Arbutus Biopharma Corporation. (NASDAQ:ABUS) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call November 7, 2023 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Lisa Caperelli - VP of IR

Bill Collier - President, CEO and Director

David Hastings - CFO and CAO

Karen Sims - Chief Medical Officer

Michael Sofia - Chief Scientific Officer

Michael McElhaugh - Chief Operating Officer

Conference Call Participants

Roy Buchanan - JMP

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Arbutus Third Quarter Corporate and Financial Update Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to Lisa Caperelli. Please go ahead.

Lisa Caperelli

Thank you, Brianna. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Arbutus' third quarter 2023 financial results and corporate update call. Joining me today from the Arbutus executive team are Bill Collier, President and Chief Executive Officer; David Hastings, Chief Financial Officer; Michael J. McElhaugh, Chief Operating Officer Dr. Mike Sofia, Chief Scientific Officer; and Dr. Karen Sims, Chief Medical Officer. Bill will begin with a corporate update, followed by Dave Hastings who will provide a review of the company's third quarter 2023 financial results. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call for Q&A.

Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that some of the statements made during the call today are forward-looking statements, which are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results to differ materially, including those described in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, our quarterly report on Form 10-Q, which will be filed later today and from time to time in our other documents filed with the SEC.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Bill Collier. Bill?

Bill Collier

Good morning everyone and thank you very much for joining us today. As you likely saw in addition to reporting our third quarter results earlier this morning, we also announced that I will be retiring at the end of the year. I’ll speak more about that shortly, but first let's discuss our results.

At Arbutus, we remain committed to our goal of developing a functional cure for patients with chronic hepatitis B virus by advancing the development of our clinical assets that can be combined to create a curative treatment regimen.

Over the last few months, we've optimized our pipeline, including the discontinuation of our coronavirus research programs and our oral RNA destabilizer. This allows us to sharpen our focus and resources on our most promising clinical programs, imdusiran and AB-101, both of which are expected to have data readouts next year. As a result of this pipeline prioritization, we are also announcing today the difficult decision to streamline our organization by reducing our workforce by 24%. We want to underscore how grateful we are to all of our employees, especially those departing the organization for their dedication and passion in developing novel therapeutics for viral diseases at Arbutus. And while these changes primarily impact our research function, we have maintained a group of research scientists as we remain committed to continuing discovery research in chronic HBV.