OmniAb, Inc. (OABI) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to OmniAb's First Quarter 2026 Financial Results and Business Update Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Kurt Gustafson, OmniAb's Chief Financial Officer. You may begin. Thank you.

Thank you, Derek, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining our first quarter 2026 financial results conference call. There are slides to accompany today's prepared remarks, and they are available in the Investors section of our website at omniab.com. Before we begin, I'd like to remind listeners that comments made during this call by OmniAb's management will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from any anticipated results. These forward-looking statements are qualified by the cautionary statements contained in today's press release and our SEC filings. Importantly, this conference call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of the date of this live broadcast today, May 7th, 2026. Except as required by law, OmniAb undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this call. Joining me this afternoon is Matt Foehr, OmniAb's President and CEO. Matt is going to cover some of the business highlights. I'll review our Q1 financial results and full year guidance, and then we'll open up the call to questions. And so, let me turn this over to Matt.

Thanks, Kurt. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining our first quarter call. I'll start now on Slide #4. OmniAb delivered a very strong start to the year, largely driven by advancement of our partner programs. We continue to see programs derived from our technologies move into the clinic and into later-stage development. And in many cases and in many respects, that's really where our business model translates into clear and more visible value for our stakeholders. The progression of these programs gives us a growing line of sight into potential for future milestones and new royalties as our partners' programs advance. Our business is designed to benefit from durable revenue streams and royalties from differentiated pharmaceutical products are extremely valuable in our view. In addition, our innovations and our technologies are designed to differentiate OmniAb as a licensing partner and more broadly as a business. and are keeping us at the forefront of next-generation discovery tech. We believe our novel technologies and our workflows are increasingly positioned to attract partners, while also supporting current relationships, having potentially important impacts both on our business and on our industry. Both our OmniUltra and our OmnidAb technologies are opening new markets and opportunities and the traction we're seeing is encouraging. And we believe that our innovation, which is informed by deep relationships with partners is a key competitive advantage. During Q1, we also continued to build a strong foundation for xPloration, which we view as a tremendous opportunity to expand our reach and diversify our sources of revenue. The xPloration sales funnel continues to grow with a lot of high-quality prospects evaluating the system for use in their labs. And with a very strong start to the year, we've revised our full year financial guidance and increased our revenue outlook, which we view as an important early indicator of the value that's embedded in our partner pipeline. Kurt will speak to our updated guidance in greater detail in his remarks. Turning now to Slide #5. I'd like to take a moment to highlight some of our novel technology launches, which we believe position us for growth. OmniAb is the only company in the world with a transgenic chicken platform that creates fully human antibody sequences. Part of the advantage of a chicken platform is based on the evolutionary distance of the chicken as a biological host for discovery versus other animals, specifically mammals. This distance allows our chickens to create a robust response and a diverse set of antibodies against novel targets that a mammal likely wouldn't. Members of our business development team recently attended the AACR meeting down in San Diego. And at the conference, there were reports and one specifically from BioCentury that about 170 new therapeutic targets for cancer were disclosed at the meeting, many of which had not appeared before in cancer-focused R&D programs. And new targets are generally where biology is not fully understood and technology platforms such as ours can really help understand and advance novel drug discovery. Traditionally, many therapeutic targets are highly conserved among mammals and that also adds to the value proposition of our transgenic chicken platforms. We have a number of different types of highly engineered chickens that can create unique antibody repertoires and help discover drugs such as traditional heavy and light chain antibodies, common light chain formats, single-domain antibodies, ultra-long CDRH3 domains and dual modality antibodies and even peptides. These technologies are designed to open new market opportunities and drive partner interest. Our most recently launched OmniUltra shown at the top right-hand corner of this slide is the first and only transgenic chicken that produces antibodies with ultra-long CDRH3s, which is a structural feature of antibodies typically found in cows. These ultra-long CDRH3s are designed to reach binding pockets not accessible with other antibodies or modalities, potentially unveiling new therapeutic opportunities and can also play a role in such things as being building blocks for multispecifics as binders for CAR-T and for radiopharma therapies and as in vivo generated peptides. We just launched the new OmniUltratech in December, and our scientists will be presenting on OmniUltra next week at the PEGS, Protein Engineering Meeting in Boston as well as at the TIDES peptide meeting that is also taking place in Boston next week. Prior to OmniUltra, the most recent novel chicken-based technology we launched was our single domain technology known as OmnidAb, which was launched just a couple of years back. As of Q1, there are now 2 OmnidAb-derived partner programs in human clinical trials. Both got to the clinic very quickly, and one is now already in Phase II trials. I'll touch on this a little more in a few slides when I review our clinical pipeline. xPloration is summarized here on Slide #6. xPloration is our proprietary innovative high-throughput single B-cell screening platform that leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence. The xPloration platform includes a competitively priced instrument and proprietary single-use consumables. As such, it has the potential to generate multiple revenue streams to our business. We're seeing continued strong interest in exploration and in demand for demos given its rapid run times, its ease of use and overall robustness. With these user benefits, we believe we have the right technology at the right time as we're entering an era when our partners and the broader industry increasingly recognize the value of lab automation and high-value and high-impact instrumentation for large-scale data generation and AI and ML-enabled screening and selection. We're in the early days of xPloration, but we're very excited about what this technology can contribute to the business. I'll now turn to some of our metrics starting on Slide #7. At the end of Q1, we had 107 active partners, consistent with year-end 2025. In the first quarter, new licenses included an agreement with Florida State University as we continue to see growing opportunities in academia with agreements that have been prewired with financial terms that allow us to share in the economics of assets generated from our technology. This quarter, our partner adds were offset by attrition, which is an expected part of the business. The mix of partners across discovery stage companies, large pharma and academic institutions remains very well balanced. A majority of our partners are headquartered here in the United States with the remainder primarily in Europe and in Asia. We're also proud that 8 of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world are active partners of OmniAb. This demonstrates the quality and the strength of our partner base and further validates our technology platforms. And I think it's kind of important to note that these are companies that spend billions of dollars on clinical work and research and development. So they're deploying substantial amounts of capital to discover impactful medicines that serve global markets, and they leverage OmniAb's technologies as part of their discovery efforts. Management here and our team take pride in that, and so we feel it's important to note. Now I'll move on to Slide #8, and you'll see here our active programs metric. We ended the quarter with 409 active programs with a net increase that reflects both the addition of new programs and new program starts and the normal attrition that occurs as partners refine their pipelines and portfolio priorities. Importantly, about 98% of our active programs include contracted future economics to OmniAb. Across our portfolio, we have more than $3 billion in total contracted milestones on standard antibody licenses with an average contracted royalty rate of approximately 3.4%. On the clinical front, Slide 9 shows our partners' active clinical programs and approved products. At the end of Q1, there were 32 active clinical programs and approved products that leverage our technologies. That total reflects both new entrants into the clinic and attrition. And I want to note that the numbers we consistently report to investors are all net of attrition. As I mentioned briefly, during the quarter, a second OmnidAb-derived program progressed into Phase I human testing, reinforcing the momentum we're seeing from our newer technologies, and we continue to anticipate multiple new clinical entrants in 2026. We've seen important clinical advancement within these active clinical programs year-to-date and look forward to further positive advancement activity this year. And I note that we have approximately $350 million in remaining potential contracted milestones to OmniAb for these clinical stage programs. Turning now to Slide #10. This graphic summarizes our clinical and commercial stage partner pipeline for active programs that carry downstream economics to OmniAb. The placement of each program here is based on its most advanced stage in any geography or indication. And as you can likely tell, there has been some significant movement in the later stages of development with additional programs now in Phase I, in Phase II and in Phase III. Now I know many investors follow and reference this graphic frequently, and I do want to point out a few things that developed in Q1 that are playing a key role in driving elements of the business. First, in the lower left-hand corner of this slide, in the Phase I section, you'll see we have our second OmnidAb-derived program enter human trials. For competitive reasons, this partner wants to ensure that both the therapeutic target and their work in the clinic remain confidential. And we obviously respect that request by our partner. As we move to the right on this graphic, I want to highlight that we also had a program progress from Phase I to Phase II in Q1. This is also an OmnidAb-derived program and another instance, where the partner continues to want to keep the program and specifically the source of the antibody confidential. Both programs are what I will characterize as early adopters of the OmnidAb single domain technology, which is really great to see. And both of these are pursuing what we see as areas of substantial unmet medical need. Moving further to the right, I also want to mention that Ramantamig, which was formerly referred to as JNJ-5322, jumped from Phase I to Phase III on this chart. That was a program that J&J Innovative Medicines highlighted earlier with some impressive clinical data, and it's a trispecific antibody being developed for multiple myeloma. The right-hand side of this graphic is getting more crowded with what we view as important potential first-in-class or best-in-class medicines. And I should also highlight the TEV-408 anti-IL-15 asset, which was subject to some substantial news in Q1 with a very large investment in the program by Royalty Pharma that was announced by Teva in the quarter. Teva featured this program prominently on their most recent earnings call last week, highlighting that it has potential in multiple indications and describing it as being on a "accelerated path". Slide 11 shows a summary of some of the upcoming clinical and regulatory events with 2026 clearly shaping up to be a really active year of news and catalysts for our clinical stage partner programs. Teva is expecting a few data readouts, including the TEV-408 program for vitiligo in the first half of the year. The drug is being evaluated in a 24-week proof-of-concept study with a week 24 body surface area score as the primary endpoint, which Teva has described as the registrational endpoint in this disease. The second half of the year features additional expected readouts from Teva as well as from Merck KGaA and from the IMVT-1402 program at Immunovant, which is also a very exciting program with multiple indications. And as a final slide for me here on Slide #12, we highlight a few of the partner programs that will be featured at the ASCO conference beginning later this month in Chicago. These programs cover a range of cancer types being treated with antibody drug conjugates and bispecific antibodies that are derived from our technologies. We look forward to seeing these data, which will provide additional visibility into individual assets and continue to highlight our broadly validated technology platform. And with that, let me turn the call over to Kurt for a discussion of our Q1 financial results and our updated 2026 guidance. Kurt?

Thanks, Matt. As Matt mentioned, this was a strong quarter, driven by the advancements in our partner portfolio. So let me start with Slide 14 with total revenue. Total revenue totaled $14.4 million compared with $4.2 million in the first quarter of 2025. The increase was primarily driven by higher milestone revenue, reflecting the progress of our partners' programs in the clinic. We also saw a modest increase in service revenue due to some new Ion channel agreements signed late last year as well as early this year. Revenues from royalties and xPloration were about the same year-over-year. Turning to Slide 15, you'll see our operating expenses for the quarter. We continue to execute against our plan to run the business efficiently while investing appropriately in our technology platforms. Our operating expense in the first quarter decreased slightly to $22.3 million from $23 million. Most of this decrease is due to lower personnel expenses and outside service costs related to contract research services and legal costs. Q1 2026 also included a noncash write-off of $2.9 million related to certain legacy small molecule ion channel intangible assets. Without this, our operating expense would have shown an even larger decrease year-over-year. On Slide 16, you'll see the change in the new financial metric that we introduced last year, cash cost and operating expense. We define this as our GAAP cost and operating expense less stock-based compensation, depreciation and amortization of intangibles. Essentially, it takes the GAAP number and removes all the major noncash items in our P&L. We believe this metric provides a better measure of our spend. As you can see from this slide, while both the GAAP and non-GAAP figures decline was an even larger decline in our cash operating expense. We focus on driving efficiencies in the business that have brought costs down. But in Q1 2026 due to the noncash write-off, those reductions aren't as apparent when looking at the GAAP figures alone. Moving on to Slide 17 shows our P&L for the quarter. I'd like to draw your attention to our operating expense line items, where reductions in R&D and G&A demonstrate the impact of cost savings and other efficiency initiatives. R&D decreased $3 million to $9.6 million in the first quarter of 2026, and G&A also decreased $1.3 million to $6.6 million in the first quarter of 2026. The onetime noncash charge that I mentioned earlier was reported in the goodwill and intangibles amortization line. Net loss for the first quarter of 2026 was $7.7 million or $0.06 per share. This compares with a net loss of $18.2 million or $0.17 per share in the year ago period. Excluding the onetime noncash charge, our EPS in Q1 2026 would have been a loss of $0.04 per share. Now turning to the balance sheet on Slide 18. We ended the quarter with a cash position of $49.1 million. You'll also see a slight increase to our accounts receivable, reflecting the milestones that were achieved in the quarter that won't be paid until after the end of the quarter. We continue to believe that the company is well capitalized to execute against our strategy. Our updated 2026 financial guidance is on Slide 19, which reflects the strong first quarter performance and our view for the remainder of the year. We are raising our full year 2026 revenue outlook and revising expectations for our operating expenses and year-end cash. We now project total revenue for 2026 to be in the range of $28 million to $33 million. During the first quarter, one of our partners achieved a milestone that was not part of our original guidance, which is the primary driver of the increase in our revenue guidance. We now expect 2026 GAAP operating expenses to be in the range of $83 million to $88 million. The revised range is driven primarily by the noncash impairment charge recorded in the first quarter. Importantly, our cash operating expense guidance remains unchanged at $50 million to $55 million as the noncash write-off doesn't impact this figure. Regarding cash, with the higher expected revenue and no change to the cash operating expense guidance, we now anticipate ending 2026 with cash and cash equivalents in the range of $33 million to $38 million. The effective tax rate for the full year remains at approximately 0% because of the valuation allowance we record. I thought I would put our guidance in a historical context here on Slide 20. You can see our 3-year financial metrics are improving, in particular, when it comes to cash usage. We expect revenue to grow significantly in 2026 versus 2025, while cash operating expense is expected to remain in a tight band, driving overall cash use lower. While we're still in a period, where revenue is largely driven by milestones, which can be highly variable in any given quarter, our portfolio of partner programs has continued to grow and advance. This should generally drive milestone revenue higher. As we look beyond the next couple of years, we would expect royalty revenue to kick in and start to accelerate that revenue growth and eventually become the larger contributor to our total revenue. The stacking of royalties combined with a scalable infrastructure is the essence of our business model and points to a promising future for the company and our shareholders. And with that, I'd like to open up the call for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Joe Pantginis with H.C. Wainwright.

Two, please. So first, as you mentioned, you have some ASCO data coming up for some of your partners. Are there milestones associated with these data releases? And are they in your current guidance, number one? And then number two, more for your overall tech platforms. While you're constantly developing new ones, if you will, can you discuss any -- I mean, you don't have to describe any secret sauce here, but for your current platforms, any sort of improvements and refinements that you do to the existing that add to your marketability of those platforms?

Yes. Great. Thanks, Joe. Yes, great questions. In regard to the ASCO data events, maybe I'll answer that by maybe describing generally how our agreements are designed, right? So partners come to us to get access to our technologies, and we'll generally enter into a license agreement that provides them access to the technologies in exchange for service costs, some license fees and then where the real focus is, are the downstream milestones and royalties. And while we generally start in about the same place in any negotiation with our 107 partners, every agreement is different in one way or another. But generally, the milestone payments are linked to clinical events, regulatory events, approvals, things like that. So largely, it's Phase I starts, Phase II, Phase III. There are some subtleties around it. We generally don't have milestones that are specifically associated with, I'll say, data disclosures, but there can be milestones associated with data generation. So hopefully, that gives you a little more color there. But as far as ASCO, we're actually quite excited about some of the work that our partners will be presenting. I think that's an opportunity for assets to become more in focus for those that are watching the expansion and the growth of our portfolio. In terms of the technology platforms, obviously, I talked through some of our platforms today in the prepared remarks, specifically around our chicken-based technologies. And I think it's important to note, even beyond our [ night branding ] of each of those technologies, our brand team is obviously proud of that. But even beneath those, there are different kind of highly technical subflavors, if you will, of each of those animals that we pair with partners' programs. And I think that's one of the reasons why we've continued to be successful in growing the portfolio, why partners kind of understand the quality of the technologies that we produce. And for us, those continued innovations and the things we add on really are informed by these deep relationships with our partners. So really leveraging this ecosystem of partnerships and these deep relationships around discovery, that informs our continued innovation. And we expect we'll continue to innovate around our platforms, another area I will highlight is workflows as well. We continue to innovate around more efficient workflows, leveraging big data management, AI and ML and our data work, those kinds of things, partners have known that about us for years. But all of those things kind of together, I think you'll continue to see those sorts of innovations out of us in the future.

Your next question comes from the line of Srikripa Devarakonda with Truist Securities.

I had a couple of questions. One is around Teva, the TEV-408 with Phase Ib vitiligo data expected in the first half, and you were just talking about it, Matt, milestone -- when we think about milestones, would that be -- would we have to wait until Teva formally elects to move the program into Phase II or Phase III or at the end of Phase Ib, knowing that they're moving ahead, is there a milestone there? And then second one is Immunovant recently announced batoclimab failed Phase III trials in TED. This was, at least for a section of investors, one of your most advanced and visible programs. Can you talk a little bit about how this impacts your long-term royalty projections in the context of having Immunovant IMVT-1402 as well?

Yes. Great. Maybe I'll start with your second question, Kripa, on Immunovant. And for a long time, they have remained highly focused on rapidly advancing the clinical development of IMVT-1402. And they've really been signaling that the last almost couple of years. Obviously, IMVT-1402, it's an investigational FcRn blocker. They're looking at it across multiple autoimmune diseases with -- that significant unmet medical need. So Graves disease is one of their key strategic priorities. And -- but they're going after multiple diseases as well with IMVT-1402. So in addition to Graves, they're looking at difficult-to-treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, where they think they can be potentially first-in-class and best-in-class. And then also looking at myasthenia gravis and CIDP and Sjogren's disease, where they've generally described it as a potential best-in-class drug. So we have really seen and they have signaled that pivot towards IMVT-1402 for quite a while. So the Batoclimab update that occurred really had no impact on our planning or our guidance, et cetera. So we're obviously cheering them on and with all the great work that they're doing on IMVT-1402. Switching gears a little bit on your question around TEV-408 at Teva. While I can't disclose kind of the final details of any individual contract, I kind of go back to my general comments around how our agreements are generally structured that I mentioned earlier, but that is an asset that I think is becoming much more in focus now. It's an asset that they're highlighting quite a bit. They've described it as having quite a unique binding site. They call it the antibody with the highest affinity for IL-15, and they're going after multiple indications. So right now, they have vitiligo and celiac. Vitiligo is a disease with really tremendous unmet medical need with a lot of psychosocial burden, social stigma, et cetera, and they'll have top line results from that here in the first half of the year. They also have a trial running in celiac. And then more recently, they've also referenced other indications for this as well, alopecia areata, atopic dermatitis, eosinophilic esophagitis and potentially others as well. So we're obviously cheering them on. It's great to see not only their efficiency of acceleration of clinical work, but they've also, in some of their recent presentations, talked about potential market size and seeing a potential for peak sales of $1 billion in just in vitiligo and $1.5 billion to $2 billion in celiac. So we're cheering them on as well. And they've been a great partner, long-term partner of ours. So that's good to see.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Brendan Smith with TD Cowen.

This is Jackie on for Brendan. Maybe a broader question to start for us. We've been seeing a lot of pharma and academic users increasing their own adoption of AI within their workflows. So how should we think about how that ramp in adoption should impact demand for your specific products and services? Do you expect the increase in partner model training could potentially accelerate demand for your platform, which is very data generating?

Yes. Thanks, Jackie. Yes, good question. Simply put, we see AI as a tailwind for the industry as a real positive for a lot of different reasons. One, and there's been a lot of reports of AI playing a role in accelerating the potential early identification of new targets. And I think we kind of see some early evidence of that with some of the things that came out of the AACR meeting this year that I was referencing in the prepared remarks with over 170 previously untracked oncology targets now being visible. Our partners have known about us for a long time, and you can look at our history of announcements, et cetera, that we've leveraged AI for quite a while. We've been deep in that space. It's a natural place for us to go when you have novel biological systems that are generating billions upon billions of sequences it was always a natural place for us to go. That's something -- a few years ago, we rolled out our OmniDeep platform, which is essentially a way for us to kind of brand the in silico tools that are woven throughout our technology platform. I've told this story a couple of times, and I was kind of reminded of it because I saw this partner recently, but there was a partner, who was talking to me, who was describing the success they were having with our platform and talking about how much there is still to learn about novel biology. And that's especially true when you're going after a disease target that might not be fully understood. And she was comparing the data about target biology that exists in all of the public databases and even within individual companies only as sort of a bathtub of data, if you will, whereas when you're going after a novel target, you need to explore the ocean. And she was sort of connecting our animals as being a way to navigate that ocean, right, that you can generate these bespoke repertoires and then downstream from that, you can really leverage AI and machine learning to help you focus and hone and do downstream work. So we're excited about the impact of AI across the industry, and I think we're really well positioned.

So more of Dolphin and less of a [ rubber ducky ], I guess, in that analogy. But maybe just -- it might be too early to tell, but just as a follow-up, are you seeing any shift in new partner interest towards like more data and tech-focused partners away from more of the biology pure plays? It might be too early to tell that, but are you seeing any of that kind of mix shift over to tech?

Well, I do -- the comment I'll make and it sort of relates to our xPloration platform is that I do think there is -- and it's part of the reason we feel like xPloration is well timed. There is a thirst for more data, right, and big data analysis. And I think that was one of the things that I think partners saw in us and can see our technology platform developing and producing. So hopefully, that gives you some color.

Your next question comes from the line of Stephen Willey with Stifel.

This is Josh on for Steve. So I know that you said you have this new license out of the Florida State and just kind of thinking about -- I know you had said you share economics generated from partnerships like this, but I wanted to kind of dig a little deeper into kind of the differences in the economics associated with maybe a more academic deal versus more industry-focused deal and what kind of differences there are there and maybe if there's any kind of priority for one or the other moving forward?

Yes. Good question. The way we describe and really design the architecture of our agreements with the academics is in a simple sense, they're -- we'll call it a revenue share, right? But they're designed that way specifically to enable academics who are focused on asset monetization or company formation, right? And we've seen -- we've already seen examples of that. That's something I think, with some dynamics that exist in the greater academic landscape, we'll see more universities who are motivated to spin companies out, out of some of their basic biology technology and that sort of thing. So the way they're structured, there's a sharing of revenue that will flow back to OmniAb. And that can come in a variety of forms, whether it's license fees -- sublicense fees to a new entity that's formed, whether it's in the form of equity of the new formed entity that would also flow back to OmniAb. And so those kinds of scenarios and, of course, milestones and royalties as well. So those agreements are specifically structured to enable that. That's something that we think is quite unique in terms of how we do licensing with the academic space, and it's something that I think does attract partners. And some of the research that these places are doing is quite exquisite. I'm very impressed with some of the things that have been produced by some of our academic partners who from the very beginning are planning to potentially form companies. Now that obviously takes time, but it's a good thing to see. So hopefully, that gives you a little more color.

Yes, definitely. And then just a follow-up. I know there was a previous question on kind of some of the milestones attributed to maybe some of the catalysts for the second half of this year. And just trying to think about some of your milestone and license revenue assumptions for the remainder of the year. Is it fair to say with some of these clinical event catalysts coming up that maybe some of your milestone and royalty revenues will be more second half weighted in terms of your guidance that you provided?

Well, I think we provided full year guidance for revenue. Q1 was a pretty strong quarter for us. Most of the revenue that sort of is slated for 2026 is kind of milestone-based. That can be lumpy. So we had a really nice Q1, but we're also looking forward, we sort of have forecasted a number of nice clinical events to happen throughout the rest of the year. So we're off to a good start, but we see more to come.

Your next question comes from the line of Puneet Souda with Leerink.

You have Micheal Sonntag for Puneet. Congrats on the quarter. My first question regards to OmniUltra. I was wondering if you could offer any insights on traction you're seeing with expanding into like new customer types and modalities that you've highlighted peptides is one area that this model unlocks. Any color you can offer there?

Yes. Great. Thanks, Micheal. Yes, obviously, OmniUltra is our newest technology. We just launched it in December, as I mentioned, our team is actually going to be highlighting it at the PEGS conference as well as the TIDES conference in Boston next week, and it opens up a whole host of new opportunities for us. still early days. I'll say the reception is good. We obviously have multiple programs running with OmniUltra partner programs already. We disclosed that previously. And I think for the antibody space, the players that know OmniAb very, very well in the antibody space, it's a very natural expansion, and we're obviously working on a number of work plans and expect some other starts coming here soon around OmniUltra. And those are folks who are interested in, I'll say, kind of the Pico body element as well as the ultra-long CDRH3 element that the OmniUltra platform produces. On the peptide side, it really is kind of a completely new way of discovering peptides, right? So you're looking for inherently or you're screening right out of the gate, essentially inherently biologically active and peptides that are also evolved for stability, you get high diversity in those repertoires. But it is a bit of a new sell, right? These are new customers for us, which is great. I see a real nice opportunity there. But there are over 130 companies that previously were not in our call file that are now in our call file that our BD team is -- has been reaching out to and dialoguing with. So still early days, but we're excited about it, and we are really looking forward to highlighting the OmniUltra technology at these conferences next week as well.

And then I wanted to also ask on the new program starts this quarter. It came in maybe a little bit softer than we were expecting. And we did have a larger tool company, particularly leveraging the preclinical space, highlight some headwinds in the early-stage [ biotech ] affecting their results. I'm curious if you could offer any color on if you're seeing any of that or if this is just your standard fluctuations in the starts.

Yes. I'd characterize it as standard fluctuations, right? We see lumpiness in program additions. We saw a big bolus of programs come in very late in Q4. And sometimes there will be impacts on when we receive annual or biannual reports from our partners. So it can have -- that can also be part of that as well. But no, we actually -- we see the industry really -- a couple of years ago, there was a lot more, I'll say, macro headwinds in the industry. We're really seeing the industry get back to work, and we're excited about that. So I just would describe it as kind of the standard lumpiness that we see.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael King with Rodman & Renshaw.

This is [ Tanay ] on for Mike. Congratulations on the updates. Just a quick one on your active programs. You had 9 additions and 7 terminations and that base the guidance for this year. Just wanted to ask, is the value of the newer contracts higher than the older ones? Or if you could provide some more color on that?

Yes. So as we look across our whole portfolio of programs, right, we've got over $3 billion in contracted milestones and average royalty rate of 3.4%. As you look at what our average royalty rate was a couple of years ago, that it's actually improved over time. When you have that big of a denominator, right, it can take time to continue to evolve that. But as we continue to have a further validated platform and invest in it, that's allowed us to command, I'll say, strong economics. The way program additions and starts work, right, they're going to be linked to an individual partner and a contract. So they're not always linked to a contract that would say, just signed in the last quarter or so, right? Some of the programs that are going to be spinning up are ones that are from an agreement that may have been signed a couple of years ago, right? So there's a variety there. But again, I kind of direct back to our total portfolio from that perspective. But we are excited about the novel targets that our partners are going after. We're noticing bigger companies taking bigger swings, if you will, from a target and an indication perspective. And I think that's good to see, that's healthy to see, and that's something that we're excited about as well.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Matt Foehr for closing remarks.

Great. Thank you, operator. We look forward to discussing our second quarter financial results in a few months. And in the meantime, we'll be participating in some investor conferences over the coming weeks, including Benchmark's Healthcare House Call Virtual Investor Conference that will be later this month. And then we'll also be at the Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference in New York City in June. So we hope to see some of you there. So thanks again for joining our call, and have a great day.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.