OmniAb, Inc. (NASDAQ:OABI) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Your next question comes from Stephen Willey from Stifel.

Stephen Willey : I appreciate some of the macro commentary that you provided. I know some of your peers have been kind of talking about that of late. But I guess, have you seen much in the way of any uptick of attrition just on the discovery program front? And would you expect that to be kind of the better surrogate of some of the macro challenges just given some of the reprioritization of R&D spend and, I guess, kind of broader pipeline streaming efforts that we’re starting to see across the space?

Matthew Foehr : Yes. I mean, a great question, Steve. I’d say, really nothing specific there on the attrition front. As we noted, obviously, I’ll just say at the outset, attrition is a natural part of the pharmaceutical industry, as we all know, many things fail, and that’s — the fact that there is attrition is obviously expected. This last quarter, we only saw attrition in the discovery phase and just in discovery stage assets. Looking back a little bit in the fourth quarter of last year, we saw first program attrition at the clinical stage, 2 partners had exited certain therapeutic areas or specific therapeutic areas, those assets themselves may have potential in other hands, but are not included in our program count anymore.

I bring that up as an example. It’s difficult to say. Is that a macro thing? Is that just larger partners focusing in those specific instances? It’s very difficult to say. So I think it’s hard to answer your question specifically, but these are all metrics that we always monitor all the time, and obviously, keep having deep dialogue with our partners. So hopefully, that gives you a little more color.

Stephen Willey : Okay. And I guess the work that’s ongoing in the ion channel space, I know that these, again, are being kind of out-licensed on a target exclusive basis. But I guess, for those targets that have already been claimed by either GSK or Roche, and I understand that all of these are difficult to drug. But I guess, how would you kind of characterize these targets that they’ve selected in the hierarchy of things that are difficult to do within the ion channel space itself? And how much more kind of green space in the target universe do you think that you have over the next kind of 1, 3, 5 years?

Matthew Foehr : Yes. Great question, Steve. The description — obviously, there’s a substantial amount of confidentiality considerations and other things with partners that we always respect of course. But the GSK relationship is around specific targets for neurological disorders. And at the discovery phase, it was an agreement that was originally struck a couple of years ago, so it’s progressed well. Obviously, we announced the milestone in this quarter. And I’ll just say when folks are pursuing ion channels and transporters, these are generally considered high-value targets, right? And I’ll just comment generally. I think GSK has a really ambitious innovation agenda in this area. They stated publicly a goal to positively impact the health of 2.5 billion people by the end of 2030.

So that’s a really aggressive goal and an ambitious one, and we’re excited to be collaborating with them. I think these are our programs where we’ve got distinct capabilities and cell lines and reagents and other things as well as high-throughput screening as well as the ability to leverage multiple modalities, which I think are the kinds of things that can attract more of these sorts of partnerships potentially in the future.

Operator: Your next question comes from Matt Hewitt from Craig-Hallum.

Jack Siedow : This is Jack on for Matt. Obviously, you’ve recently just launched OmniDeep, and I was just kind of curious what the initial reception has been for your customers?