Good day, and welcome to the Organovo 2017 Fiscal Year Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. All participants will be in a listen-only mode [Operator Instructions]. After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions [Operator Instructions]. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Steve Kunszabo, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us. I’d like to welcome you to our fiscal second quarter 2017 earnings call. Joining me on the call this afternoon are CEO, Keith Murphy and our CFO, Craig Kussman. Today’s call will begin with a discussion of the 2017 fiscal second quarter results, followed by Q&A. Before I turn things over to Keith, I’d like to caution all participants that our call this afternoon may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical fact, and include statements about our future expectations, plans, and prospects. Such forward-looking statements are based upon our current beliefs and expectations, and are subject to risks, which could cause actual results to differ from the forward-looking statements. Such risks are more fully discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Our remarks today should be considered in light of such risks. Any forward-looking statements represent our views only as of today, and while we may elect to update forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so, even if our expectations or views change. During the call, we’ll also be referring to certain supplemental financial measures. These supplemental financial measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Please refer to today’s earnings release for a definition of these supplemental financial measures. With that, let me turn things over to Keith.

Thanks, Steve, and good afternoon, everyone. I’ll begin by emphasizing that we more than tripled total revenue year-over-year in our fiscal second quarter, and affirmed our recently updated guidance across the Board today. In fact, our total revenue for just the first half of fiscal 2017 was 53% more than what we recorded in all of fiscal 2016. These gains represent a significant inflection point in our growth trajectory, putting us on solid footing to execute against our financial and operating targets in the months ahead. Craig will cover these financial updates and trends later on his remarks. Before I feature my customary update, I'd first like to recap our recently concluded $26 million equity offering. In short, we strengthened balance sheet and successfully closed this round of financing in three days with meaningful participation from long term fundamentally oriented institutional investors. In addition, we continue to engage leading analysts in our space, which we believe will yield increased research coverage and exposure for Organovo. More importantly, let's step back and evaluate the big picture around how we'll put this capital to work and maximize the value created by our enterprise. Let me be clear in stating, while we could just stop at scaling our preclinical tissue testing business and focus on profitability, that approach wouldn't allow us to take full advantage of our platform technology. As we've shared in the past, the true power and versatility of our platform is showcased by working across multiple disciplines with multiple tissue types in multiple markets and applications. Our investments don't end with our ExVive Human Liver and Kidney Tissue Services, although we'll certainly focus on accelerating adoption of our existing commercial products. Allow me to describe a few examples of our compelling growth opportunities. First, we believe we can double the…

Thanks, Keith, and good afternoon everyone. I'll begin by summarizing our key financial metrics for the fiscal second quarter, and then walk you through the full-year financial targets we affirmed today. I’ll wrap up my thoughts by briefly reviewing our balance sheet and liquidity profile. Organovo generated fiscal second quarter total revenue to $1.4 million, which was up 358% from the prior year period, and up 54% on a sequential basis. Total revenue benefited from an increase in customer activity for our tissue research services and milestone achievements through our collaborative work with Merck. As Keith noted, we’re seeing traction in our commercial business with three recent global top-25 pharma wins, a healthy pace of orders for our fee-based liver toxicology services, and a solid early response to our kidney program. It's worth reinforcing that the breadth of applications we can offer is diverse and superior to what can be achieved with traditional pre-clinical models. It includes toxicity testing of compounds in the late pre-clinical stage of drug discovery, drugs in development that are on clinical hold due to toxicity issues, as well as other use cases, such as disease modeling. I'll focus next on operating expenses, and we continue to underscore that the core driver in the forecast growth of our cash operating expenses for the forseeable future is the people we bring on-board to grow our commercial operations to support the manufacturing and sales functions. We now have approximately 115 employees on the Organovo team. We reported $0.4 million in cost of revenues for the fiscal second quarter. This is only our second period reporting this expense line item. And as the description suggests, it captures our cost related to manufacturing and delivering our product and service revenues. It's an important factor of how effectively we're commercializing the…

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Brandon Couillard from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

This is Sachin on from Brandon. Will you qualify the expenses associated with the metabolic service offering for the liver and kidney, as well as for tissue product?

Is that for that the tissue product, we talked about has potential add-on. Is that what you are asking?

Correct.

Yes, so we haven't undertaken to quantify that yet, we can't you be that level of details just yet. First of all, to be clear, we’re evaluating product opportunities. So there is nothing specific that we’re talking about when we say that we've got opportunities. I mean there’s specific things that we are clearly evaluating that you would understand. They come from the existing partnerships; so, obviously, evaluating next steps in skin for L’Oreal, and then some undisclosed tissues with Merck. But I can't give you exact number there, because obviously we’re still working on that. In terms of the metabolism offering, we haven't undertaken to qualify that. I think it's safe to say, it's still little bit early. But I think the opportunity that we feel there is very strong. It's the same customer base. Again, we can leverage the customer relationships that we’re building. We can leverage the sales team that we've already established. And I think that there is strong demand for that, both in the liver side and on the kidney side as well. So, we’re very excited about being able to add that. And we’ve demonstrated internally that we’ve got the capabilities to do metabolism with some early data, which is looking very strong too.

And then would you also provide an update among the traction with the pharma customers? And percentage of them are repeat, and how many of them actually indicated interest to kidney assay?

So, we haven't talked about the specific repeat numbers when we said it's very strong. We see strong repeat business. And we've also -- I can also say that the trend that we've seen is that the second contracts are higher value than the first contracts that are done, which is all of these trends are in our favor, had a very strong response. I think that's driven by a few things. I think it's driven by the fact that we’re hitting a key need for the customers that they grow to understand the value of the offering after they’ve used it a little bit. And then it also speaks to the increasing level of validation. So as we work with these customers, some of what they're doing is, for example, testing internal compounds that had failures for them. So, we've talked to you about compounds known to the space that were late stage failures that we were able to detect that couldn't have been detected, were not detected with, for example, rat and traditional 2D cell culture tox models. But internal to each customer, each company, especially large pharma companies, they have misses that aren't known to the world that they want to test with us, and a number of them have undertaken the test dose. And we feel we’re doing very strongly with them in terms of that kind of testing which we seem to greater confidence in our platforms. So that's all been very positive. And I think, if anything, the anticipation and excitement about the kidney platform, it's even higher than it was at liver launch, in part, because as we've said before, there's a stronger unmet need there. They don't have an in-vitro model that they can use. And the data that we're showing, it's still early, but the data is very powerful. And I think there's a strong response to that; so, a lot of interest. And so, yes, some of the existing customers are obviously interested in using that, but we're getting new customers as well, who have a first use for that. So it's exciting across the board in the kidney space.

Our next question comes from the John Meckler from 3D Advisors. Please go ahead.

Just quick question about Samsara Sciences, are you guys able to give us a little update on what's going on there. And any sort of idea of its contribution to the, I guess, top-line?

So we don't provide specific guidance on Samsara's top-line revenue. It's been going for on the order of a year now. We launched commercial operations in January 2016. I think one key thing to remember is that it's not only about the top-line with Samsara, they've got an early contribution that will be growing overtime. As it's relevant to do so, of course, we would give more clarity on that. But for now, it's a smaller portion of our overall revenue. But I think something that’s good to remember is that Samsara yields a lot more value than just top-line revenue contribution and marginal profit. It's delivering cells to our core businesses, our core business and our core R&D efforts. And there's a cost savings involved with that that’s quite substantial. And when we undertook to build Samsara, remember that that was actually our primary motive. The cost of cells is quite high, especially on the liver side. Availability of cells in some cases can be difficult, that's very true on the kidney side. And so to have a source for cells that assures both lower cost and ongoing supply or secondary supply for risk mitigation has been really critical and we've seen that pay-off and stays already. So, we're very happy overall with Samsara. And the other opportunity that we are taking advantage of is taking additional revenue and marginal profit. As we can do so, we'll update you in the future on that.

This concludes your question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Keith Murphy, CEO, for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you everyone for your time today. I just like to say we're grateful that Craig has joined us. He's been here for since August now, and everything is flowing quite nicely under his tutelage; I think the reporting speaks to that. And we're very happy with where things are and very excited about the future. So, thanks everyone for continuing to follow, and for your time on the call today. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.