atai Life Sciences' (ATAI) CEO Florian Brand on Q1 2022 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

atai Life Sciences N.V. (NASDAQ:ATAI) Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call May 16, 2022 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Greg Weaver – Chief Financial Officer

Florian Brand – Chief Executive Officer

Srini Rao – Chief Scientific Officer

Conference Call Participants

Charles Duncan – Cantor

Ritu Baral – Cowen

Greg Weaver

Hi everyone, I’m Greg Weaver, CFO of atai Life Sciences. And I’m pleased to welcome you to our First Quarter 2022 Earnings Management Interview. I’m joined today by my colleagues, CEO, Florian Brand; and CSO, Srini Rao.

We thought we do things a bit differently this time by hosting a conversation with two of our analysts, Charles Duncan from Cantor, and Ritu Baral from Cowen and we’re super excited to have them here with us today. Over the next 30 minutes Ritu and Charles will be asking us a series of questions on our Q1 activities and progress made in our pipeline developments.

As a reminder, our discussion today may include forward-looking statements about atai’s future results and performance, which are 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 moving to the interview, I’d like to briefly comment on our first quarter cash and operating expenses as reported in today’s Q1 earnings release. Our first quarter use of cash, total operating expenses, R&D and G&A expenses were generally in line with expectations. The total use of cash of $27 million for the quarter and we ended the Q1 with $335 million in cash. And we reiterate our guidance with runway into 2024. I’d like to emphasize the strength of that cash position with liquidity on hand to reach multiple key clinical milestones over the next two years and with our continued discipline management of our cash resources.

With that, I’ll hand the call over to Charles to kick off the conversation. Charles?

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - Charles Duncan

So hi Greg. Hi everyone. Thank you, Florian and team for the opportunity to co-host this Q&A with Ritu and congratulations on the recent progress. Just starting with a prospective builder perhaps for Florian. Florian, just thinking about atai strategy for navigating the turbulent biotech equity markets. It’s been a challenge this year. And I guess I’m wondering if you see this as an opportunity to acquire new assets or perhaps to frankly increase your ownership of companies that you’ve already invested in like COMPASS Pathways or are the prices with the prices so low, or is this a headwind, which forces you to be more careful about your cash runway?