Atai Life Sciences N.V. (ATAI) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Atai Life Sciences N.V. (NASDAQ:ATAI) Q3 2022 Earnings Conference Call November 10, 2022 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Stephen Bardin - Chief Financial Officer

Florian Brand - Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder

Srini Rao - Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder

Conference Call Participants

Andrew Tsai - Jefferies

Ritu Baral - Cowen

Stephen Bardin

Hi, everyone and welcome to the Atai Life Sciences Third Quarter Earnings Call. I am Stephen Bardin, CFO of Atai and I am very pleased to have you with us. I am joined by our CEO and Co-Founder, Florian Brand as well as our CSO and Co-Founder, Srini Rao.

Today, we will be speaking with two of our long-term analysts; Andrew Tsai from Jefferies and Ritu Baral from Cowen. Over the next 30 minutes, Andrew and Ritu will be asking us about recent progress across the pipeline and upcoming catalysts.

And now for the standard reminder that our discussion today may include forward-looking statements about Atai’s future results and performance, subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ. Atai does not undertake any obligation to update such statements which speak only as of today.

Before kicking off the interview, I’ll comment on the key financial takeaways included in today’s earnings release. First, our Q3 operating use of cash was $28 million and was in line with expectations, so no surprises there. Next, I want to remind everyone of our previously announced debt facility with Hercules, which provides access to up to $175 million. Back in mid-August, when we closed the facility, we drew down an initial $15 million. We ended Q3 with $304 million in cash. This cash balance plus the Hercules facility gives us a strong capital position. We reiterate our cash runway extending into 2025.

Let’s start our interview section. I’ll hand the mic over to Ritu from Cowen to get us started. Ritu?

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - Ritu Baral

Thanks, Stephen. Florian, there has been a lot of news flow around our company as of late. Before we get to it, could you please provide a brief high level summary of your most recent progress and upcoming milestones for the ones who might not be too familiar with it, with Atai?

Florian Brand

Absolutely, Ritu. Great to have you back, both of you, Andrew and Ritu, on this earnings call interview format. Quickly as a recap, our ultimate goal at Atai is to achieve clinically meaningful and sustained behavioral change in mental health patients. As of today, we have 8 drug development programs in the clinics, and we also have 4 enabling technologies that we deem to be very complementary with those 8 programs. And all of those 8 programs target several major indications, neuropsychiatric indications. In addition, all of these programs have either already achieved proof of concept, in the case of COMP360, or have a path to efficacy data over the next 2 years. And we expect that these upcoming efficacy datasets are really going to be value inflection points for Atai. Looking at last quarter, very briefly, in addition to multiple clinical trial initiations, we have announced two very encouraging positive initial Phase 1 results with GRX-917, our deuterated etifoxine compound and with KUR-101, our deuterated mitragynine compounds. Both of them showed very, very intriguing PK/PD results and encourage us to drive the development of those programs further. And then last but not least, of course, we have PCN-101. We announced that we completed our enrollment in this study. So that’s the Phase 2a proof-of-concept study in TRD with R-ketamine, and we are very much looking forward to the data coming out of this trial around the end of this year.