OABI - NASDAQ

Good afternoon, and welcome to OmniAb, Inc. First quarter 2025 financial results and business update conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Kurt Gustafson, OmniAb, Inc. Chief Financial Officer. You may begin.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. This is Kurt Gustafson, OmniAb's Chief Financial Officer, and thank you all for joining our first quarter 2025 financial results conference call. There are slides to accompany today's prepared remarks, and they're available on our website at www.omniab.com. Before we begin, I'd like to remind listeners that comments made during this call by management will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from any anticipated results. These forward-looking statements are qualified by the cautionary statements contained in today's press release and our SEC filings. Importantly, this conference call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of the date of this live broadcast today, 05/08/2025. Except as required by law, OmniAb undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this call. Joining me on the call today is Matt Foehr, OmniAb's President and CEO, and Bob Chen, our Vice President of Discovery Systems. During today's call, we'll provide highlights on the company's business and operations, partner and technology updates, and our recent financial results. At the conclusion of the prepared remarks, we'll open the call to questions. And with that, let me turn the call over to Matt.

Thanks, Kurt. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today on our call. 2025 is off to a very good start and is on track with our expectations. Despite some tumult in the broader landscape and in our industry, we're continuing to sign up new partners, and our pipeline of partnered programs continues to grow and to progress. Deal flow to start the year has been strong with both platform deals and recent asset-based deals, and I've been impressed with the robustness of both the pace and the quality of our deals. Overall, we believe the foundation of our business is getting stronger. Our technology offering is highly leverageable. It's differentiated and it continues to expand. As we previously announced, we streamlined our operations early in Q1 and we remain focused on creating value for our partners and for all of our stakeholders. We've seen nice progression and favorable data from many of our partners. And today, we're also excited to be talking about another technology milestone for the company, which is the launch of the exploration partner access program. That allows OmniAb partners to purchase exploration instruments for use in their own labs. At OmniAb, we've always been committed to innovation to enable drug discovery. Part of this innovation has been the development and refinement of tools that we use in our own workflows that increase speed, accuracy, and efficiency. Exploration has been an important part of our work here for many years. We highlighted exploration a couple of years back at an analyst event over in San Francisco. And we've continued to make enhancements to both the hardware and the software while it served as a backbone of our internal screening work. I'll now touch on just a few of our very briefly before I turn the call over to Bob to talk about some of the technical aspects of exploration. Moving now on to slide number five with active partners. We exited the first quarter with 95 active partners, including new deals with Harvard's Weiss Institute, Takis Biotech, and Orion Corporation. The Orion deal is notable as it's related to a single ion channel antibody program. Subsequent to the end of the quarter, we also just signed, actually, earlier today, an asset deal with Angelini Pharma for a small molecule ion channel modulator that targets Kv 7.2. You might recall that this was a program that was returned to us from Roche late last year. As part of our deal with Angelini, we expect to receive a $3,000,000 upfront payment and have the potential to receive over $170,000,000 in contracted milestones and royalty. Now on to slide six. The number of active programs also grew in the first quarter. We were pleased to see that the momentum of program additions that we noted in Q4 of last year continued into Q1 of this year. And our total number of active programs grew to 378 at quarter end. I'll note here, as we often do, that attrition or terminations are obviously a natural part of drug development. And we saw attrition in Q1 as well, mostly concentrated in the discovery stage as is generally expected. Now on slide seven, as of the end of Q1, our partners had 33 active clinical programs and approved products. There was one new clinical entrant in Q1 from Genmab, and you'll see it on the pipeline chart in the appendix of today's presentation materials. We look to the rest of the year, we continue to expect a total of five to seven new entries into clinical development for the year. Slide eight highlights the growth in our portfolio of post-discovery stage assets. In Q1, we saw new assets advance into the preclinical stage of development, a new program enter Phase I, as I just mentioned, and a program that is now shown in phase three, that is an anti-PCSK9 antibody called SAL003 with Salubris Pharmaceuticals. That antibody was discovered by WuXi using our OmniRat and we have a 3% royalty on that phase three stage program. I also note that Teva recently disclosed progression of TEV 408 from Phase I to Phase II with a new study to evaluate safety and efficacy in adults with celiac disease. In general, it's good to see the continued growth in these post-discovery stage assets, which have increased more than 39% over the last couple of years. And we continue to be excited about the diversity, the sizable future milestone potential, and the potential therapeutic impact of the assets in our preclinical stage bucket, that's shown here in the orange part of the pie chart. We expect those will mature and will drive new clinical starts in the future. Here on Slide nine, we've highlighted some select and recent partner updates. A few of these updates and positive data disclosures occurred at the AACR meeting. And it's good to continue to see the progression and substantial financial investments by our partners in programs that have been enabled by our technologies. We're also looking forward to a number of presentations at the upcoming ASCO annual meeting in Chicago, which gets underway on May 30. A listing of some of those are also in the appendix of our slide deck today as well. So now on to slide 10. Bob and I are gonna talk in a little more detail about our exploration partner access program that we launched today. It was described in our press release that came out right after the market closed. Within our growing ecosystem of partners, there's been increasing recognition of exploration's substantial value. And partners have expressed interest in integrating it within the workflows of their own labs. So after a lot of development and testing, which has included deployment outside of our labs, we think exploration has reached a level of technical maturity where its capabilities and reliability will be an important contributor to the screening instrument space, which we see as a growing area of interest in the industry. We're already in preliminary conversations with some of our partners. And the feedback we've received has been overwhelmingly positive. We think exploration will allow our partners to enhance and accelerate their downstream work. And importantly, this new program also has the potential to create new revenue streams for us as well. Now I'll turn the presentation over to Bob to go a little deeper on some of the key elements of the exploration technology, Bob.

Thanks, Matt. I'll pick things up with slide 12. For the past few years, exploration has been an integral part of our discovery engine, empowering the antibody discovery services for our partners. After seeing this technology in action and the data it produces, our partners have asked, "How can we get one of those?" These years of supporting partner discovery have also helped us refine and mature the technology. This growth paired with field testing has validated exploration to a state where the instrument is now available to be offered to partners for use in their own laboratories. As a reminder from our previous analyst research and technology event that Matt referenced, exploration is an AI-driven, deep functional screening instrument for antibody discovery. Mining primary B cells from immunized animals has always been a tough challenge in therapeutic antibody discovery. Traditional methods can limit antibody diversity and can take weeks to complete. But with exploration, we have simplified the process into three steps. As shown here on slide 13, the process starts by loading B cells into a unique microcapillary array chip, which features a through-hole format with 1,500,000 microcapillaries, each just 40 microns in diameter. These microcapillaries isolate these cells for various assays. Next, the chip is loaded into an instrument, which performs automated imaging of each cell. Using advanced AI computer vision, the instrument detects promising hits that match the desired antibody properties, providing precision and efficiency in identifying the best candidates. And lastly, the hits are recovered using a precise, rapid, touchless laser method to sort cells from the microcapillaries onto a recovery plate. After recovery, the antibodies are sequenced from the sorted cells. From a technical perspective, as described here on slide 14, we believe that exploration represents a significant advancement in single B cell screening antibody discovery. It provides important advantages in fast processing speed, powerful throughput, exceptional hit recovery, and ease of use combined with reliability. Our platform has rapid run times of approximately one point five hours, enabling multiple daily runs, and offers 10 times more single cell screening throughput versus other instruments. This screening throughput is paired with the ability to rapidly sort thousands of live cells for large-scale repertoire mining. Along with these advanced capabilities and speed, the instrument was designed to provide simplicity and robustness from installation to training to use. The system features no fluidics at all, which ensures simple setup with minimum maintenance. AI-assisted analysis automatically scans images to find hits, leading to faster speeds and less labor and fatigue for users. Since the AI models are trained from expert user input, new users can use this expertise and leverage it, improving ease of use and reducing training. I will now turn it over to Matt to discuss some business elements relating to our exploration launch.

Thanks, Bob. From a business perspective, and I'm now on slide number 15, we expect exploration will increase the diversity of our technology-based sources of revenue. The instrument, which is built here in the United States, is available to our partners at a list price of about $500,000. Partners will also need to sign up for a subscription service that will cover proprietary software and maintenance. In addition, there are proprietary consumables that are used in operating the instrument each time a run is performed. We're really excited about this new offering for our partners. And while I say all that, I also do want to emphasize that our core business of licensing novel discovery technology to the pharmaceutical industry is and remains the foundation of our strategy, and that is what has been driving consistent growth in key partner and program metrics for multiple years. That's all unchanged. We see the offering of exploration to our partners as additive, as a natural strategic enhancement that expands and elevates our existing offerings in a highly scalable and highly leverageable way. We think now is the right time to do it as we're quickly approaching a hundred active OmniAb partners. We're highly committed to growing the business with a clear focus on value creation and long-term profitability. By consistently prioritizing innovation, efficiency, and creating leverage in the business, we aim to enhance our position and deliver sustainable value to all of our stakeholders. We expect the launch of exploration will be accretive to earnings and to cash flow in both the short and the long term. And lastly for me, here on slide number 16, see a summary of some of the upcoming technical presentations that we have. We'll obviously be highlighting exploration next week quite extensively at the PEGS conference out in Boston. And one of our partners who were early adopters through a collaboration will be presenting data related to exploration as well. And with that, let me turn the call back to Kurt for discussion of our Q1 financial results.

Thanks, Matt. We start with Slide 18 with a review of our revenue in the first quarter of 2025. We're reporting a revenue increase to $4,200,000 compared with $3,800,000 for the same period in 2024. This increase was primarily due to higher milestone revenue as a result of the phase one milestone for the start of Genmab's 1078 clinical program. This was partially offset by lower service revenue associated with the completion of certain small molecule ion channel programs. Royalty revenue was also lower for the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. Turning to slide 19, you'll see our operating expenses for the first quarter of 2025. Operating expense declined to $23,000,000 from $26,400,000 for the prior year period. To break this down, R&D expense was $12,600,000 compared to $14,600,000 a year ago, with the decrease primarily due to lower stock-based compensation expense and lower external expenses associated with small molecule ion channel programs and technology development. G&A expense declined to $7,900,000 from $8,300,000 for the same period in 2024, the decrease primarily due to lower legal fees and lower stock-based comp. On slide 20, focusing on the bottom section of the P&L, our net loss for the first quarter of 2025 was $18,200,000 or $0.17 per share, and this compares with a net loss of $19,000,000 or $0.19 per share for the same period in 2024. Turning to Slide 21, you'll see our balance sheet as of 03/31/2025. We ended the quarter with $43,600,000 in cash, and this was in line with our expectations. Q1 is traditionally our largest cash use quarter, and similar to previous years, there are certain seasonal compensation items that occur in the first quarter. In addition, as we previously disclosed, we implemented a reduction in force in early February, this resulted in approximately $1,000,000 of additional cash outlay in the first quarter. However, we will see the benefit of lower expenses and lower cash use going forward. With regards to guidance for 2025, here on slide 22, you'll see that we continue to expect that 2025 revenue will be between $20,000,000 and $25,000,000. We have not included any revenue contribution from the launch of the exploration partner access program in our 2025 revenue guidance. At this stage, it's difficult to predict the precise number and timing of instruments that we might sell to our partners. However, as Matt said, the feedback from some of our early conversations has been quite positive. And we believe this program will be accretive to both earnings and cash flow. With regards to operating expense guidance, we now expect operating to be in the range of $85,000,000 to $90,000,000, which is lower than our previous range of $90,000,000 to $95,000,000. As a reminder, approximately 40% of our operating expense is noncash expense, which is a result of depreciation, amortization, and stock-based compensation. We also continue to expect that our cash used in 2025 will be lower than the cash used in 2024. As a reminder, our cash used in 2024 was $38,900,000 excluding the 2024 ATM issue. And finally, our guidance on the tax rate remains unchanged at approximately 0%. And with that, I'd like to open up the call for questions. So operator?

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press the star followed by the number one on your touch-tone phone. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press the star followed by the number two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. One moment please for your first question. Your first question comes from Puneet Souda from Leerink Partners. Please go ahead.

Hi. You have Michael on for Puneet. Thanks for taking my question. My first has to do with the number of programs start this quarter. It's very strong. I think you've matched almost half of what you did to all of last year. I was wondering if you could attribute that to any particular trends and whether the strength was balanced across geographies or size of the partner, you know, large pharma versus SMidCap.

Yeah, Michael. Thanks. Yeah. I mean, as I noted in the earlier remarks, we saw as we talked about in our Q4 call, I believe, we saw some nice momentum of ads at the end of 2024. And that continued here in the first quarter of 2025. I think there are a lot of things that drive it, candidly. It's continued innovation. Obviously, we've launched new technologies and new workflow enhancements over recent years. Omnigab, which is our single chain antibody technology, has driven a lot of interest from new partners. And we continue to see existing partners starting new programs. So, it's good to see that. I always balance that with saying starts and attrition can be lumpy. There are factors like timing of reports that we may get from partners either on a quarterly or biannual or annual basis. Right? So some of those things can drive lumpiness in starts and attrition. But overall, it was great to see the momentum in new program additions that we saw at the end of last year continue in Q1 as well. So I think it says a lot about not only the work that the team is doing, but also the technologies themselves and the innovation around them.

Great. Thanks. And then my second question has to do with the exploration platform. I just want to make sure if I'm understanding right. So this is exclusively for people who are or partners who are, like, have access to your broader platform and not just any theoretical pharma company. And I was just wondering what the incremental cost associated with promoting this product will look like and how that balances with the decrease in OpEx guide that you have.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Michael. So the first I'll say, yes. This is a partner access program. So this is making OmniAb instruments and the associated consumables, etcetera, available to those that are in the OmniAb ecosystem of partners, right, which, you know, at the end of Q1, was 95 partners. So that's kind of the answer to the first question. Obviously, we updated our guidance on expense today. We've known and have been planning for the exploration partner access program launch for a while. We have positioned our organization and our plans accordingly. So we're ready for it. We're positioned for it, and that's kind of built into our financial plans as well.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Michael. Thank you. Your next question comes from Mr. Rigrita. Please go ahead from Truist Securities.

Hi. This is Alex on for Kripa. I also have a question on the exploration partner access program. I know you said that the number of potential partners is a little bit speculative at this point in time, but any color or any benchmarks or ceiling and floor numbers that you could give to put a boundary on that would be helpful. Imagine a lot of the partners would have their own machinery, so maybe they would have to make a decision whether to upgrade. And then how fast would these partnership discussions happen with respect to the exploration? Do you imagine that it's a you email all the different partners, and it could be sort of an instant rollout, or would it take some time to get up and running with each partner? Thanks.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Alex. A great question. You know, obviously, our partner base now has been growing consistently at double-digit rates now for multiple years where, as I said, we're up at 95 partners. Realistically, it is a portion of those partners that are the most likely and best candidates for an exploration instrument or exploration instrument, depending on the work that they do. And we know who those folks are. We have the benefit of having deep relationships with our partners. They're very deep technical relationships. In some instances, you know, multiple years, we understand what their capabilities are. We understand their research interests. So that informs how we're gonna target the different partners. As I mentioned, we've had preliminary conversations with some partners. Those have been overwhelmingly positive and very good. But it is difficult to give any kind of exact numbers at this point. I expect as we get deeper into the launch, we'll be talking more about that here in the future. Next week, we'll be at the PEGs Conference in Boston, which is a major conference for protein engineering. There'll be multiple presentations about exploration. We'll actually have an instrument in our booth, and we'll be talking more about it then. So, it's more a stay tuned at this point. But, again, we're excited about being able to offer this to our partners. We think it will streamline their workflows. It creates new revenue streams for us, not only with the instruments, but with the consumables and software maintenance, etcetera.

Thanks. Yeah. It's great to see all the progress in your development. Thanks.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Gilpin Ginis from H. C. Wainwright. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. So congrats on the exploration public launch now. And I wanna see if I can get a little more color. Obviously, you focused on a key element of the differentiation, and that was the time and throughput. Are there any other key differentiators to point to?

Yeah. You know, multiple from a simple sense, Joe, and I'll have Bob, you know, Bob can comment and fill in. It's actually a very easy instrument to use. And it's highly efficient. Obviously, it interplays very well with big data management that we've talked a lot about as we've rolled out new things like our OmniEAP and our OmniHub platforms. But, actually, I'll turn it over to Bob to maybe talk through that.

Yeah. I think the top line numbers of kind of the throughput and screening and speed, that's very clear. But I think one thing to also add is that we've really matured this technology with live discovery campaigns in our hands. So that maturity probably comes from the fact that there's no the technology is designed around a no fluidic system. Right? So very often with these instrumentations, fluidics is a big Achilles heel. It causes leaks, clogs. It can cause some issues there, but we have a system that's very simple. And that also makes it very easy to use on a daily basis. We really refine the software so that using these AI tools to help you navigate it with a guided scan and everything so that this instrument is approachable even for junior members in the lab.

That's very helpful, actually. Thanks for that. And then I think for someone on the actual lab itself, even having the pitch of, you know, less clogs can be very powerful. So just as an addendum to prior question, wanted to see if you guys had any sort of views on the revenue opportunity, number one. And then also, you know, considering exploration and the fact that you're a tech-heavy company. At first, it's nice to hear that the asset is made in The US. But when you look at the individual parts and also all of the supplies needed and, you know, what have you for your current platforms, you know, I almost feel awkward in asking this question, but what are the impacts of tariffs right now, and how do you consider this currently or potentially in the intermediate term for your cost?

Yeah. Joe, I can comment on tariffs. Kurt can talk through some of the other elements. You know, we really both for exploration and across our business, we really don't see significant impacts to tariffs. For a lot of reasons, the exploration instrument and the vast majority of the parts are all here in The US. They're built the instrument is built here in The US. We've built our supply chain in that way. Kurt, maybe you wanna comment on the other.

Yeah. And I just think, you know, with regards to other things that we use in our business, other lab supplies and things like that, they're fairly straightforward. And there's multiple suppliers that we can use. So we really don't see and it's a small part of our overall operating expense. So we see very little impact if any, from any of these tariffs.

Great to hear. Thanks, guys.

Joe. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Steven Willey from Stifel Financial. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. This is Julian for Steve, and congrats on your progress. I just have a question regarding exploration platform. So first of all, like, I know I understand that it is available to existing partners through this partner access program. And I'm just wondering if there is any trend I know that Matt just mentioned that there's been, you know, like, ongoing discussions with potential partners. So is there any trend in terms of, like, targets that partners pursue or indications or even that size of the partners, you know, partners like large versus small to mid-cap companies, etcetera. And second, like, just out of, like, naive curiosity, would it also be possible in the future to extend this program to, let's say, like, new partner, not the current partner? So that will be my question. Thank you.

Yeah. Great questions. I'll take the second one or the last one first. Part as new partners sign up, they also will have access to the exploration platform. Right? And so, like, for instance, as we new partners, we're always negotiating new deals. Those partners will also get access and the ability to purchase an exploration instrument from us and the ability to purchase the custom and proprietary consumables. So that will continue as we add new partners. In terms of your question on specific targets and things like that, that one becomes one of the great things about our position in the industry with now, you know, growing platform of active programs that at 378. You know, nice flow of addition of new programs and these kind of deep relationship partnerships. You really do get a good sense of not only where the industry is where it's been, where it is now, and where it's heading. Some of that we see a lot of diversity as you get deep into our portfolio. Some of it also relates to the technologies that we launch. We launched OmniDAB a couple of years ago. With that launch, we definitely saw an uptick in things like CNS disease, infectious disease, use for ADCs, and multispecifics. Right? So those are all areas that we continue to see of growing interest in the industry. Of course, there's always a consistent interest in oncology, in I and I, and in a variety of areas. And metabolic disease, aging, those kinds of things, and we see that through our pipeline as well. But I really can't provide specific targets that folks are working on, generally, become visible as partners enter the clinic. And as they pursue downstream clinical development.

Thank you. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Matt Hewitt from Craig Hallum.

Hello. This is telephone for Matt Hewitt. So with the new FDA decision to move away from animal testing, where does it put your business prospects, especially with the rollout of exploration platform? Some detail on that would be great. Thank you.

Yeah. So I think what you're referring to is there was an FDA announcement around essentially revising some of the requirements for antibody-based medicines from a toxicology screening perspective before they go into the clinic. And so, to be clear, that's totally different from what we are providing, which are transgenic animals that provide broad, bespoke antibody repertoires in response to antigens that partners can then screen. Right? So this is a totally different part of the industry. It was actually very good to see that announcement from FDA that they were looking at streamlining entry into the clinic, which, you know, potentially across the industry, could facilitate antibody-based medicines getting into the clinic faster. So we actually see that generally. I mean, there's a potential benefit there if it streamlines timelines for certain partners or certain programs. Or if it attracts other partners into an antibody-based modality also has the potential to perhaps decrease cost for antibody-based medicines to get into the clinic, which we see as a benefit as well. There's a scientific foundation for why this applied to antibody-based medicines because when you're doing, you know, in vitro work with them, you can get a much better sense of where they're going and what they're doing. And that's one of the reasons why I think, foundationally, the FDA made that announcement. So overall, we think that's potentially good news for the industry.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Brendan Smith from TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Hey. This is Jackie on for Brendan. Thanks for taking my question. I guess, also on the bandwagon diving right into the exploration access program, sounds really awesome. Do you intend to build out additional computational or, you know, AI-driven platform offerings or data packages for customers, as sort of a stand-alone partner SaaS offering? And are there any specific models, datasets, areas of white space that you think would be great for your platform to really dive into?

Yeah. Before Bob comments on that, I'm sure Bob's got all kinds of things he can add to that, but I'll just say, but first, thanks, Jackie, for the question. And I think you see implicit in your question is the connection between the various technologies we have launched over recent years. Right? Been a lot of intention in what we've been doing when we launched things like our Omni Deep platform, which is a suite of in silico tools that are woven throughout our discovery platform, exploration, and importantly, exploration. Last year, we also launched our OmniHub platform, which is a digital platform for data sharing and tool sharing, things like that. But Bob can talk about kind of the ever-evolving elements of leveraging AI and big data management and how that fits in.

Yeah. I think, you know, a few things there. I think exploration in its core abilities to just look at millions of biological variants and then recover thousands of positive events. Right? And to do that, we, of course, use AI tools for that process to really kind of understand the image analysis to help the user get the end profile. But, really, we view exploration overall as a great way to get large amounts of data, large amounts of functional data, in particular in our hands on antibodies, against different targets. And so we really view exploration as a way to generate a large amount of data to feed into AI tools and in our hands kind of feed into the Omni Deep. And then there's an interplay also there of like kind of as we use AI tools to select repertoires, to select analyze interest, those sequence space can actually go back into exploration for testing. Right? So exploration actually has a very unique place to kind of rise some benefits as AI tools get more and more developed to both make the process discovery easier and also maybe supplement the data collection to feed new model training.

That's great. Thank you so much for the color, and I'll hold back for other people to join in.

Thanks, Jackie. Thanks, Jackie.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, should you have a question, please press 1. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to the OmniAb team. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you, operator. I'd like to thank everyone for joining today's call and for your engagement and your questions. We'll be traveling over the next few weeks to attend various investor conferences and scientific and technical conferences, and we look forward to keeping you updated. Thanks again.