Aurora Spine Corporation

Q4 2021 Earnings Conference Call

5/2/2022

spk01: Good morning, and welcome to the Aurora Spine Report's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021 financial results call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal conference questions by pressing the start key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may first start it on your telephone keypad. To withdraw a question, please press start and two. Please note this event is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Adam Lowensteiner. with Listen Partners. You may now go ahead.
spk00: Thank you, Anthony, and good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today to review the financial results for Aurora Spine for the fourth quarter and year-end ended December 31st, 2021. With us on the call representing the company today are Trent Northcutt, President and CEO of Aurora Spine, and Chad Klaus, Chief Financial Officer of Aurora Spine. Before I begin, I would like to remind everyone that statements made during the course of this call may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Act of 1934. These statements reflect current expectations concerning future events and results. Words such as expect, intend, believe, may, will, could, should, anticipate, and similar expressions are words that are used to identify forward-looking statements, but their absence does not mean a statement is not forward-looking. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties and other important factors that could cause actual performance or achievements to be material different from those projected. For full discussion of these risks, uncertainties, and factors, you are encouraged to read Aurora Spine's documents. on file with CDAR, including those set forth in the periodic reports filed under the forward-looking statements and risk factors section. Aurora Spine does not intend to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. On this call, management may refer to adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, and adjusted EPS, which are not measures of financial performance under generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. Management believes that these non-GAAP figures, in addition to other GAAP measures, provide meaningful supplemental information regarding the company's operational performance. Investors should not recognize that these non-GAAP figures might not be comparable to similarly titled measures of other companies. These measures should not be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or superior to any measure of performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in accordance with SEC Regulation G can be found on the company's earnings. With that, I'd like to now turn over the call to Mr. Trent Northup, President and Chief Executive Officer of Aurora Spine. Trent, please proceed.
spk03: Thank you, Adam. I appreciate everyone today, and I'd like to welcome everyone to the Aurora Fourth Quarter 2021 Financial Results Conference Call. Earlier today, we issued a press release detailing our financial results. Hopefully, you've had a chance to review this news. But if not, a copy can be found on our website at auroraspine.com. That's aurora-spine.com under our investor relations section or in our other financial websites. To lay out the agenda of today's call, let me first summarize a few key events of the quarter. including some of the brief commentary on the numbers. And then I'd like to talk a bit about the status of each of our key initiatives and products, like the silo and the zip, as well as our initiatives on the spine division, including our new DEXA product line. Chad Klaus, our CFO, will join us to recap the financial results, and we will then conduct a Q&A session at the end. Key events in Q1, the market overview dynamics of our new products and our clinical study, Overall, fourth quarter produced a solid result and demonstrated that the issues and experience of the COVID-19 have now started to go behind us. While there were still little bits and pockets of surgery cancellations here and there, overall, our business didn't experience any industry slowdowns in the quarter like some of the other companies in our industry. And Aurora actually surpassed the pre-COVID level revenue levels and showed growth year over year as well as significant sequential growth improvement from the third quarter. In addition, the fiscal 2022, while starting slow, has gained momentum and off to a solid start. So what's going on? The phenomenon that we believe unfolding in front of us is a multitude. First, coming out of the COVID, more patients were focused on their health and feeling confident and coming back to the doctor's office. Doctors, in fact, were actually letting people come back into their offices. taking care of health issues, and they postponed because of the pandemic. Also, doctors adopted a pandemic protocol. Many of them shifted towards concluding their own procedures, either in the office or at the surgery centers to serve more patients. We saw a big boom in the surgery center business. In the timely fashion, this has also shown doctors to pursue new technology, especially those we found in patients that improved outcomes and done in minimally invasive manner, that also enable the patient to return home in the same day. Another catalyst is this continued emergency in the pain interventional market, which continues to evolve in a sizable manner as doctors are incorporating pain management into their practices. These doctors are also very mindful of the opioid crisis and need devices that can be highly effective, included in a minimally invasive manner that helps treat the patients without using addictive pain medications. Two of Aurora's proprietary products, the Zip and the Silo, are exactly what doctors are looking for. During the quarter, the fiscal year for that matter, we work diligently focusing on proprietary products to continue to focus on the doctor education. Through our cadaver lab trainings, which are done in various cities throughout the United States, it allows 20 doctors or more to learn about Aurora's products, especially on the Zip and on the Silo. We trained over 200 doctors in 2021, and have created an aggressive training program scheduled for 2022. We should basically double what we did this past year and train more than 400 doctors in 2022, and we're well on our way at meeting that goal this year. We also embarked on a clinical trial for the Zip, which is going very well and has attracted many new doctors to utilize the device, join our study, and have embraced this new incorporated device into their practice and now incorporated many different procedures for that particular surgery center, hospital, or doctor practice. Our SI joint device has been a key contributor recently, and we believe it has a very positive future ahead. As the SI joint procedure continues to be adopted by doctors, we are continuing to educate doctors on the silo we are very excited about. our next generation device, which will be a titanium and non-allograft version or non-bone version called the Silo TFX. What's unique about this device is that this device is actually specifically designed for the SI joint and it is made in a minimally invasive approach where the doctor can have controlled precision of the instruments and allow this implant to be placed into the SI joint and instantly give the patient SI joint pain relief, and the patient can walk into the surgery center that day and actually leave the same day and will walk out of the surgery center. This is a step in the right direction, and again, reducing that opioid concern. Other area we have advanced during the quarter is our DEXA technology platform. This has been very exciting for us. We have secured a key patent in a patent called DEXA Technology last year, and we hit the ground running creating our DEXA product, DEXA-C cervical implant that was attained by the FDA clearance during the third quarter. This patented technology allows us to create a series of implants, manufacturing varied densities in order to help match that patient's bone density and DEXA-T score. We would employ the superior fixation to help promote a quicker bone growth and bone healing. We are now working towards marketing this product and conduct initial surgeries into the patients earlier this year. These procedures have gone very smoothly and we've had some initial traction with doctors starting to incorporate the DEXA-C into their practice. What's unique about this device is that it actually works with the summary of the patient's bone density. The density is a true measurement in how a patient's bone health and how the patient's performance in a recovery surgery based upon implants that are placed in this patient. The fact is that most, if not all, implants that are made for your cervical, for your lumbar, and other joints aspect to your body, but specifically to our company, Spine, all implants are manufactured and actually made to the same density. A healthy patient, a non-healthy patient, or a patient that has some variance in their bones. We believe that DEXA technology is that perfect procedure, that perfect product for the doctor to actually select it and dial it in to make sure that it works right within that patient's bone score and have a measurable and an outcome that gives positive clinical results to that patient, to that doctor. To summarize, I'm extremely proud of what the team performance was, staying focused on building those companies. We are well positioned to take advantage of the growth markets, and several of our new key proprietary products will remain focused on penetrating these markets further this year through continued training, successions, and also clinical result trials that are ongoing. Looking to the longer term, we are well positioned for success, especially as new products and more clinical studies proving out our technologies and teaching more doctors to use the Aurora product. Good news is that the pandemic is mostly behind us. Surgeries have returned and patients are focused on improving their health and well-being. We will now turn the call over to Chad Klaus, our CFO at Aurora Spine. He will review the fourth quarter financial results. Chad, please proceed.
spk02: Thank you, Trent. With the numbers highlighted in detail in the press release, let me focus my comments in a few areas. The revenue during the fourth quarter of 2021 was approximately $3 million, an increase of 21.7% compared to $2.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2020. The improvement in revenue was driven by a strong usage of proprietary products, especially the ZIP and silo devices. Gross profit in the fourth quarter of 2021 was $1.4 million or approximately 46% of revenue. This compared to gross profit of $0.9 million or 37.1% of revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020 and $1.4 million or 45% of revenue in the third quarter of 2021. Gross margin showed continued progress and improvement even on a sequential basis as more proprietary products are part of our revenue. Proprietary products in the fourth quarter were 70% of revenue. Margins have the capability of continued expansion beyond these levels, especially as proprietary products sales increase and become a larger portion of total revenue. Total operating expenses in the fourth quarter of 2021 were 2.3 million compared to 1.4 million in the year ago fourth quarter. and sequentially higher from the $1.7 million in the third quarter. These expenses are within our range and we're due to continue investments in building more sales and marketing initiatives. Investors should anticipate these levels remain in the coming quarters as the company continues to invest in conducting more training sessions and clinical trials. While there will be higher expenses, we do believe these investments will put the company in a proper position for accelerated growth. EBITDA earnings before interest tax depreciation stock compensation in the fourth quarter of 2021 was a loss of 0.6 million compared to EBITDA of 0.2 million in Q4 2020. A decrease year over year in EBITDA is in quarter was due to higher operating expenses compared to last year. That loss in the fourth quarter of 2021 was negative 0.9 million or negative 1 cent per basic included share compared to negative 0.042 million or negative 0 cents per basic included share in Q4 2020. Turning to the balance sheet, the company strengthened its balance sheet during fiscal 2021 with a capital raise net of fees of $4.5 million. These funds have enabled the company to secure the necessary inventory to ensure product availability to surgeons utilizing their products in their practice. We have also used the capital to add key sales positions in both the spine and pain market to deduct more training labs in various large cities around the U.S. to educate more doctors. At the end of the fourth quarter, we had cash of $3.2 million and an increase of $1.9 million from the end of fourth quarter 2020. We exited the quarter with $2.7 million in receivables, about the same from the third quarter levels. We are always working to improve our cash collections, but we are confident our current system is in place, and we have been able to usually capture collections in 60 days. The business is in a financially strong position, even while making very important investments that have increased operating expenses. This demonstrates that this is strong and continuing these investments and keeping the burn to a limited number. As these investments mature, we expect the company to experience solid growth improvements, putting the company on the path to profitability in fiscal 2022. I now turn the conversation back to Trent.
spk03: Thank you, Chad. Before we open the call to questions, I'd like to conclude that we believe that the company has stabilized from the pandemic and should continue to improve as we further away from it and more surgeries get booked. We have been very busy making necessary expenditures to make sure that the company captures the opportunities that are evolving in spine and in the pain markets. Some of these new initiatives include building inventory, additional instrument sets and kits, and making some key new hires to improve our sales and licensing efforts. So far, we are happy with the progress of these investments and are very excited about the company's efforts in 2022. Given our very unique situation as an innovative medical device company, we remain very confident in our opportunity to create substantial long-term value and shareholder growth And with that said, our operator is ready to answer any questions.
spk01: We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on the telephone keypad. If you're using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw a question, please press star then 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster.
spk03: Oh, I dazzled them with my presentation, so I know they're eager to ask me a few questions.
spk01: Again, if you have a question, please press star then 1. Our first question will come from Tom with Microcap Connection. You may now go ahead.
spk04: Oh, good morning there, guys, and congratulations on the quarter. Love to get some color on the doctor uptake with the training that's taken place. With 400 doctors planned for training in 2022, I would assume that 100 doctors have been trained so far this year, and we witnessed a number of them coming online on LinkedIn, so there is evidence Is it safe to say that the adoption rate we can expect to be the same as last year, 20%?
spk03: Yeah, good question. And, yes, I believe that we will have good adoption up to 20% on the training programs. The training programs have only improved from last year to this year, and we did kick off this year quite strong with the – ZIP study protocols as far as introducing those back to the doctors, also introducing more inventory and some updates actually on the silo SI joint system. We've made some instrumentation tweaks, if you will, to help improve the performance of the instruments. And we've introduced some of the last cadaver courses that were in Dallas and in Northern California, and they've gone quite well.
spk04: Perfect. And as for the doctors using DEXA products, and I've taken this information off of the net, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that at the end of 2021, there were 40 pain doctors selling Aurora products, averaging around $10,000 per month. Now, if the math equates, by the end of 2022, if there's 400 doctors trained, theoretically, we could exit 2022 with with 120 doctors at some point because it's bound to be a delayed effect. So, you know, even count on 100 doctors by the end of 22 doing $10,000 per month. Is that a fair assessment? Is that the goal? Very fair.
spk03: Yeah, the goal is for them to get, obviously, to get adoption rate from these doctors. training physicians that are coming into it. But we've also, last year, early in the year, we were mostly focused on, early in the year, we were focused on the ZIP device, and then we incorporated the ZIP and the silo device. So we have seen, basically we've doubled down on ourselves. We said, look, if they're going to use the ZIP device, terrific, but if they will use the ZIP and the silo device, we'd like to see an increase in some of that usage following the training. So, yes, step in the right direction. And also a good question.
spk04: Perfect. And to follow that up, you know, when you factor in the cost of a zip and silo and you equate that to the average, you know, amount spent per month of $10,000, that's about 1.1 to 1.5 devices sold per month per doctor. Organically, for organic growth, could you see that jump to three devices per month? Because I got to see that as, you know, a is a source of a revenue increase. It's just growing the organic growth within this doctor that you've got on selling your devices already. It's got to be a target, right? So what are you doing to help doctors increase their sales of your devices? And is that very possible to see three to five to six devices sold per month per doctor?
spk03: To answer your question, yes, it is possible for them to expand their usage and to adopt this technology further into their practice. What we are doing, and that's different from last year to this year, is that we added a director of clinical education, Chrissy Ramey, joined our company, and she now we have a direct follow-up based upon our CRM that directly follows up with each one of these customers and how they've progressed since their training. The focus of these particular doctors was an interview question coming into the course and a certification that we give them through our company. They've been certified and been trained. We blended all of our trainings with orthopedic, neuro, spine, and pain interventionalists, so it's a collaboration amongst talents and professions in the spine space. Every single course has ortho, neuro, and pain in this course, so it's not just one-sided where it's only a pain course or it's only a neuro course. It's a blend of all three, and we've seen that, and we continue to follow them in our CRM to see what things are missing, like if it's a piece of literature that they think they need to get in front of their patient or if it's a help with the reimbursements, and one of the things I'm going to touch on today in this call is that we added PREA Healthcare, which is a pre-authorization company that works with all the large payers and the small payers that are all across the country. PREA Healthcare, we have a contract with them. We made a press release on them, and they'll actually do the doctor's pre-authorization so they know when the doctor knows when he gets up in the morning and is going to that surgery center, all those cases have been pre-approved.
spk04: Perfect. And that was my next question. How has that actually shown? Have you seen evidence that It's improved the success rate of a doctor getting approval. Have you witnessed it already?
spk03: We've witnessed it already. I want to see more of it, and we are running metrics on that, too, to see, you know, what that add-in and that add-out and what we're going to do is we'll measure this in the second half of the year. Because we knew the start of the year would be a little bit slower, but, yes, PREA is already – uh, uh, got preauthorizations for, uh, uh, multiple of our, uh, uh, doctors that we've trained in these courses. So yes, it's off to a good start.
spk04: Perfect. Perfect. Where are you seeing the greatest success right now?
spk03: The fastest growth has really been in, um, well, I guess it's, it's, the zip has been really steady and, and, and is increased in growth, uh, usage from the zip device. So we're really pleased by that. Um, we, uh, silo, uh, The numbers that we came out with last year are interesting because we only had 20 instrument kits in the field last year, these little surgical trays. We only had 20 of those kits out in the field last year. And two of them got lost in the mail, which was very frustrating. As you can imagine, if you only had 20, you'd be lost too. Now we have over 55 sets. So the beginning of the first quarter, we actually got we'd order more inventory, more sets. So we actually have another rev of 30 kits. So that would push us over 80 instrument kits throughout the year for silo. So my eye is really on the silo technology, really on the set availability. And when I was with my warehouse team, we had a conference this weekend, they told me that all siloed, all the silo kits are in the field actively at doctor accounts, either for a training, in-office training, or actually for a procedure to be performed. So that's going to be an increase this year for sure. And the third part that I mentioned was DEXA technology, although it's only in its alpha trial as a release, it is FDA approved. It's 510K cleared. We had a roundtable group this weekend with nine surgeons, and these are all surgeons if you're just neuro and ortho, and we had several university doctors there, chief of orthopedics from one university, and we had a really nice review of the DEXA technology, and we had a case series review of how these patients had been performed, and this was presented in front of the nine surgeons, and we had really great reviews from those nine surgeons, and we're beginning a multicenter study with the DEXA-C cervical system soon.
spk04: And can you elaborate on DEXA in that I understand, and a lot of people on this call may not understand, but when you have spinal surgery and you use a cage, generally speaking, there are many devices used along with that surgery. So when it comes to Aurora marketing DEXA, how do you package up your other products or how are you trying to promote your other products in that space? So it's not just a DEXA sale. You might sell a silo device, a Zip device. Are you offering a package price? Are you pushing those other products? What are you doing to try to capitalize and gain the most amount of revenues as possible?
spk03: We've been positioning the DEXA implant as a leap forward in anterior cervical fusion for device so we've the two the two sites that we ran right now are actually we're getting a over in one particular facility it's over 6x above list price that we had listed before because they wanted to see if this was a better way for them to treat their cervical cases and these cases indeed have gone quite well the second location had a premium of a hundred percent above what we normally sell our inner body device for. So that was a real encouraging sign. I do not think that's going to be something that lands everywhere, but I do like the fact that we can get a good price. We are packaging it with our cervical plate, which is the Apollo cervical plate, which we put out a press release on. We got the 510K on that, which is replacing the third-party product that we had touched on last year. Actually, we'll not be touching on this. There's no – not necessary because we've evolved away from all the third-party products. So we use the Dexacage. We have a national agreement with the Zeobiologics, which is a – publicly traded allograft and in a company that provides biologics to us. And they also are the makers of our silo implant. And then of course the DEXA implant. So it's all three of those products going in. So the plate, the cage, the biologic, and we're getting a good premium price for that as we, as we started the year off with it.
spk04: Nice. Nice. So, so it is a, that is a marketing tool, I guess is what I'm trying to say is, is that, uh, Don't just look at DEXA, look at the package, because that's the push, I guess, out of Aurora to not just obtain one cell, but to obtain two or three potentially, right?
spk03: Well, and I'll add to that, and it's something I missed and I should point out, is what's unique about the DEXA technology, we also entered into a co-marketing agreement with a company called Echo Light. Echo Light is a is an ultrasound bone density measuring device. The doctor can, within a few minutes, just scan the patient, and you can either do it pre-op, so in the doctor's clinic, or they can actually do it right before the procedure, and actually measure the patient's bone density, get a reading and know what density that patient's bone score is out in, and it's based upon the T score of the bone density, And it's also a really simple color code. It's green, it's yellow, it's red, green being healthy, yellow being the presence of osteopenia, and then red is the type of patient that has osteoporosis. So then the doctor will say, well, what was the score within that? And it's a very small score, so from a plus four to a minus four, so each numeric value in between there. And then, of course, our cages, the DEXA-C cages, if you look on our websites, You'll see they're color-coded. They're based upon a numeric value system that is close to the patient's T-score. So the doctor can pre-select which implant they're going to put into the patient. This is the first time this has ever been available to doctors and to patients ever. So the patient has a better likelihood of having an implant that is better suited for their bone density versus a one-size-fits-all, which everyone else has. and only Aurora has this proprietary product and approach to matching the patient's bone density.
spk04: Yeah, amazing, amazing. On to the numbers, I'm curious as to the new break-even. Expenses did rise. We were told to keep an eye on a million to $1.1 million a month. Is that break-even? Of course, higher expenses, more doctors trained. expenses are bound to arise. What is the new break even now? What should we be looking at and is that number going to be stable going forward? Can we expect to see the same expenses with this training throughout the year or will they increase even more?
spk03: Some of the expenses came in on some of the biomechanical data that we needed to collect earlier, right at the end of the year and going into the beginning of the year. for the siloed TFX, which is the new add-on to our SI joint system. And I know you didn't ask a question about TFX, but it was related to budget. So we did experience a little more training. We added some more biomechanical data that we needed to submit to the FDA, so that increased costs. One of the challenges of last year, as you can imagine, was getting specimens for biomechanic testing that were not affected by COVID, right? So you couldn't use a specimen that had, you know, that was listed as having COVID. And we had to, you know, work a little bit harder on that to get some of this biomechanical data. We were able to collect that data. Some expediting came in there. So some fees went up, but we do expect everything to balance out, settle down, if you will. and all the money was put towards R&D training and building up inventories. We decided to build a couple more kits than we originally scheduled, and that was also part of the add-on cost.
spk04: I got you. So going forward, should we still look at $1 million to $1.1 million, or is it better to assume... even $1.4 or $1.5 million for breakeven, just because doctor training is obviously going to be an increased cost. I know there's more sales staff brought on as well during the end of 2021. Should we be adjusting that number ever so slightly just to have a realistic breakeven number?
spk03: Yeah, I would say right around at 1.2 would be fair to that break-even number, yes.
spk04: Okay, perfect. You mentioned in your press release and you mentioned again about sequential growth for Q1, that you believe that Q1 will be sequentially better than Q4. Sequentially better, well, you grew 21% year over year. Would we see that kind of growth, 21% or just better? Is that more of the terminology sequential just meaning they'll be higher than Q4, no expectations on how much?
spk03: To understand the question you're talking about, where do we go from Q4 into Q1?
spk04: Yes, exactly. Exactly. How do I read sequential? Yes. Yeah, so the second half of the year...
spk03: Last year was great because we felt like all the headwinds had really kind of started to die down. We felt really good about Q3, felt even better about Q4. And to answer your question this way, we really springboarded off of the end of Q4 right into Q1. And I couldn't be more pleased with what we did in Q1. We really advanced it forward. And we hit the ground running even harder than we did. started last year. So really, really, really pleased with how the team executed. The clinical educator got in there, really got these meetings tightened up. So I'm really encouraged about where we're going here in Q1, especially how we've already started Q2.
spk04: Perfect, perfect. And could you give us any indication on how many new doctors we could – you know, we might see through Q1 that have increased. If we had 40 doctors last year, I've already seen four doctors on LinkedIn that have claimed that they're now selling Aurora products. So I know in the last month alone, it's at least four more. You know, if you're training 100, you know, doctors a quarter, potentially we could see 20, right? So You know, are we on the right path, I guess, of gaining 20 doctors per 100? Has Q1, you know, has that shown you those results?
spk02: I can jump in there. So just generically, Q1, we had 60 different doctors use our devices. Beautiful. So that's right on target. Yep. Yep.
spk04: That's exactly on target. Those are exactly the numbers I was looking for. That's perfect.
spk03: And I can also, you know, the other thing for everyone to keep an eye on is the second, you know, obviously we're not, I don't have a crystal ball in front of me, but we are pending FDA approval with the TFX. The TFX, the training of that device already has a plan and a strategy prepared to fit right on in into our current educational training program that's in place throughout the year. So the second it gets its 510K approval and instrument sets come off the machining, we implement those right into the training program. So we think that we can hit revenue numbers that are not – they're in the budget for this year, but we think that it could really accelerate revenues, so even a larger growth beyond 20%.
spk04: Beautiful. Now, will the current silo just drop off? You just will no longer sell, or will you have both?
spk03: We will maintain both.
spk04: Okay. Okay. Very cool. As for newer products, new additions, DEXA is a series of platformer products. Is there anything else that we can expect to see that will either be announced to be carried at some point in the future or or maybe something that you'll look at acquiring? I don't know.
spk03: I would say that you're spot on with the platform. You'll see some expansion in the platform in DEXA technology. There's no doubt we're going to go from cervical to lumbar with the DEXA technology. And then we're also looking into and how that might work out in the SI joint space as well. So it would be very unique and novel to have us cover those three major areas for us, especially if we're doing well in performance. They have the only bone-matched patient implant in the world for all three sectors of the patient's fusion areas.
spk04: Okay. As for licensing out DEXA, is that something that discussions have carried on?
spk03: This weekend, we had nine surgeons in the roundtable this weekend. And, yes, we're discussing with them and branching out to discuss with people who are in the dental implant and the total hip, total knee market, since those are markets that we have no plans in exploring. And I think that the key on that is this roundtable was to discuss the cervical – multi-center study that we put out. So now we should be able to show some clinical data that would support our claims based upon the patent, and then this would be something that we could give to those, again, those other type of companies that are making products that have to affect and interact with the bone, that this might be a technology they'd want to license. And we also had Watershed, which is our 3D printing manufacturing company that is walking steps from our office to They were there presenting the technology. And they told me, just as a sidebar here, they got, after a couple press releases on the DEXA, they started getting phone calls from some of the vendors saying, hey, how do we get the DEXA technology added to our implants? And, of course, they said, well, you can't. It's proprietary. You need to get a hold of Aurora. So that was interesting to hear and exciting. And, yes, we will. If we see an opportunity to license out the technology, we will.
spk04: Beautiful. Well, I've exhausted my questions, guys, and I don't want to hog the call, so I'll leave it for others. But thank you very, very much for your time, and congratulations on a great quarter.
spk02: Thank you. Thank you.
spk01: Again, if you have a question, please press start at 1. It appears there are no further questions. This concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Trent Northcutt for any closing remarks.
spk03: Well, thank you again for your time and interest in Aurora Spine. We're very excited about what's going on here beyond 2022, this year and beyond 2022. We look forward to speaking to many of you in the weeks ahead. Feel free, if you have any questions, to reach out to Adam Lowensteiner at Lippin Partners. and they'd be happy to schedule a follow-up call with you. Really pleased with the results and the team. So if you have any questions, please get a hold of us, and we look forward to chatting with you. Have a great rest of your day.
spk01: The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

-

-