OmniAb, Inc. (NASDAQ:OABI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Joseph Pantginis: That’s really helpful. Matt. Thanks for that. And I guess the other aspect with regard to your underlying business, you alluded to in your prepared comments, you said OmniChicken, for example, in your prepared comments was the fastest growing, and new technology, you’re constantly working there. And you’re looking to present at like antibody engineering conferences. So maybe, without giving away the special sauce right now, but what kind of general tech improvements are you looking at, and you’ll be able to share with the street.

Matt Foehr : Yeah, thanks, Joe. As I said, well, we plan on launching innovations around our technology at major antibody engineering or protein engineering conferences through the year. There are elements — it’s a never ending process in our view in terms of continuing to innovate around the platform. We have a really unique, and I think important seat in the industry, with 69 partners, and number of active programs where we really can have that deep collaborative dialogue with partners to understand not only what they need now, but also to predict where they’re headed technologically. When you start hearing the same things out of multiple big pharma players and smaller biotechs, you really do get a good sense of what innovations will be leverageable broadly across the industry.

One example of that that’s really in the past was where we were a couple of years ago with launching OmniFlic and OmniClic, right really seeing the bispecific field forming years and years ago. And that’s one of the reasons why we started engineering, heavy chain only chicken a couple of years ago. That was done in collaboration with one of our big pharma partners. But it will become available, and we plan to launch it in the fourth quarter of this year. Heavy chain only antibodies that have a lot of interesting and desirable characteristics. We’ve turned them into antibodies or pica bodies in some instances, but they can open up new therapeutic approaches and have other biological benefits that we think will be something that is desired by our partners.

So that’s one that we expect to launch at a major conference in the fourth quarter.

Joseph Pantginis: Great, thanks for the color guys.

Matt Foehr : Thanks Joe.

Operator: Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Steven Mah from Cowen. Please go ahead.

Steven Mah: Great. Thanks for the questions. I have a two-part question on your active partners. If I’m doing the math right, looks like there is 13 new partner ads and 12 rolling off in the quarter. So the question is of these 12 programs that rolled off, were any of these paused or were they just terminated? Or could they possibly resurface? And then the second part, could you give us a sense for these 12 partners that rolled off? Are they mostly big pharma or large biotechs or small biotechs? Thanks.

Matt Foehr : Yeah, thanks Steve. I’m not — I don’t think I’m following your math. The one thing I would point out, we added 12 new partners last year, right through the year. And one of — and then we did an agreement that was an expansion with an existing partner. So we might — there might be a mix up or maybe we’re talking about — you’re talking quarter versus annual. We did not have partners rolling off. So there might be a clarification there, or maybe a interchanging of programs or partners .

Steven Mah: No, I didn’t do I didn’t do my math right. Yeah, sorry — I was looking — sorry. This is my first call with you guys. But yeah, it was annual versus quarterly. Okay, yeah, got you. Got it.

Matt Foehr : Good.

Steven Mah: And then on the 13 new partner adds, could you give us some color on the partner type and then pharma or biotech, and then you said OmniChicken is growing the fastest. Could you give us a sense of what percentage of these new partners added for OmniChicken?