So please join that if you’re interested in going deeper into the science and learning a bit more. So thank you much, and I’ll turn it over to Kurt now to finish the formal presentation.
Kurt Gustafson: Thanks, Doug. So today, I’m going to start by talking a little bit about our third quarter financial results. And then I’ll kind of switch gears and talk about some metrics for the broader portfolio. So let’s start with the third quarter results. So total revenue for the third quarter was $5.5 million compared to $6.9 million in the prior year quarter. We saw an increase in the license and milestone revenue this quarter that’s related to a milestone that we received from Seagen as well as the Genovac program that was partnered with Pfizer. That increase in the milestone revenue was offset by the decrease on service revenue as a result of our completion of work on certain programs. The royalty revenue was $500,000 this quarter, which was comparable to the prior year period, but actually showed an uptick relative to where we’ve been in the first couple of quarters of the year.
On the operating expense side, our R&D expense for the third quarter was $13.9 million compared to $13.2 million in the prior year quarter. The increase was primarily due to higher personnel costs. On the G&A side, we also saw an increase in costs up to $8.5 million. That increase was due to headcount that we’ve hired as we’ve become a public company as well as those public company costs, you go back to Q3 last year, we were not a public company at that point. The net loss for the quarter was $15.7 million or $0.16 per share. Moving to our year-to-date results, on a year-to-date basis, our license and milestone revenue was significantly up from last year. You’ll recall, this is primarily due to the recognition of a $10 million milestone that we got from Janssen for the launch of TECVAYLI in Europe.
The increases in operating expense for the nine month period ended September 30, are basically the same reasons that I stated for the quarter. We’ve had headcount hiring as we become a public company as well as those public company costs drove that increase. The net loss for this nine months period was $36.6 million or $0.37 per share. I wanted to drill a little bit deeper into the cost structure. And if I move to this next slide and just take a look at our year-to-date results, I wanted to highlight something here, and that is that a significant portion of our operating expenses are noncash. If you look at the nine months ended September 30, 2023, you’ll see total operating expenses of $77.6 million. If you look at the callout box here on the right, you’ll see that between stock-based compensation, depreciation, amortization we had over $33 million of noncash charges.
So if you exclude those numbers, actually our cash operating expense is closer to $44 million. So when you’re doing your evaluation of our metrics, it’s important to understand that net income is not a good proxy for our cash burn based on all these noncash items that exist in our P&L. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with a total of $96.6 million. This is down $6.5 million relative to where we were at the end of the second quarter, which was a cash balance of $103.1 million, but still above our prior year-end balance. There really aren’t any other changes to speak of for the quarter on the balance sheet. But as I turn over to the cash guidance, Matt talked about the fundamental drivers of the business, right? So signing new partners, that metric looks good.
We continue to see it grow in our active programs. But obviously, the industry is facing some headwinds, and those headwinds are also affecting various elements of our business. Earlier in the year, we saw some attrition in clinical programs for the very first time. And later in the year, we’re starting to see some delays in some of our partner programs. And as a result, we now expect to end the year with slightly less cash than the balance that we had as of 12/31/2022. That being said, we still continue to expect that our cash will provide sufficient runway to fund our operations for the foreseeable future. So that’s sort of it for the third quarter. I want to kind of transition and talk a little bit about some longer-term metrics and maybe drill in a little bit on revenue.
So historically, our total revenue for lack of a better word, has been lumpy. And most of that lumpiness, if you will, has come from milestone and license revenue, which is unpredictable based on the timing of our partners achieving various milestones. Royalty revenue, on the other hand, has been a little more consistent, but it represents a very small portion of our revenue. If you take a look at this chart, it’s the part of the bar chart that’s in purple, and you can almost barely see it. Now I expect that number to grow but I wouldn’t expect it to be meaningful until we see some additional product launches from some of our partners. Service revenue on this line is shown in blue, and that comes from both the ion channel side of the business as well as the work that we do with chickens on the antibody side of the business.
