Taylor Crouch
Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead
Thanks, Steve, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll get us started by jumping right into the excellent progress we made advancing our liver therapy and tissue program. We believe our liver NovoTissues has the potential to become a revolutionary therapeutic application in treating many forms of dysfunction and impairment. In particular we're studying a range of clinical indications involving inborn errors of metabolism that can become life threatening and often result in the need for a liver transplant. Patients need is great in treating these abilitating pediatric liver diseases where annual cost of care are quite significant and current cell and gene therapy treatment regimen has had limited success. Our liver tissue aims to change all of this. In late December, we reached our first regulatory milestone with the FDA granting orphan for our NovoTissues treatment of Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency or A1AT. Patient populations suffering from this rare disease are in desperate need of new treatment options. The FDAs quick action recognizes the importance novo tissue engineering bases to purchase for these vulnerable patients. The FDAs orphan drug designation program also provides important developmental and economic expenses to sponsor so that we can expect to have more frequent interactions with the FDA including protocol assistance as we design and execute our study. We also qualified for tax credits for clinical research cost and weaver a certain registration fees. Finally, orphan designation also comes with a seven year term of market exclusivity upon FDA approval of the orphan drug. Taken together, these benefits can provide a more extreme lines and cost effective path to commercialization, while also being substantial drivers of our capital plan and partnering opportunities. As for our ground picking science we're creating a liver tissue patch that will approximately the size of a dollar bill when you plant into human. Simply put, our immediate target would be to supplement the function of a deteriorating organ with healthy tissue. Ultimately, we could delay the need for a transplant, reduce annual cost of care for patients and perhaps even potentially cure some of these diseases. We've also begun new animal model studies in a second therapeutic indication within the area of inborn errors of metabolism. The second disease known FAH deficiency frequently causes severe liver damage and commonly requires a patient to receive a new liver at an early age. We look forward to reporting proof-of-principle data in the coming months on this second important indication. I like to emphasize that unlike traditional drug development, where a different drug candidate progress for each indication, we're embarking on a strategy where the same healthy tissue patch could potentially be used across multiple disease areas. This approach could offer important synergies in terms of manufacturing, R&D and de-risking the development process. Overall, we're pleased with the progress we've made toward developing multiple IND-track therapeutics programs. We continue to target distribution of our first investigational new drug application to the FDA by the end of calendar year 2020. Until then, we'll continue to conduct safety and dosing investigations in small animals of these models as we move to defining and scoping IND enabling studies. Let me move now to an update on our commercial operations. As we announced last quarter, we continue to shift our R&D and business development efforts to high value disease modeling capabilities. In addition, we're seeing great commercial traction from our Samsara subsidiary, which more than doubled its contribution to our business versus the year ago quarter. Samsara's procurement and delivery of high quality human cells provides key building blocks for our own R&D mission and the same cells are also increasingly in demand for our client's research programs. We expect that our disease modeling and Samsara revenues combined will be the corner stones of our revenue growth as we look ahead to fiscal 2019. These core sources of revenue should also be bolstered by a range of deeper service and collaborative agreements, NIH grant payments and proceeds from technology licensing agreements. As a remainder, the objective of our platform technology is to produce living tissues that mimic key aspects of human biology and disease. Our ability to manipulate our bioprinted tissues to crossover from a healthy to a disease state in liver and kidney systems can facilitate breakthrough translational research from target discovery through to high content drug profiling. Importantly, by anchoring our work in liver disease, we're addressing growing markets that align with major therapeutics research areas in the biopharmaceutical industry. Case for our focus on tackling the spectrum of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is quite compelling. Let's briefly review the key factors. As a starting point one third of first flow population suffer from deteriorating liver function. Liver disease is a growing public health crisis throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. As a leader in liver research, it's important for us to be a partner in treating liver disease as well as understanding how new and existing drugs perform in our dynamic tissue model as a potential for [indiscernible] given these funds. Furthermore, according to a recent journal publication, approximately two thirds of patients over the age of 50 with either diabetes or obesity are thought to have NASH with advanced fibrosis. This truly isn't epidemic. Not surprisingly the global pharmaceutical industry has launched over 250 clinical therapeutic programs to pursue treatments across the liver disease spectrum including NASH and fibrosis. Many global pharmas have major research programs aimed at liver disease and several of these companies are among our early adaptors. Lastly, liver disease is complex and requires a multi-planned approach to treatment. Our leading clients are already working with us to validate multiple platforms that evaluate different conditions of disease induction, progression of the various liver disease states and multiple classes of drugs. In short, our biopharma clients want more human relevant data in their drug discovery workflow to support decision making around which programs to move forward and we believe this demand will lead to growing and sustainable engagement with our platform. I'd also like to share a few leading indicating indicators demonstrating our momentum as we shift to disease modeling collaborations where our goal continues to be moving our clients from single project studies to larger longer term relationships. I'm pleased to note that we've added 11 customer accounts and completed over 40 orders in the first three quarters of fiscal 2018, which puts us ahead of the pace we were on in fiscal 2017. In the fiscal third quarter, substantially all of our service revenue related to developing custom disease model with some of our repeat clients now moving forward to begin testing their proprietary compounds on our platform. This is good news because our competitive differentiation lies in our ability to emulate human disease on our tissue platform and predict our drug form in human. We regularly hear from clients that existing animal models and simple screening platforms do not answer key questions of functionality required to improve drug development success rates. Overall, our sincere disease modeling services recognizes the important role that liver disease plays in pharmaceutical R&D, while also representing the highest value opportunity for our commercial business. We're seeing deeper engagement from our clients in this space and look ahead with excitement to forging lasting relationships. In closing, if you break our business down into two key components, we're developing our own therapeutic solutions to treat disease, while also providing assets to our dynamic tissue platform that allows our clients to do the same. This foundation supports multiple path to monetizing value for our stakeholders including the curation and delivery of high quality cells, the partnering of our platform to develop custom models for high content drug profiling and being successful in our own research mission to deliver revolutionary therapeutic solutions for treating disease. These are harmonious and complimentary paths for creating value with meaningful commercial, operational and R&D synergies. Importantly, we plan to execute against these opportunities while also being mindful towards our cash burn rate. We look forward to an exciting fiscal 2019 and to updating you again in the months ahead. With that I'll turn it over to Craig for a more complete financial review.