I’m very proud of our team at Co-Diagnostics and our accomplishments so far in 2024. I believe we are now closer to achieving our long-term goals, and I look forward to updating you on our progress throughout the remainder of the year. I will now turn the call over to Brian to discuss our first quarter financial results.
Brian Brown: Thanks, Dwight, and thanks to everyone who joined today’s call. For the first quarter of 2024, total revenue decreased to $0.5 million as compared to $0.6 million in the prior year same period. Grant revenue in Q1 2024 was $0.2 million, and product revenue was $0.3 million. Gross profit for the first quarter increased to $0.2 million compared to $0.1 million in the prior year comparable period. Total operating expenses for the quarter ended March 31, 2024, increased to $10.5 million compared to $10.1 million in Q1 2023. The increase from the prior year is primarily due to strategic investments in research and development to support our development and commercialization initiatives for our Co-Dx PCR platform. Research and development expenses in the first quarter were $5.7 million compared to $5.0 million in the comparable prior year period.
The year-over-year increase was driven by investments in our Co-Dx PCR platform and the ongoing development of our diagnostic pipeline. For the first quarter, income before taxes decreased to a loss of $9.3 million as compared to a loss of $8.0 million reported in the prior year. Income tax expense in the first quarter was $0.02 million, representing an effective tax rate of 0.2%. We have previously discussed that our effective tax rate will differ from the U.S. federal statutory rate of 21.0% due to state taxes, permanent items and discrete items, including changes in valuation allowances. Net loss for the first quarter of 2024 was $9.3 million or a loss of $0.31 per fully diluted share compared to a net loss of $5.8 million or a loss of $0.20 per fully diluted share in the prior year.
Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $8.4 million compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $7.2 million in the prior year. We ended the quarter with $50.0 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities and continue to manage our spend as we look to maintain a healthy balance sheet to position ourselves for long-term growth. Co-Diagnostics remains focused on maintaining our cash position through appropriate and diligent spend to position the company for success upon a future commercial launch of our platform. We believe that we are operating from a strong cash position, and we’ll continue to focus on driving operational efficiencies. We remain excited about our 2024 plan and are very optimistic about our test pipeline and the Co-Dx PCR platform.
I look forward to updating you on our next earnings call. With that, I will now turn the presentation back over to Dwight.
Dwight Egan: Thank you, Brian. Before opening for Q&A, I want to take this time to extend a warm thank you to our Codiak [ph] shareholders in addition to our employees, distributors and consultants whose hard work, support and belief in the value of our platform helps us execute on our goals every day. We will now take questions from our analysts. Operator?
Operator:
Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session and concludes the conference call. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.+
