, Europe's got 780 million people. It's a very large market as you build out into it. We're in North America. We're in the US and Canada. Between that, we're sitting with about 360, 370 million people. It's the primary market in the world. We're in all of this. It gives you the reach that allows you to get everywhere. Yes, we're going to have the physical presence, but telehealth, absolutely critical. And as I mentioned, we clearly are looking at opportunities to continue to build out the telehealth piece. Within this, we would have the three programs. So we would have Aristotle, which is the specific cancer testing. It's the early diagnostic aspect, We would have the COC protocol, which is really for patients that currently have cancer, and so we work with that. AVERT is derived from the COC protocol program, but it's for patients that are concerned about developing cancer or developing other forms of chronic disease. All of this is tied together with the fact that we not only have our own oncologists, our own nurses, our own physicians and scientists, that we can do additional testing with all of this. But it's actually all connected within that. And at this point, we'll talk a lot about the interconnectedness. Matt will go into this in quite a fair degree. But for example, I think everyone has looked at us as saying it's Aristotle. It's an Aristotle company. Yes, we are. But we're much more than that. And the reason for building this out is critical. Aristotle, someone will have an Aristotle test once a year, once every two years, once every five years, whatever the choosing is that they have it. But it's one and done. If you're with Treat, you come and you stay with us for a significant period of time. We touch on multiple touch points. The amount of money that we actually made through the initial process with Treat is nearly identical to what we make out of Aristotle. But we're doing it time and time again. Then we go to AVERT. AVERT is the same thing. AVERT has stickiness. You come to us, you stay with us. You can start with AVERT and then move to Aristotle. From Aristotle, if you have cancer, you can move to treat. If you don't have cancer, you can stay within the AVERT program. It's all very interconnected, and this is our way of seeing the world, and it's the way that we believe things truly work moving forward. Absolutely critical with what we've built. Next slide, please. We'll talk about these in a little detail. In actual fact, we can probably move through that slide fairly quickly.