Verona Pharma plc (NASDAQ:VRNA) Q1 2024 Results Conference Call May 9, 2024 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

David Zaccardelli - President, CEO & Executive Director
Mark Hahn - Chief Financial Officer
Christopher Martin - Chief Commercial Officer
Tara Rheault - Chief Development Officer

Conference Call Participants

Andrew Tsai - Jefferies
Tom Shrader - BTIG
Ram Selvaraju - H.C. Wainwright

Operator

Hello, and welcome to Verona Pharma's First Quarter 2024 Financial Results and Operating Highlights Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Earlier this morning, Verona Pharma issued a press release announcing its financial results for the 3 months ended March 31, 2024. A copy can be found in the Investor Relations tab on the corporate website, www.veronapharma.com.

Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that during today's call, statements about the company's future expectations, plans and prospects are forward looking statements. These forward looking statements are based on management’s current expectations. These statements are neither promises nor guarantees and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from our expectations expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.

Any such forward-looking statements represent management's estimates as of the date of this conference call. While the company may elect to update such forward-looking statements at some point in the future, it disclaims any obligation to do so even if subsequent events cause its views to change. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and will remain available for 90 days.

I'd now like to turn the call over to Dr. David Zaccardelli, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

David Zaccardelli

Thank you, and welcome to everyone to today’s call. With me today are Mark Hahn, our Chief Financial Officer; Dr. Kathy Rickard, our Chief Medical Officer; Chris Martin, our Chief Commercial Officer; and Dr. Tara Rheault, our Chief Development Officer. In the first quarter, we continued to make excellent progress on preparations with the planned commercialization [indiscernible] for the maintenance treatment of COPD. As you know, the FDA assigned [indiscernible] target action date for MC central of June 26. And has indicated they are not planning to hold an advisory committee meeting.

We are finalizing our activities for our potential U.S launch of MC central in the third quarter of this year, and look forward to continuing our work with FDA during the review. It’s approved MC central is expected to be the first novel inhaled mechanism available for the maintenance treatment of COPD in over 20 years. We believe its dual mechanism providing bronchodilator and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory effects has the potential to change the treatment paradigm for COPD.