R.J. Kirk
Analyst · JP Morgan. Please go ahead
Alright. Well, first let me thank everyone for your time and attention. As always, I want to thank our board, I want to thank the people in the room here with me and the team that help us run this fine enterprise, also the extended team of Intrexon. I think that we as general Bostick indicated, we've never been in finer condition. So tremendously gratified by the hard work of all. Of course, I want to thank our board. We recognize, as I indicated in the press release, we recognize our fundamental obligation here and we understand that any business has as its primary purpose the obligation to produce value for its owners. We recognize that intensely. So I just want to make clear something that may not have come through adequately in the call today. And that is everything that you see here is something that we planned on happening and hoped it would happen. So if you go back to go – if you look at our IPO materials and those of you who were involved with the company, even prior to the IPO, the two biggest things that we were focusing on was a, our belief that CART represented a huge -- an enormous therapeutic advance as a motif, but as the practitioners -- the existing practitioners of that motif, we're not working with technologies that would actually make it primetime so to speak, it wouldn't be really usable in very many cases, it wouldn't be accessible, it certainly wouldn't be reasonable cost, it would always involve a great safety risk to patients. And that has largely been the case for CART today. So the two INDs that we have opened, [indiscernible] and her team have now opened and cleared with FDA, one in solid tumor, one in liquid tumor, we represent -- we believe that this is really a game changing event. And so we are very eagerly anticipating the clinical data coming from those two. And then the other thing that was a focus at the time of our IPO was of course our natural gas upgrading technology, what we call, referred to as our methane bio-conversion platform. I'm part of the meetings at times with parties and people in the energy industry. I will tell you nobody who is studying this technology has any doubt that it is a huge, enormous contribution to the field. We believe that it's an appreciating asset. And as an appreciating asset, I'm not that eager to do a deal today or do any, the first deal that comes along if it doesn't suit our purposes and doesn't conform to our objective. On the other hand, I'm very -- we're very, very eager to see this technology take its place in the world, actually be used to produce many, hopefully, many, initially a few of the products that today are derived from oil, instead of from natural gas, which, as you all know, really represents by far the lowest cost carbon feedstock in the world and today and for every measurable period of time that we can anticipate looking forward. So these two have succeeded on these two efforts to the degree that we have make us very, very proud. We believe that we are in excellent condition to commercialize of these two platforms. We think the rest of the company is also outstanding, but I would direct your attention to the accomplishment of these two goals and look, our purchase of oncology rights from Ziopharm and from Merck, those were made because of our belief in the value of that ultraCAR platform and the rest of the pipeline that Helen Sabzevari and her team at Precigen have created. So I invite you all to continue to -- I want you to be critical. I want you to hold us to task. I'm being very clear here about what we think our talent is. And I'm reminding you that the tasks that we've told you for five and the five, our 5.5 years as a public company that we were focused on, these are precisely the ones that we've delivered. We intend on actually seeing these all the way through and to all of our mutual benefit. So thank you very much.