Darrin Uecker
Analyst · H.C. Wainwright. Please go ahead
Good afternoon. Thank you everyone for joining us today. This afternoon we look forward to providing you with an update on all the recent progress made by our team at Pulse Biosciences. But before we begin, and it is important for me to recognize the ongoing impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic outside our business. First, I'd like to thank all the frontline healthcare workers for their continued bravery and unwavering commitment to patient care. Our thoughts are with everyone who has been affected by this virus. It is clear at this point that the pandemic will persist in our communities for some time, and we all must continue to be vigilant in our efforts to protect those around us. The health and safety of our employees remains our top priority, and we are taking every precaution to ensure we create the safest workplace possible while observing all local and state health department regulations and guidelines. With that, as so many have experienced disruption in their day to day lives the pandemic has had an impact in our business as well. However, we are fortunate that today these issues have not been significant. And we have maintained our full workforce as we work through these challenging times. From the onset of these uncertain times, internally, we have relied on clear and concise communication of our objectives to maximize our productivity. The responsible attitude of our company, our single location and our current state of internal focus have been beneficial as we navigate the current landscape with the intention of bringing about improved conditions. Amid these unique circumstances, we remain excited about the opportunity ahead and confident, we can execute our growth strategy over our next phase of growth. We remain focused on achieving regulatory clearances and continued progress towards commercialization of our proprietary technology along with the introduction of the CellFX System versus to the aesthetic dermatology market. Now for anyone new to Pulse Biosciences, I'd like to provide a quick background on our business. Our mission is to offer bioelectric medical solutions that make a meaningful difference for the betterment of patients and clinicians. We believe our device the CellFX System, will be capable of offering such benefits. The CellFX System is a multi-application platform that harnesses our proprietary nano-pulse stimulation technology. NPS technology delivers nanosecond pulses of electrical energy to non-thermally clear undesired cells, while sparing adjacent and needed non cellular tissue. In the area of Dermatology it is highly differentiated, cell specific mechanism of action provides the ability to address cellular lesions that were not well addressable previously, and at the same time prevent collateral damage to the surrounding healthy skin. This enables clinicians to generate patient and caregiver friendly improved outcomes, as older modalities typically result in a skin appearance that could be worse than the original condition. The CellFX System is a console-based software enabled device designed to accommodate the clinical workflow preferred by dermatologists. Based on our extensive industry experience and collaborative process with clinicians, we design our CellFX System with an integrated cloud infrastructure we call CellFX Cloud Connect. It is the backbone of our innovative, utilization-based business model that aligns the operational and financial interests of patients, practices and the company. CellFX Cloud Connect makes possible the wireless connectivity between the customer CellFX System, our e-commerce customer portal, clinical practice management tools to track utilization data and other operational metrics that are tracked by our internal customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning software systems. The customer portal is where practices purchase and wirelessly download cycle units directly through CellFX System. Cycle units are on a per lesion basis so the more lesions the patient once cleared; the more cycle units consumed. This enables the physicians have identifiable and controllable fixed costs per lesion, and to charge the patient on a per lesion basis, which is aligned with the patient's preference. Our model contrast with the currently employed disposable and single use based medical device models, removing the friction for the physician that can occur in those models. One last note about the CellFX System is that it facilitates direct connectivity for Pulse to remotely perform software upgrades to the CellFX System as well as provide several service and maintenance functions in real time because of the ability to streamline, be responsive and prevent disruption to the clinic clinician workflow CellFX Cloud Connect allows us to provide unprecedented support and clinical practice growth enablement for future customers. Turning now to our business objectives, on the call today, we're pleased to highlight our progress and development in the three-quarter priorities we laid out on our last call. First; our regulatory clearance for CellFX System both in the U.S. and key territories outside U.S. namely European Union and Canada and second; preparations for commercial launch of the CellFX System in these territories and third, financing with the closing of the rights offering in June. I will start off by addressing the successful close of our recent financing. On June 16, 2020 we closed the rights offering generating net proceeds of $29.5 million for the company with the potential for additional gross proceeds of $4.5 million through the exercise of issued warrants. The capital resulting from the shareholder friendly transaction has significantly strengthened the balance sheet and will provide the runway necessary to progress our other two corporate priorities regulatory clearances and commercial launch preparations. We are thankful for this strong display support and confidence from stockholders. Sandy will provide additional details on this very successful financing later in the call. Now to our second priority, on the regulatory front, our top objective is achieving 510(k) clearance for the CellFX System with an indication for use in general dermatology. As we mentioned previously, in May we have a pre-submission or cu-sub meeting with FDA, in which we confirmed three imperative items regarding our subsequent work. The regulatory path for our 510(k) general dermatologic indication for the CellFX System, the adequacy of the selective predicate device and their proposed preclinical studies performed under FDA's good laboratory practices would be sufficient for the indication and support of our 510(k) clearance. We received solid confirmation of all these items. It is important to note that the confirmed preclinical studies use the animal skin and no further human studies would be required for this submission. With the study design locking, we began working with the GOP animal facility on the protocol and pilot activities for the general dermatologic study. Because of COVID-19, these labs were not operating at full capacity in June and are still operating at a restricted capacity to an extent as we update you today. It is our constrained capacity; we begin our study several weeks after our initial plan and we currently expect to submit this 510(k) in the next 60 to 90 days. On the positive side, we are pleased to report that we have now completed all the preclinical treatments required for the study. The next steps will include the pathology assessments of the skin treatment samples at the different follow up time points. Then, with the data in hand, we will analyze, evaluate and prepare it for the 510(k) submission. We continue to be optimistic that the advantages of the general dermatology indication submission being more straightforward combined with the FDA's prior knowledge of our system and the data being provided could potentially result in a clearance somewhere between December year end 2020 and Q1 2021. Our step wise regulatory approach will continue with the pursuit of specific indications following the CellFX System initial clearance. While the submissions will be sequential, we're able to parallel path some of our work. The next indication we will pursue is Sebaceous Hyperplasia or SH. On our May Investor Update Call, we reported that we would be requesting a formal pre-submission meeting with FDA to discuss the required SH study design. Today, we are pleased to report that we requested the meeting in June and just last week had the meeting with FDA. Leading after the meeting, we received feedback from FDA on the draft setting protocol we provided with the meeting request. The meeting was very productive and we were able to agree with FDA on the basic design of the clinical study that would support a specific indication clearance for SH. Based on this, our next step is to incorporate FDA feedback into our investigational device exemption or IDE submission and submit those to FDA for approval to move forward with the execution of setting. We anticipate to meeting the investigational device exemption in the next couple weeks and to begin enrollment it is important to compare a trial in the fourth quarter. Barring any delays due to COVID-19, we estimate enrollment will take approximately three months. We plan to follow a similar path to achieve indications for warts and Seborrheic keratosis and we'll report on our timeline for this on upcoming calls. Onto our efforts to commercialize the CellFX System in the European Union by obtaining the CE mark. As we discussed in our previous investor call, the delayed implementation of new regulations for medical devices in the EU due to the impact of COVID-19 has provided an opportunity to potentially receive the CE mark for CellFX System six to nine months sooner than we otherwise would have been able to. And we are pleased to report that we continue to track according to this accelerated plan. Over the last several months, we have worked closely with our EU notified body. The company authorized to assess our compliance with the European Medical Device Directives or MDD and authorize use for the CE mark. And we recently achieved important milestone of submitting all required documents in support of the application for the CellFX System CE mark. The application is currently under review and based on our discussions, we continue to believe we will gain approval for the CE mark in quarter one 2021, leading the commercialization of the CellFX System in the EU. We also continue to make progress on Canadian regulatory approval, another important territory. The Health Canada process leverages the work we are doing for the CE mark and therefore, we believe we'll be in a position to submit our application for the CellFX System to Health Canada in Q4 of this year for the Canadian clearance in the first half of 2021. Now, I will turn the call over to Ed to provide more details on our continued engagement with scientific dermatology community.