SWK Holdings Corporation (NASDAQ:SWKH) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question will come from [Scott Jensen], a private investor.

Unidentified Analyst: Good quarter, Jody and everyone on the team, especially with the buyback as just mentioned and pleasantly surprised on the 2 workouts. It’s not going to being to be a hit to the bottom line, at least at this point. My question, I guess, is on Enteris. It looks like some good progress being made. And when you say $9 million in future bids that are out there, what is the kind of metrics that you use to [compete] on those? Is it price? Is it reputation? How can we kind of get an idea of how that hit ratio might work out?

Jody Staggs : Yes. Great question. We’re still learning a bit about that. So the majority of those bids, those proposals stem from our partnership with a large pharma service organization, which I’m not supposed to name, but we’ve been working with them since April in a formal arrangement, and we are their preferred provider for certain Phase I and Phase II services. So they’ve got customers. They’ve got small biotech pharmas coming to them for help as they develop their programs and for particular dosing technologies, and that partner is referring them to us for certain of these services. So these are really warm leads. It’s — we’re — I would need to check, but we’re picking up the vast majority of that revenue. The partner is keeping a bit of it.

And really, for them, the benefit is getting these biotechs quality CDMO services and moving them through the clinical progression so they can hopefully use our partners, technology, patented technology once they get out to market. I wish I have some number to tell you we’ll pick up x percent, but the rates have been great so far. I mean we the early proposals we put out, we’re winning lots of those. And I think we’ll definitely win our fair share of these new ones, particularly given that these are coming through warm leads. But at this time, I don’t have a great rubric of the percent, and I’m still kind of working with Paul and the team and Enteris to understand that a bit better myself.

Unidentified Analyst : And then just kind of a continuation, as you say, strategic options possibly for Enteris, clearly, one of the things that you’d benefited from over the past number of years have been the paybacks from some of the Cara royalties, and it seems like they’re making good progress, at least to report this week, on their Oral program, would that be something where you’d still maintain some kind of future royalty access? Or would it just depend on the bid or the options that you’re presented with?

Jody Staggs : Yes, I think we would retain that. It’s really a financial asset at this point in time. We like royalties. We understand it. We think we understand what the value is, so there’s no reason we could retain that. I tend to think the people that might be interested in the CDMO business are not really that interested in a royalty from a third party, so I would envision that we would retain that. There is another royalty there at Enteris as well. It’s — we haven’t talked much about it. And it’s just a royalty, milestone that there’s an active program going on there. And then we’re actually working on some other proposals as well. So I think all of those types of things, which are really financial assets, SWK would keep. I just don’t see CDMO buyer really being that interested in those.

Operator: Our next question will come from Michael Diana with Maxim Group.

Michael Diana : Now that SVB has been gone for about 4 months, do you notice any change in the competitive environment?