Exscientia plc (NASDAQ:EXAI) Q3 2023 Results Conference Call November 9, 2023 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Sara Sherman - VP, IR

Andrew Hopkins - CEO

Dave Hallett - Chief Scientific Officer

Ben Taylor - CFO and Chief Strategy Officer

Dr. Mike Krams - Chief Quantitative Medicine Officer

Conference Call Participants

Alec Stranahan - Bank of America

Peter Lawson - Barclays

Chris Shibutani - Goldman Sachs

Operator

Hello, everyone. My name is Sarah, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Exscientia’s business update call for the third quarter of 2023. [Operator Instructions]. At this time, I would like to introduce Sara Sherman, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sara, you may begin.

Sara Sherman

Thank you, operator. A press release and 6-K were issued this morning with our third quarter 2023 financial results and business update. These documents can be found on our website at investors.exscientia.ai, along with the presentation for today’s webcast. Before we begin, I’d like to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements on our call. These may include statements about the initiation, timing and progress of and data collected during and reported from the company’s clinical trials, expectations regarding the growth of the company’s capabilities and the performance of its technology platform and the company’s projected cash runway. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these statements. Unless required by law, Exscientia does not undertake any obligation to update these statements regarding the future or to confirm these statements in relation to actual results.

On today’s call, I’m joined by Professor Andrew Hopkins, Chief Executive Officer; after Dave Hallett, Chief Scientific Officer; and Ben Taylor, CFO and Chief Strategy Officer. Dr. Mike Krams, Chief Quantitative Medicine Officer will also be available for the Q&A session.

And with that, I will now turn the call over to Andrew.

Andrew Hopkins

Thank you, Sara. In the third quarter of 2023, we made great strides across our internal and partner programs. We are executing on a focused development pipeline and prioritizing our most differentiated highest-value oncology programs, including GTA, EXS-617, our CDK7 inhibitor in partnership with GTAparon, which is enrolling patients in a Phase I/II clinical trial and EXS-74539, our LSD1 inhibitor, for which we anticipate submitting an IND in the first quarter of 2024.

We also advanced partner programs, achieving the first milestone in our Sanofi collaboration and inked a new partnership with Merck KGaA that bolstered our financial strength and expanded our reach. We continue to push forward with clinical validation in our precision medicine platform. Xigen is a multicenter observational trial evaluating of predictive power of a functional precision medicine platform in ovarian cancer. We also have a similar program with Charite in hematological cancers. As a learning company, we are always looking for ways to advance and develop new tech. Exscientia’s automation facility recently opened, and we have begun screening biological assets. We plan to migrate all the primary assays we can from our CROs to our automated labs. We synthesized our first compound at our automation labs and through 2024 plan to bring you more information on how we integrate an AI to automate chemical synthesis at the facility.