Owen Hughes
Analyst · Leerink
Thank you very much, Juliane, and good morning, everyone. 2025 was a foundational year for XOMA Royalty as we continue to execute on our strategy of building a diversified portfolio of biotechnology royalty and milestone assets. We are approaching the inflection point when expected cash flows from our royalty receipts alone should cover the core operating costs of the company. Through both traditional royalty and milestone acquisitions as well as innovative transactions, we enhanced the company's prospects by adding 22 assets to the XOMA Royalty portfolio in 2025 in addition to the acquisition of 2 platform technologies that we hope to be able to out-license in order to generate future royalties and milestones. Furthermore, total portfolio receipts surpassed $50 million, including royalty receipts of $34 million, which grew 68% from fiscal year 2024. By maintaining a lean operating structure, we achieved positive cash flow from operations, and we were able to return $16 million of capital through opportunistic share buybacks in 2025, retiring more than 5% of our common stock outstanding. On a go-forward basis, we anticipate maintaining a disciplined approach to capital deployment, investing in new portfolio assets to increase the portfolio breadth while continuing to chip away at our equity base, which should increase our future cash flow per share. With 7 commercially available programs, we are establishing a diverse and growing source of recurring receipts for our investors. Several of these commercial-stage programs, including Day One Biopharmaceuticals' OJEMDA, and Zevra Therapeutics MIPLYFFA are in the early stages of what appear to be very promising launches with potential geographic expansion ahead. In fact, both companies submitted marketing authorizations in the EU in 2025. And just recently, I believe it was February 26, 2026, Ipsen, Day One's partner outside the United States, announced a positive CHMP opinion recommending the conditional marketing authorization of OJEMDA in the EU. In addition, Ipsen submitted a marketing authorization in Japan in the fourth quarter, triggering a $2 million milestone payment to XOMA. On the flip side, however, we're not immune to the impact of clinical setbacks, although though given the breadth of our portfolio, we hope to be more resilient and less binary than traditional drug developers. In that vein, over the last few months, we've had 2 Phase III studies, Rezolute's program for congenital hyperinsulinism and Gossamer Bio seralutinib for pulmonary arterial hypertension demonstrated clinical efficacy that unfortunately failed to show statistically significant differences at their respective thresholds relative to the control arms. We are encouraged, however, that both companies remain committed to exploring options in 2026 for these programs. Rezolute is undertaking extensive analysis of the primary results and other endpoints and plans to meet with the FDA prior to the end of the first quarter under its breakthrough designation. Gossamer has also indicated that it plans to meet with the FDA to discuss a path forward for seralutinib, which in a prespecified intermediate and high-risk subgroup of 234 participants, showed a 20-meter placebo-adjusted 6-minute walk distance improvement, achieving a p-value of 0.0207, with 3 of the 4 secondary endpoints achieving a p-value of less than 0.0125. Our broader portfolio includes 14 programs in registrational stage and therefore, a number of key catalysts and sources of potential top line royalty growth over the ensuing years. The developers and marketers have guided to the following events that could occur in calendar year 2026. Top line results from Rezolute's separate Phase III program evaluating ersodetug in participants with tumor hyperinsulinism in the second half. Top line results from the volixibat VISTAS study in PSC in the second quarter. REC-4881, the developer engaging with the FDA in the first half to align on a registrational study in FAP and additional data from AZ's TIGIT program in various solid tumors throughout 2026. This robust late-stage pipeline is a result of both traditional and innovative sourcing methods. In 2025, we executed a strategic revenue share transaction with Takeda, where we added potential royalty and milestone payments across 9 programs, including 4 in Phase II and Phase III to our portfolio, while simultaneously reducing our economic interest in Takeda's anti-CD38 antibody mezagitamab, which is being evaluated in 2 indications in Phase III trials. Importantly, we still maintain a healthy low single-digit royalty on mezagitamab as we are keen on the mechanism of action and the dosing paradigm, particularly in IgA nephropathy. We also continue to efficiently expand our portfolio of assets through the acquisition of 7 negative enterprise value companies either directly or as a structuring agent. For the cost of sweat equity, not cash from our balance sheet, we have added multiple development-stage assets, either wholly owned or with established partner economics, received nondilutive cash to support expenses or future investments and in certain circumstances, acquired technology platform such as Generation Bio's ctLNP for the delivery of messenger RNA and nucleic acids. These transactions highlight one of XOMA's unique strengths, our ability to structure creative transactions that provide capital to both biotech innovators while capturing the long-term economics for our shareholders. From a strategic perspective, our focus remains clear, to build a large diversified portfolio of royalty interest in high-quality therapeutic programs while maintaining disciplined capital allocation. When we look at the company today in early 2026 compared with where we were at the beginning of 2023, the transformation and execution against that strategy is coming to light. Since then, we have built one of the industry's most expansive royalty portfolios, doubling the number of assets in active development, going from roughly 60 assets in 2023 to over 120 today. The portfolio has matured with sevenfold increases in both the number of commercially available assets as well as the number of assets in late-stage or potentially registrational development. Our prior business development efforts are starting to bear fruit in the form of milestone payments and growing recurring royalty receipts, such as our economic interest in MIPLYFFA, which was acquired in 2023. We have also increased our unrestricted cash position to over $80 million, access nondilutive capital thoughtfully and creatively and demonstrated that our business model can achieve positive operating cash flows, which gives us the firepower to continue to add assets on a go-forward basis. Importantly, we have done all this without diluting our shareholders as evidenced by a share count that is essentially flat compared to 2023. Overall, we believe XOMA Royalty is well positioned as a differentiated royalty aggregator and remains the only firm to invest in royalty assets across the entire drug development spectrum from preclinical stages all the way through commercial assets, helping innovative companies access nondilutive capital while building a portfolio designed to generate long-term shareholder value. With that overview, let me turn the call over to Brad to give you more detail on the portfolio and pipeline.