OmniAb, Inc. (NASDAQ:OABI) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 14, 2023
Matthew Foehr: Okay, great, we’re at 8 am Pacific Time, 11 am Eastern time. So we will kick it off. Good morning everyone. I’m Matt Foehr, CEO of OmniAb, and I want to thank you all for joining our first Research and Technology Event. We are presenting today from NASDAQ’s Entrepreneurial Center, in Downtown San Francisco, which is just a short drive across the Bay Bridge from our headquarters and labs over in Emeryville. It’s been just over a year since OmniAb became an independent publicly traded company listed on the NASDAQ Exchange. And I want to thank the NASDAQ team here in San Francisco and back in New York, but especially the team here in San Francisco for hosting us today and furnishing this great space for our event this morning.
But before I begin, I’d like to remind you that we’ll be making forward-looking statements during our presentations. These forward-looking statements, of course, carry risks and uncertainties and actual results may be different from those that are projected. So I’d urge investors to please consult today’s earnings release as well as our SEC filings for more information on these risks. So again, welcome. I’m going to provide some opening remarks this morning, some updates on the business and also give a bit of a roadmap to today’s presentations. But before I do, I wanted to introduce you to our presenters. We’ve got a wider cross-section of management. I’m excited that investors and analysts get the chance to meet more of our management and leadership team here.
So you’ll see presentations from Todd Pettingill, who is our VP of Business Development and Strategy. Todd’s been with the OmniAb business really since the beginning of forming the foundation of what has now become OmniAb. He played a critical role in all six of the acquisitions of the company and technology acquisitions that we did in the less than the six year period to form what is now the foundation of the business of OmniAb. Bill Harriman, heads our antibody discovery. Bill was a Founder of Crystal Bioscience, which was the innovator and inventor of OmniChicken. Bill’s had a really illustrious career in the antibody discovery space, is also the inventor of the GEM Assay, which is a part of our technology. And Bill has the honors of doing the OmnidAb launch today, and you’ll hear more about that as I run through the agenda.
Bob Chen runs our Discovery Systems. Bob joined us when we acquired xCella Biosciences. Bob was the Co-Founder of xCella. He Co-Founded it along with Dr. Jennifer Cochran, who also sits on our Board of Directors. The xCella business was spun out of the Stanford School of Engineering, and Bob is an inventor of our exploration technology, which has become a key part of our business as well. And you’ll also get to meet Doug Krafte. Doug is a well-known individual in the scientific circles around ion channels and transporters. He has a long history of first scientific — first around the ion channel and transporter space and heads our Ion Channel AND Transporter Team based out in Durham. And then you’ll also get to meet Kurt. Obviously, many of the investors on the line and analysts know Kurt very well.
Kurt joined us not long before the split, when we split the business off and became an independent publicly traded company. A long career in biotech and technology, longest of which was at Amgen for many years, heading their European finance operations. So excited that you’ll get a chance to meet all of these colleagues who I’m honored to work with today. Today’s agenda, again, I’ll provide some opening remarks. Todd is going to give an update on creating value for partners. That’s something obviously is very important to us. And Bill will be launching the OmnidAb technology today. We’ll talk a lot about that, get into the science, get into where it fits in the industry and why it’s important. Bob will highlight how we enhance discovery with OmniDeep, which is our suite of in silico tools that are woven throughout our technology stack.
See also 12 Best Performing S&P 500 Stocks in the Last 10 Years and 25 Countries with Highest Percentage of Females.
Q&A Session
Follow Omniab Inc.
Follow Omniab Inc.
And Bob will provide details there and provide some case studies and other details that we think will be interesting to the investment community. And then Doug will talk about the Ion Channel opportunity, some high-value partnerships that we have there and why we see unlocking the antibody potential in ion channels as an important part of the future. And then Kurt will review our financials. Obviously, we reported our Q3 financials earlier this morning. He’ll review those and also provide some other financial insights into our portfolio of partnerships in our business. But I’m going to start with our mission. We are a mission-driven organization. This is what guides us. This is what keeps us focused. And our mission is to enable the rapid development of innovative therapeutics by pushing the frontiers of drug discovery technologies.
We are highly focused on this. We’re highly committed to this. And I think that clarity of mission is one of the things that attracts new partners and also causes a number of our existing partners to expand their use of our platform. Our business, in many ways, is quite simple. It’s a licensing business. So we license our technologies to the industry to allow them to more quickly and efficiently discover antibody-based therapeutics. Our technology offering addresses some of the most critical needs in discovery today. And we’re operating one of the largest Greenfields in the pharma industry. I’ll talk more about that in a couple of slides, but the antibody element, an antibody-related therapy elements of the industry continue to grow. We have a leading and proven technology now with a growing number of partners and a growing number of programs, and we are committed to continued innovation in what we call intelligent expansion of our technology.
Because of where we sit in the industry, we have a bit of a unique position where we can have deep technical dialogue with our partners, not only understanding where they are today, but where they are headed and that informs how we invest in and how we innovate around our platform. So a little bit on OmniAb today. We, as I said at the outset, we just passed the one-year mark of being an independent publicly traded company. And we really do feel like all of the pieces in the business are beginning to become aligned. As we look forward into 2024 and beyond, we do feel like we really have a business that is positioned to sing, if you will, going forward, that the pieces have come into place. And we really do now feel like we have a business that’s positioned to sing.
Our work is centered on driving the business, on accelerating innovation around the platform and consistently staying ahead of our partners’ discovery needs. We are 112 employees across three primary U.S. sites. Our headquarters here in the San Francisco Bay Area, over in Emeryville. We have an ion channel and transporter team in Durham, North Carolina, as I mentioned. And then also an in silico team that’s based in Tucson, Arizona. And that we’ve also built up our business development team more broadly, and recently established ex-U.S. business development presence as well. We see the need for only minimal future headcount growth to support substantial growth in our portfolio and our partnerships. There’s a lot of leverage in this business, a lot of efficiency that’s been built in over time, and we feel like we’re really well positioned to take advantage of that leverage.
Despite a macro landscape in the pharma tools and technology space that has obviously been widely reported and has had a number of headwinds associated with it, our business metrics in our business continue to demonstrate the value that our platform brings to the industry. We’ve had nice growth in new partners, nice growth in new programs over the last 24 months, while the industry has been facing substantial headwinds. We’ve also seen nice partner program advancement and announced this morning that we now have five new clinical entrants in this calendar year 2023. Our work and our technologies are really having an important impact, not only on our partners’ R&D pipelines but also on patients’ lives. This is something that really motivates us.
It motivates the rigor that we put into the science, how we challenge ourselves to stay ahead of partners’ needs. But we’re quite proud of the fact of where we sit in the industry, and it’s quite rewarding to see the impacts we’re starting to have on patients’ lives. There are over 170 active or completed clinical trials that are testing OmniAb-derived therapeutics. That’s a testament not only to our partners’ commitment and conviction around the antibodies that have been discovered out of our technology, but it also speaks a lot about the impact that we can potentially have on patients’ lives. There are over 30,000 subjects either enrolled or to be enrolled in those trials. We have three approved OmniAb-derived drugs. All of those are in cancer currently and a growing portfolio of clinical programs that I’ll touch on a little bit later in this section.
